At any moment the School Captains will knock sheepishly on the door and ask if you can bring your kids out now, even if they’re right in the middle of a big lesson you’ve spent all week working towards and… bugger me… they’re actually working well! Then when you’re outside in the first clear spot you can find, you set about the task of getting twenty five excited kids into a line from the shortest to the tallest. Meanwhile… the kids at the front have worked up their excitement levels to near-hysteria and by the time you’ve gotten halfway down the line, the front half is once more a shambles. Meanwhile, you haven’t even reached the end of the line where already one kid is grizzling because his mate behind him messed up his hair or messed up his collar. Which only starts the other kids off laughing at the poor kid!

Yup. Trying to organise a row of excited kids into an ordered, height-sequenced line can be like juggling jelly with a tea strainer.

Anyway… we managed it and wandered over to have our grade photo taken, a feat that took all of a minute once we were standing nicely on various benches or sitting on seats, hoping the tall kids up the back wouldn’t fall off and break their legs, because a phonecall home to mum explaining why little Johnny broke his leg having his photo taken leads to all sorts of questions you just don’t have time to answer. Fortunately, none of them fell off during the photo, but there was a moment of madness when the photographer told all the kids up the back to jump down…

Not to worry… the photos have been taken, and fortunately we got them all done before recess, so the boys particularly didn’t have to worry about getting filthy during playtime. They were very happy about that. Probably a good thing they were all wearing their uniforms too and not in any old dress ups they found at home! All’s well that ends well…

But I’m still a little concerned about the kid who whispered quietly as I was having my own photo taken… something about ’should’ve gotten your mum to do your hair this mornin’, Mr V!’

Related posts: Your mum’s here, boy… better get out of that dress!

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