Little Kids are F***ing Dangerous

All this week, I have been (and will be)helping with this 'Holiday Club' for the kids at my church (because it's the almost-last week of the summer holidays) as a 'Runner'. This basically consists me moving loads of tables, buying a crap ton of stuff from Tesco and making sure the little kids don't impale themselves on the nearest pointy object. That last one is REALLY HARD. Considering there are only four of us, and two of them are really quite incompetent (one in a 'I-lack-common-sense-but-I'll-do-what-I'm-told' kind of way, the other in a 'HERP-HERP-DERP-DERPY-DERP' kind of way) it can get quite difficult to stay sane.

Even though I'm writing this six hours afterward, I still feel absolutely exhausted.
So yeah, today I had to watch the kids while they played outside. A group of seven year olds started pretending they were pirates and claimed all of the tennis racquets, skipping ropes, hula hoops and everything else as 'treasure'. For some reason, probably because I'm an idiot, I decided to take one of the racquets from the 'pirate ship' (a wooden boat thing in the front garden which had 'St. Peter's boat' on the side).


Big mistake.

Within minutes I was being chased around the garden by about nine 7-year-old pirates intent on getting their treasure back. Even after giving them back the bloody thing, they tried imprisoning me in the large basket they put the toys in, with limited success (I spent about five minutes running around with a basket around the upper part of my body pinning my arms to my sides, feeling like a idiot. When they started calming down (or so I thought) they started saying weird things like
"we're gonna steal your hair".
At that moment I said the worst thing I possibly could to a bunch of kids hyped up on nothing but air and cheese sandwiches:
"I'd like to see you try"

The next half an hour or so was a complete blur. I think it was half an hour. It may have been three minutes. It's hard to tell the time when you're being chased by crazed children bent on ripping the afro straight from my mixed-raced scalp. I'm pretty sure one of them was attached to my 'fro for about 30 seconds straight. And I vaguely remember climbing onto a decorative rock to get away but was pulled down by the horde of rabid creatures intent on adding my scalp to their ever growing pile of 'treasure'.

It was only once one of them tried jumping on me from the top of a broken fountain that anyone thought to call them off my tail. By then it had started raining, so they all went inside. Several of them told me "You're lucky your hair didn't get stoleded" rather menacingly. They're probably right.

I clearly have no idea how to deal with children. It was almost as bad as all those times that four year old tried punching me in the nuts every time he saw me. But that's a story for another day.