Day 226 of The 365 Experiment. Pasta Palooza.

I don’t miss my teenage years at all, nor do I miss my twenties. But sometimes I miss being 10. 

Tonight, I sped home home to make the second dinner seating of Pasta Palooza.  It’s the annual tradition at my daughter’s elementary school, where the children run a faux Italian restaurant for the evening.  Every child has a role to play, from coat checkers, to selling flowers, to waitstaff. They even serenade us while we eat.  The kids are completely adorable, and so engaged in what they are doing.  

I love their youthful enthusiasm.  They each take their assigned task so seriously, and worked incredibly well together as a team.  Of course, there were over thirty mom volunteers helping to coach and organize them, but the kids did the work, and their pride was shining.  

It’s the kind of night you go into thinking, “Ugh…am I seriously going to eat a plate of overcooked pasta with “red sauce” on a foam plate at 5:30 for dinner?” as you drive home from work exhausted.  And then as you enter through the doors and see the smiling faces of the children who worked so hard to pull this together, you known you’d eat that Olive Garden-wannabe meal every night if it meant seeing your kid this proud.  

Pasta Palooza is more than just a dinner.  This is the beginning of the fifth grade class getting ready to spread their wings and show us they’ve got their s*it together enough to head to middle school in the fall.  They’ve got the social skills to interact with adults.  They’ve got the team skills to work with each other in a large group.  They’ve got the presence to sing in front of an entire cafeteria of dining guests.  And they had fun the entire time.

10 is such an awesome age.  The opposite sex is only slightly yukky, the girls haven’t really become mean yet, and the boys have not yet begun to douse themselves in Axe bodyspray.  They don’t have hours of homework yet, or the pressure of pimples.  They just get to revel in their newly forming independence, and bask in the glow of being pre-teens with Instagram accounts.

With no disrespect to the cafeteria staff, I’m Italian.  My bar for a pasta dinner might be a little higher than the norm, but I think we’d probably all agree no one showed up tonight for the food. We showed up to support our kids.  And it was completely worth it.