There is no "fun" in fundraising

I understand that there is a shortage of funding for schools and education. I understand that schools need to raise extra money - as much as possible - to help make ends meet and that they constantly have to do more with less. I understand all of this, and yet I cringe when fundraising time comes around, no matter how worthy the cause. I'm not new to the world of school fundraisers; the preschool Kiddo attended last year had several. Well, we now have the first fundraiser for her elementary school sitting downstairs on the kitchen table.

It isn't that I object to fundraisers in general, but I do strenuously dislike the "catalog" fundraisers, like the one presently buried under a pile of coupon inserts I have yet to sort through and clip. My problem is that these are little kids, these supposed salespeople. Kids who really don't have the wherewithal to sell things via a catalog to their nearest and dearest, much less to strangers in the neighborhood. So, to whom does it fall to hit up friends-n-relations to buy overpriced, teensy rolls of wrapping paper or ridiculously expensive, tiny boxes of chocolate? To the parents. Of course.

Now, I did my share of fundraising when I was a kid. I didn't rely solely upon my dad taking the order form into work and passing it around, either (though he did sell more than any other parent and even won an award for that one year at his office, hee hee). I went door-to-door with Girl Scout Cookies and that ridiculous 4-H Goat's Milk Fudge sale (which I thought I'd blogged about, but I can't find in my archives - I'll have to tell you that story another time). I'd even dress my little sister up in my old Brownie uniform (complete with adorable pigtails done by my mom under the beanie) and take her with me. She was shy as heck and didn't say a word beyond maybe a mumbled "hello" but I only needed her for the cuteness factor. She was the "awwww, look how cute" and I was the huckster, pushing the cookies on the folks with my charm and persistence. But still, I wasn't five. I was maybe seven or eight by the time I started my fundraising days. You know, the Girl Scouts get it - they don't allow the girls Kiddo's age (who are now "Daisies" which didn't exist back in my Scouting days) to even sell cookies yet. Not so much for the schools, though.

I hate asking people for money. I hate having them feel obligated to buy something that they don't particularly want just to support Kiddo. Not to mention there's always a glut of fundraisers at any one time - you can't chitchat over a cup of lemonade at church on any given Sunday without being hit up to buy cases of fruit or magazine subscriptions or ginormous tins of popcorn. And nine times out of ten, it's the parent who is waving the form, not the student in question.

Part of me feels like "Okay, I have bought stuff from YOUR kid(s) for years, now it's payback time." That's the part that doesn't mind pushing the catalog on someone else. (I'll even admit there were times when I supported some kid's band trip fundraiser or Scouting troop or what-have-you with the precise thought in my mind that one day, it would be Kiddo's turn.) But the other part of me still cringes. Blech. I wish I could feel firmly enough in my convictions - catalog sales by kindergartners are ridiculous and wrong! - to just not do the dang fundraiser. I learned from helping out with fundraising at Kiddo's preschool last year that plenty of parents just ignore such things entirely and don't think twice, but I just can't do it. I can't NOT help. (This would be why I joined the PTA and am already chairing a special event for Halloween next month...) Last year when the dreaded catalog fundraiser came home, I took a picture of Kiddo holding the catalog and sent a low-pressure email out to our family and friends (oh yeah, that's another problem - most of the folks that we would hit up for such things live out of state) and a few folks did order some stuff via the catalog's website, for which I was profoundly grateful. (A word of warning - I'll probably do that again this year...) I'm pretty sure that Hubby's company has a rule against bringing in the forms and leaving them in the break room or passing them around, which I can appreciate as someone who felt obliged to buy stuff from each sheet handed to me by a coworker myself, though now that I'm on the selling instead of the buying end of things, I wish his company allowed it just for the ease of effort that would entail.

According to the PTA ladies who chose this fundraiser, this catalog - Kathryn Beich - is really fantastic. The stuff is really high quality - made by the same manufacturers who make things for Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel and LL Bean, supposedly. The PTA ladies positively raved about how delicious the humongous tubs of gourmet cookie dough are, in particular. The prices, well, they're what you'd expect for a catalog of this sort, and yes, along with the cool, funky things there are those dang rolls of giftwrap and boxes of chocolate. They have an online ordering site, too. So, if anyone out there in the blogosphere has a hankering for tubs of gourmet cookie dough, wrapping paper, candy or any other fundraiser type item, give me a shout and I'll happily supply you with the link and code to order things on behalf of Kiddo's school. Of course, you probably are dealing with your own fundraisers yourself, aren't you?

