Frontal Lobe Obstacles

First Published in the Tri Town Transcript Nov 10, 2017

By Esther C. Baird

The night before the storm that blew the Tri-Towns off the map was lovely, with no wind. I know because we held our first teenage party for our eldest daughter’s eighth-grade class in our yard.

Because we have the standard Boxford jumbo-sized yard, we needed to figure out how to mark the boundaries in the darkness. No parent would appreciate their child wandering into our tick- infested marsh, or getting eaten by a coyote. So we lined our property with luminaries, handed out glow necklaces to all the attendees, and tied glowing balloons to trees, boulders and other immovable objects.

Once the kids arrived, and inhaled the obligatory pizza, they played a game of Capture the Flag that made no sense but that they seemed to enjoy. Then my daughter announced it was time for the Giant Obstacle Relay Race.

She had meticulously created an obstacle course that had eight segments. There were balance tricks, food based events, blindfolded legs, and other simply bizarre segments that only a middle-schooler could appreciate. For example, the second to last leg involved wearing a giant trash bag covered in shaving cream, onto which teammates would throw cheese balls, until a set number of them stuck.

Earlier in the day, my daughter explained her plan to set the props at each station just before the race. It sounded fun and nicely organized, and I thought nothing more about it. You, Regular Reader, may have noticed what I did not, in which case you know exactly how this story ends.

We began the race by clearly stating that the teams stay together, and, advance along the course together. But somehow they heard, “Each team member go to your station and wait till your leg of the race.”

Alas, middle-schoolers don’t wait well. Really, they don’t wait at all.

As we stood at the bottom of the yard ready to begin, two white, glimmering apparitions began bobbing towards us like so many Casper the Ghosts. It was the kids from the cheese ball station! They were already in their trash bags, already covered in shaving cream, and glowing faintly against the luminaries as they floated down the hill to see what was taking us so long. (Again with the waiting.)

Is that when the wheels came off the relay race wagon? Or was it when we got to the blindfold leg and spun kids around so that they careened dizzily into the shaving cream kids? Possibly it was when the saltine whistle challenge took too long (because it’s hard to eat 10 saltines quickly) and some kids got antsy from, you know, waiting.

Did I mention they were, inexplicably, covered in shaving cream way before that leg of the race??

By the time we got to the grand finale, which was a team sprint down the hill to the back line of luminaries, all of the kids were slip sliding about, with shaving cream covered trash bags, in the dark. Blobs of shaving cream began flying and suddenly there was an all out war underway.

A shaving cream war. Did you guess that might happen?

I had a moment of panic. Would the parents hate me? Their kids were covered, some quite literally from head to toe, in shaving cream! Was it the worst party ever? Could I flag down a coyote to quickly put me out of my misery?

But then I listened. There was so much laughter. So much excitement and fast paced glee. There wasn’t a phone in sight — the only things glowing were the kids running in the dark, trampling cheese balls as they went.

I quickly realized that shaving cream is basically like soap and lotion combined into one product. Really, I was sending kids home cleaner than before, and with supple, smooth skin. What parent wouldn’t love that?