Overload!

Yesterday was "Take Your Son and Daughter to Work" day.  One of the gals at work did a lot of planning and organizing to make something like this work and go smoothly for our employee's kids.  It is the first year (in my 15 years there) that there was a collective effort to get something like this accomplished.  We have had other TYS&DTW days... not that successfully executed, though.  I remember one where the kids all went outside to clean a no-longer-employed employee's van!  THAT'S teaching the kids what we do!

Then there was the time I took The Boy to work with me.  At the time, I worked in a separate office from the rest of the group, with only one other person in the suite with me.  It was very, very quiet, and as I work on the computer all day, not a whole lot to show The Boy.  I think he slept much of the day.

So I admit... I didn't plan well for my own "take a kid to work" day.

But the gal who planned it for yesterday had quite an agenda.  The kids were always involved in some activity or the other, which was helpful to keep them going.  They got a tour of the offices and met everyone there.  Then they went outside and planted little marigolds in cups and quietly (for the most part) went around and slipped them in on everyone's desk as a gift to all the office workers.  They got their pictures tak en with their parent (and the office manager went and got them developed quickly).  The did some project with the HR person (I don't know what it was).  Then they went on a scavenger hunt from office to office for specific items (prearranged).  I had made up little business cards that had a picture of a computer monitor with a laughing cartoon mouse on the screen.  My "business" is computer training, so I use my "mouse" a lot and we have a good time together.  The kids went around from office to office and asked each person what they did there, and what they did was supposed to lead them to a clue to something on their scavenger hunt.  It was pretty fun.  Our accounting gal plastered pictures of $100 bills all over her office.  Our HR person pasted paper doll shapes to sticks, because she was in the "people business". 

Some kids took this pretty seriously, others not so much.  I have to admit that the age group that got into the whole thing was right around 8-12.  The teenagers were having mostly nothing of it.  We had all ages there, too, so the younger kids were just out to follow the leader.  And the baby was there to be cute.  And cute she was!

After the scavenger hunt, we did a scrapbooking page put on by yours truly.  They all got their photos back just in time to create a scrapbook page commemorating their day and our office.  It was a cute page, but getting fifteen kids to all be doing the same thing was quite interesting. Even with parental help, it was a roller coaster ride.  But fun was had by all. 

And after my class was done, it was PIZZA TIME! 

SUCH ENERGY from all of them.  It was quite a morning.  It was fun, but you appreciated the quiet of the office so much more after the kids left!  I would definitely do it again!