Ah well, at least this is the only catalog fundraiser on this year's schedule for our school. Whew!

Fairly Fantastic (and a Friday Five)

So, we're back from the Great NY State Fair. I'm still kind of brain dead a whole day later - it was a much longer trip than we'd planned. Long, but FUN!

Without further ado or promise of decent coherence, here's the photo recap!

One of the first things we did after arriving at the Fair was stop by the State Park Something-or-Other tent, where the kids were sucked in with the lure of making their own bug masks. The two choices of bugs are both bugs that travel inside cut wood and the point was that these are bad bugs who are invasive and non-native, and so you should never move firewood from one place to another. Or maybe it was any wood - I kinda missed the educational portion of this whole thing as we don't presently own a fireplace for which we'd need wood. I do know that all three of the kids opted to make the Emerald Ash Borer mask...

This is Kiddo showing off her mask. The thing that struck me funny about this entire endeavor was that one of my most common nicknames for Kiddo is "Bug" which is short for either Lovebug or Bugaboo (also things I call her frequently). So while she was diligently following the nice State Park Bug Ladies' instructions and making her mask, I was chipping in with various tips and suggestions like "Bug, why don't you use the crayon instead of the marker?" and encouragement like "Good job cutting out those eyeholes, Bug!" It was weird yet funny. (Then again, I do occasionally get looks from strangers when I call out "BUG! Time to go!" or some such thing like when we're at the playground, so I guess not everyone thinks "bug" is a term of endearment....)



Here's Kiddo and her two best friends, all Emerald Ash Borer-ed out! The State Park Bug Ladies also gave each kid some frighteningly realistic bug tattoo sheets, but we opted to "save them for after we get home and bathed" which wound up not happening last night (well, we got home, but didn't do any bathing as the kids were out cold by the time we pulled into the driveway) so now I'm kinda hoping Kiddo forgets I have the tattoo paper tucked away somewhere and we won't find ourselves flying off to Florida with a partially faded, scarily accurate looking bug crawling on her hand/arm...



Something new at the Fair this year was a bear show. It was billed as being educational, but please, you can say the bears are "demonstrating how they'd cross the stones in a river while fishing in the wild" but the bear still is really just doing tricks, I mean I'm fairly sure that in the wild, bears neither ride bicycles or play basketball, nor do they wear muzzles and harnesses (however cleverly disguised they are to look like wreaths of flowers). The kids still were loving every second of the show, though, so cynical Mommy just hushed up and snapped some pictures.



There will be butter! Lots of butter! Strangely fascinating as ever, the butter sculpture rotating away in its refrigerated display case... And to answer Hot Tub Lizzy's question from my earlier butter sculpture-related post: this year, for the first time ever, the sculpture is going to be melted down and recycled into bio fuel. (Bio-fuel? Biofuel? You know what I mean, right? Clean burning, non-gas related fuel.) Apparently 960-something pounds of butter ultimately will make 96 gallons of fuel.



We saw some of the 4-H agricultural exhibits (I always request and am indulged by my companions in a stroll through the sheep barn, where I go all misty-eyed from nostalgia) and also walked through several of the exhibition halls. More exciting than the ag barns in the kids' opinion was the petting zoo, where they love to feed the critters. Here's Kiddo feeding a zebu. (Also sometimes spelled cebu, as in the VeggieTales' Song of the Cebu, which invariably takes root in my brain as soon as I see the cebu at the Fair.)



Of course, no trip to the Fair is complete without hitting the rides over on the midway. They set up the kiddie rides in their own mini-midway, which is really, really nice. Not only does it place all the "you won't be too short for this one" rides in excellent proximity, but it is less crowded with drunken and/or slack-jawed yokels (as only those yokels with kids head into this section) and it lessens the pleas for "Oh can't I go on THAT one Mommy?" while the pleader is looking longingly at some Horrifying Contraption o' Barfing-or-Death. Here are the kids on the dragon coaster - Kiddo's the one (the only one!) with her arms in the air:



You may note that the kiddo's shirt changed color partway through the day. Well, her first shirt was utterly filthy and also rather damp (from beverages more than sweat or sunscreen) by the time we were done with the post-lunch fried dough break, so she changed. All the kids changed clothes again when we got into the car to head home, because somehow they just get soooooooooo dirty on Fair Day that us moms now pack at least one extra set of clothes for each person traveling in the car.

