Buried

This is a crazy-busy week and I have no idea when things will ease enough for a good blog post. In the meantime, I have to share a funny experience from work this week:

As most of you know, I work at a Land Run museum. During colder months, I'm the Archivist/Registrar and I sit at a desk organizing and/or updating databases of the museum's artifacts. I also help with grant-writing to fund various collections management projects. When it gets warmer, the "Education Assistant" part of my job kicks into high gear and I spend my days pretending to be a turn-of-the-century Schoolmarm in the museums' historic one-room schoolhouse. I've been doing this since the end of March and we are so popular right now that large school groups won't stop coming daily until the very end of May. (Yes, my job is awesome and I will miss it a lot.) Until then, most days in May are already completely booked. This is, apparently, upsetting to those who have waited until the last minute to book their field trip. (Mostly homeschool groups because public school teachers have to jump through a lot of hoops with administration, organization, etc...and would have to have done that by now.)

We do not like to turn people away and we don't like to make anyone sad. We love kids from private schools, public schools, and homeschools; but the bottom line with booking groups is first come/first served and our grounds can only accomodate about 100 kids for regular field trips. (We can go up to 300 during Land Run re-enactment because we don't use our historic buildings for our activities.) Today, we had about 50 kids. I was excited about today, because it is one of just a few with under 100 kids, AND they were 4th graders. (When teaching the schoolhouse, I am partial to kids who can already read and write and have a sense of humor. OK, I'm partial to those kind of kids in all walks of life. But I digress...)

The kids arrived a little early today and as they were unloading their gear, I went into the bathroom to change into my costume while the Education Director went outside to show the group where to put their lunches. As I changed, our Marketing Director took a very interesting message. Apparently, a home-school family* was sitting in the parking lot, looking to see how big the regular school group was, and then called us from their cell phone to ask if they could join. I guess it's flattering that they wanted to come so much, but without calling ahead and making an appointment-it felt a little stalker-ish to us. We're a pretty laid-back workplace, but even we like more advance notice than "Hey! I'm sitting in the parking lot counting kids as they come off the schoolbus and since there's less than 100, can I add my kids to today's group?" (Those weren't her exact words, but it was close.) We said she could come in and discuss it with the Education Director and the other school group and I guess they decided not to come in after all. It was just a little odd and definitely amusing. All in a day's work, I guess.

(And it's just as well they didn't join in, the teachers from the previously scheduled school seemed a little uncomfortable with it anyway.)

*Keeping in mind that I may be a homeschooling mom myself next year, I still found this just a little creepy.