i’m a nursery party pooper and chris’ retirement party

I have been working in the nursery at the church for about 6 years now, and so I would say that I am pretty well-versed in the nursery goings-on. I have also been a supervisor in the infants room every other Sunday for about a year.
The way it works is, when its your week to work, you get a postcard in the mail reminding you. Then, on Saturday, The nursery director calls all the workers to remind them that it is their week. However, if you’ve been doing it long enough and have a “perfect record” of attendance (or calling beforehand if you can’t come), she eventually quits calling you on Saturday.
Well, yesterday it was our day in the nursery (Chris works with me once a month). So I show up to the nursery after Sunday School, and the only two people in there (with 6 babies!!) are Bob and Greta, and it’s their first Sunday ever to work in there! I am shocked, because we almost always have a supervisor in there, and when we don’t, we at least have someone very experienced in there. Not that Bob and Greta weren’t doing a good job – they were doing fantastic! All the babies were sleeping or content, and everything looked well under control. I just felt extremely sorry for them, because, well, they really got the short end of the stick on their first Sunday ever!!
After me lamenting and apologizing for a few minutes, Greta finally meekly says, “Well, actually, I think, maybe, you were supposed to be the nursery supervisor this morning.”
I gasped. Surely not!! I was working second hour!
She said “well, I think Laura wrote a note on your postcard” (which I quickly glanced at and threw away) “asking you to work the first hour.”
I felt terrible!! Here I was shocked that these new workers were left alone, and it was all my fault!
Anyway, it worked out fine – they did GREAT (They should be promoted immediately!!), and two people that were supposed to work the next hour couldn’t come, so Chris and I just took their place.
However, I will now be demoted back to getting Saturday calls, and I have now ruined my perfect nursery record.
Oh well, at least it gave me something to blog about.

To continue our nursery saga, apparently all of the babies were on their best behavior for the “newbies” the first hour, because they ALL melted down for our hour. It was chaos!!! It hasn’t been that bad in there in I don’t know how long. They were all sleepy and fussy and inconsolable. Totally wierd!
So, I think that it did it in for Chris. It’s a wierd thing – once you have a baby of your own and you truly experience the pain of inconsolable crying and GET PAST IT (I promise, inconsolable crying does end somewhere around 6 months old!!), you have much less ability to cope with other babies crying. See, before we had a baby of our own, working in the nursery was so romantic and sweet. Chris was AMAZING. He could put any baby to sleep, and console any baby by taking them over to the window to look out. He would think of songs that had each baby’s name in it and sing it to them!! “Sweet Caroline”, and “Mandy”. . . It was amazing!! However, hearing a crying baby now is kind of like a flashback from being in war – it reminds us too much of the painful war with Ali Qaida last year, and I think his Post-Traumatic-Stress-Syndrome is just too deep to keep working in the nursery. I have Mommy genes, so I can handle it a little better. He handles it great externally, but it just eats him up internally. So, after six years of loyal service, Chris is going to retire from the nursery. Hey babe – sorry you got such a bad retirement party in the nursery yesterday!! :)