Last but not least, no trip to the Fair is complete without that ridiculously overpriced, yet somehow irresistibly delicious, fresh-squeezed lemonade. After thoroughly hydrating the kids with grape Hawaiian shaved ices (aka a slightly less chemical-filled alternative to the Sno-Cone) that were approximately the size of their heads, the moms stopped at a lemonade stand on our way to the exit and indulged in a drink for the road. My friend kindly honored my request to take a quick pic of me with my newly acquired beverage.....



Yes, I know, I know: totally hot. Literally - I was melting. I sweated off my sunscreen at least twice over the course of the day, and by this point was also covered in a fine layer of grit as well. Apparently that is the one thing that tames the Wolverine Van Beethoven hair, by the way: massive amounts of sweat and midway dust. Sadly, this is not readily available in any hair product line I've found... Aussie or Pantene needs to get on that asap!

So, at about 7pm, with lemonades in hand, we pulled the wagons full of exhausted, grimy kids to the parking lot after one final restroom stop, just in case. However, we woefully underestimated the amount of liquid contained in the approximately 5 pounds of shaved ice each kid had ingested immediately prior to our departure, and we hadn't gone more than half a mile out of the parking lot when the "I've gotta pee! NOW!" chorus began from in back. We stopped not once, not twice, but thrice for roadside emergency potty breaks. (The third time was in an underlit and weedy Park-n-Ride lot in the pitchest black of night. We could barely see the kids, much less whither went their pee... Peeing by minivan headlight: not an experience for the weak of heart!) To their credit, each time we stopped, copious amounts were produced so no one was bluffing just for the fun of having the moms stress out about "will we make it?" while trying to find the nearest, safest spot at which to pull over. Gotta love traveling with kids and their little, wimpy bladders...

So, that was our trip to the Fair this year. There were other highlights, like the kids getting up close and personal with some sea lions - Kiddo and her one friend got kissed right on the noggin by them! - and other assorted fun like the kid-sized bumper cars (no adult driver or rider necessary!) and the cut-outs that made the kids look like the world's cutest sheep, goat and cow, but those photos are too easily identifying-able for Kiddo and her friends, so they won't be going up here. (They will be up on Facebook in a little while...)

Now before I conk out for the night (dang, I'm getting old that I'm still wiped out from yesterday, though to be fair, Kiddo and I had a busy day that ended with a vigorous, hour swim), here's the Friday Five - Fairly Fantastic Edition!


1) What's your must-do/see stop at a fair? Mine is the sheep barn, as I mentioned, oh - and any good musicians, too. This year the kids got down and boogied to a great Dixieland Jazz quintet.

2) Favorite ride at the fair? Mine would be the swinging chairs and the giant slide.

3) Favorite fair food? Gotta go funnel cake here, though the kettle corn is also tasty...

4) Favorite fair beverage? You know I'm all about that lemonade!!

5) Fairs: love 'em or hate 'em? Obviously, I'm in the LOVE category!

As always, please feel free to play along with the F5, either here in the comments or over on your own blog (let us know if that's what you do so we can see your responses)!

Fair fun

Despite some rottenish weather today (steady rain all morning that became spottier but still wet this afternoon), the kiddo and I kept our date to join some friends at the county fair. Now, I am a fair girl from way back. Love me some fair/carnival type action, oh yeah. Growing up on a farm, fair season was a Big Deal every summer. We'd take our sheep to show (both through 4-H and in "open" shows) at three or four fairs most summers. We happened to belong to the 4-H Sheep Club of the same county that hosted the NJ State Fair, which meant that we didn't have a separate county fair, just our county shows held earlier in the week of the State Fair each year.

During State Fair week, we pretty much lived at the fairgrounds. (I say "week" but it actually ran ten days long, and we were there for each of those ten days.) It really was a fantastic experience, at least in my "we know I was never, ever cool anyhow" opinion. We'd arrive at the fairgrounds with the first light, well before the fair opened to the general public. We'd work in the barns from morning 'til late in the night, busting ours back showing our animals all day, then wandering the midway in the evenings after the day's shows were done. Our background noise went from just the sounds of the animals waking up to the roar of the cars on the speedway in the middle of the fairgrounds all day to the concerts in the grandstand in the evenings. (The year the Charlie Daniels band played a couple of shows, my dad went nuts. We heard The Devil Went Down to Georgia several times, live, that day...) We got to know the vendors of our favorite foods (to this day, the Korean BBQ stand, the stand that sold french fries and pierogies and the lemonade/Italian ice stand are near and dear to my heart) and they'd let us cut the lines and even give us discounts or freebies every now and again. The best night of all was the night that any 4-Her could ride any ride on the midway for free. We'd go crazy that night, stuffing ourselves on funnel cake and popcorn before riding all the rides, over and over again. I'm proud to say that I was never one of the kids who barfed on 4-H night, riding the rides. I'm less proud to say that unfortunately, I was seated near kids who did a couple of times. Good thing being at the fair meant always having a change of clothes, as well as access to showers in the one restroom facility...

