The girls and I are all sick again, so we won’t be attending church tomorrow. The kicker is it’s once again my nursery day. I coordinate in our church nursery once a month, which basically means I’m the one standing at the desk receiving children, making sure everyone has security bracelets, pagers, etc., marking down attendence, getting snacks for the various rooms… We have a large church, so it’s a bit of a hectic job. Anyway, the girls are sick so often that it seems like I’ve rarely actually done nursery duty on my Sunday. I keep having to switch with someone for another week. This month, however, none of the Sundays are very good, so…. Joel agreed to do the job for me.
Now, Joel usually helps me, but he’s usually in the background a bit. He gets the snacks ready for me, loads the dishwasher in the nursery kitchen, that sort of thing. Not that he can’t do the rest of the stuff. He does sometimes work in one of the four nursery rooms when we need extra people (other men work in the rooms, too, so he’s not the only one), but there aren’t any male coordinators out there. Standing out at the front counter and dealing with all of the parents, not to mention the workers, isn’t really his thing. It strikes me as being similar to holding your wife’s purse when she has to use the bathroom in a store, only worse. He hasn’t said that, though. He’s just nervous because he isn’t generally big on dealing with people he doesn’t know that well, and he doesn’t want to have to make any nursery decisions, not to mention he’s never had to use the attendance book, a rather formidible looking large white binder with lots of tabs sticking out. Joel’s not the complaining type, but I can see he’s a little tense about this assignment.
Well, I’ll make sure to let him know that the nursery director probably won’t mind if he doesn’t wear one of the big blue regulation aprons we coordinators usually wear. I’m sure that will ease his mind. 🙂