Family Fun Night

Last night, Kaylee's school had a "Family Fun Night".

Dinner, crafts, singing and SANTA!

I had not exactly been planning on going.  Functions like this tend to make me uncomfortable.

I go pick Kaylee up from after school program.

Her first words are, "We have to come back for Family Fun Night!  I am singing!  We just practiced all the songs and I am singing and we have to come back!"

Damn.

"OK, if you are singing, we will come back."

Randall will not be happy about this.  But he will go because he will not disappoint his baby girl.

Family Fun Night starts at 6pm.  So we have about an hour and a half to get prepared for the 'fun'.

We show up a little before six.  We live right across the street from the school so there was no need to drive.

We find a table and sit down.  They have covered all the tables with huge pieces of paper and provided crayons so the kids can scribble draw pictures.

There are 3 rows of tables and each row has 4-5 tables.  Each table is FULL.

We are sitting in the first row of tables, the row closest to the food tables.  The principal starts talking explaining what will be going on and telling us that there will be more "Family Fun Nights" in the coming months.  Great, just great.

Finally we are told to go get our food.  The row closest to the food starts first.  It is set up buffet style on a line of tables.  Except there is no food out yet.

The volunteers at the buffet line tell us that we need to sit down and they will serve us our food.

OK.  This wasn't communicated to the principal?

We go sit back down.  And proceed to watch all the other tables get served their food, (which was hamburgers and hot dogs and chips, someone decided they would grill out) except for the row that was supposed to go first.  Some people getting served more than once...

This has turned into one giant clusterfuck.

We sit and wait and watch.  I hear the volunteers start saying that there isn't enough food to go around.  More people have shown up than what they were prepared for.  One lady finally makes her way over to our table, asking if we had gotten any food yet.

She is obviously not observant.

She walks over to the buffet of empty buns waiting to be "meated".  I have been watching...  I have seen what has been going on...  She comes back and tells us that they are waiting on meat.  Someone had to go to the store and buy more meat.  They didn't bring enough.

As we are waiting for our 'dinner', the after school program kids are called up to the stage to sing.  It would have been really nice if we could have heard them.  But the 'audience' is loud and rude and doesn't notice the kids singing Christmas carols to us.

Where is the holiday spirit?

During the kids singing, we are brought hamburgers.  The volunteer apologizes profusely.  It's really no big deal but in a way it is too.

Keep in mind that the school sent out an automated phone call the day before saying that spaghetti would be served and that Santa would be showing up to pass out gifts.  I would guess that most parents heard FREE dinner and FREE gifts.  That is why so many people have shown up.

As the night goes on, I notice that they gave up on cooking and went as far as going to McDonald's and buying cheeseburgers to feed the people who hadn't eaten yet.

Wait...  WHAT?

That's right.  Some of the volunteers felt bad because everyone wasn't going to eat, so they went to McDonald's.  At the sight of Mickey D's bags, I see people who had already ate, go get more.  There are still people who haven't ate yet.  But the greedy bastards are allowed to have more.  Totally made no sense to me.

Santa finally showed up.  He was mobbed from the door to the stage.

He did not pass out any gifts.  Instead, he read 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.

I think the people running the show told him he shouldn't pass anything out, because if he didn't bring enough it would end up being ugly.  (They learned something from dinner apparently).

It was not a horrible night but it definitely could have been better.

If the school would have stuck with spaghetti and let everyone go grab a plate instead of waiting to be served it would have ran so much smoother.  And it would have been way, way cheaper than burgers, hot dogs and McDonald's.

But really, what do I know?

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