Besides our sheep shows - county, state and open, showmanship and market lamb, there were extra competitions too, my favorites being the Round Robin, the state Square Dancing competition, and a little something called Shepherd's Lead. Round Robin was where members of the sheep, dairy, goat and pig clubs got together and traded animals to handle in a show, with each club showing the other three animals after giving a brief demonstration on how to show their own. (Pigs were by far the hardest to manage if one wasn't experienced with the ins and outs.) I enthusiastically participated in our club's square dancing subgroup - we were called the Woolly Squares. We'd practice to a record with the calls on it out in various club member's driveways or back yards each week all summer. I always danced "as a boy" as did some of the other girls, because actual boy 4-Hers were hard to come by and ones that would square dance voluntarily, rarer still. That meant I could wear jeans and a western-style, button-down shirt - no ginormous skirt and crinoline for me, whew. One year, our set actually won the State Grand Championship, which was amazing considering how comparatively little we practiced - there were actual 4-H clubs entirely devoted to square dancing, mind you - and how lame we were. As a matter of fact, while we were not the most technically proficient or perfect that night, something the judges acknowledged, they said we had the most spirit and that made up for a lot, just because we were having fun. (And let me tell you, if you think that talking openly in your snooty, private high school in a posh part of New Jersey about square dancing competitively on your summer vacation gets you cool points, well, showing off the multi-colored, giant rosette you won as part of the championship team? That much more exponentially cooler!) Shepherd's Lead was open to sheep club members from around the state. It was, I kid you not, a combination fashion show and showmanship competition. (Showmanship is how well you handle your animal, how well the animal is trained to work with you, and how well they have been groomed - or fitted - for the competition.) Not just any old "fashion show with a sheep," mind you, but one in which you were to wear wool. In late August. You got extra credit for making your own outfit, which I did once only. It was a lovely mauve wool vest and A-line skirt, which I wore over a shiny, cream polyester blouse with really puffy sleeves. Stylin'! So, you'd get all bedecked from head to toe in wool, gussy up your sheep, and then walk the showring in your ensemble, after which you walked up to the table and had an interview/Q&A with the judges. There were prizes, and dagnabit, I never won one. Not even the year I made my own outfit. There was no Miss Congeniality for Shepherd's Lead. Humph.

So, yeah, fairs make me nostalgic. The kiddo and I have gone to the NY State Fair for the past couple of years, and we've been to the county fair before as well. I was probably as excited, if not more excited, than she was to go today. We did all the fair-y things - walked through the animal barns (lingering, as I'm prone to do, over the sheep pens) where even the smell of animals and hay was making me a wee bit misty-eyed, checking out all the cool exhibits in the main halls (the hydroponics in space exhibit was pretty cool, and the kids got to plant hydroponic sunflowers to bring home), watching the free entertainment - this year it was a show with miniature horses "wearing masks with special, big feathers!" as the kiddo told Hubby this evening at dinner, and of course eating way too much food. This year, the big indulgences for us mommies were salt potatoes and Artichokes French. These are both regional specialties, neither of which I ever ate in my childhood fair-going days. (Like I said, back then it was all about the pierogies and Korean BBQ beef on a stick.) The kids went more traditional with hot dogs and cotton candy. I drank one of the ridiculously overpriced yet somehow irresistible fresh-squeezed lemonades, too.

Sadly, the rides on the midway were ridiculously expensive - the cheapest of the kiddie rides was still $3 a kid per ride. (Even the big slide - $3 to slide down in a burlap sack once? Oy!) That's a long way from my childhood, and put a damper on the kids' fun since they couldn't ride endless rides the way they'd dreamed. Other than that, though, and the mud from all the rain, it was a great day and has left me looking forward to next month's annual trek to the Great New York State Fair!