In another life I was a preschool teacher.

Either that or I take after my mom. But it's not my fault. I grew up in a house with a mother who collected bears and Raffi records. (And if you don't know who Raffi is, you lived an unfortunate childhood.) I'm not ashamed to say that I still pull out the Raffi Christmas CD every year and sing along to Must Be Santa and Douglas Mountain. These are also the song titles that made me winner of the boy's union Christmas party game of who can name the most Christmas songs. I was pulling everything out from This One's For the Children (NKOTB Xmas album) to Dwayne the Reindeer (sang it in my second grade school concert) to Holly Jolly Christmas (same concert). I remember the year my grandpa fell down the stairs on Christmas Eve and spent the next two weeks in the hospital pretty banged up. Despite my dad's protests, I insisted on visiting him in the hospital. Grandma pulled me aside and gave me an entire package of Holly Jolly wafers--cookies covered in frosting and red and green sprinkles. I ate the whole package while hiding in the corner of that hospital room, too afraid to get near my grandpa in his hospital gown and bloodied face. Years later I did the same thing at his funeral, minus the cookies.

But anyway, I still declare I would make the world's best preschool teacher. I like going to garage sales and picking things up thinking "I guarantee my mom would buy this if she were here." A couple weeks ago I found a real bargain at a daycare's going out of business garage sale: a matching wooden washer and dryer set for $20. I knew for a fact if you bought these in a catalog it would be over $100.

And I like listening to Charlotte Diamond sing Looking for Dracula and I am a Pizza and Slippery Fish. I liked how my mom let me go to work with her most days when I was in eight grade and homeschooled. I helped kids cut out paper pumpkins in October and paper turkeys in November and paper Christmas trees in December. I ran the fish pond at their carnival.

I spent the morning at Vikings training camp, getting paid to put tattoos on little kids and pass out paper footballs. The kind you used to make in school and flick through someone's hands. When it was slow, the PR intern and I threw a football back and forth. But it wasn't slow very often. I'd tease parents until they got tattoos to match their sons'. One guy wanted one on his chest. I obliged. I smiled as girls squealed from the water I'd spray on to get tattoos to stick. Another asked for an ankle tattoo. A few wanted theirs on their cheeks. I saw more little girls in cheerleading outfits than I care to discuss. Boys in jerseys, too many with Culpepper's name or Moss on the backs. But it didn't matter to them that they were traded.

Kids ran up to me with their signed penants and flags and backpacks and hats and jerseys and everything else they could find to be signed. One grandma had three boys with her, all proudly holding graffittied backpacks. Jess: she could have been an extra in Fargo, no problem. Another dad had three girls, all dressed in the aforementioned cheerleading skirts. I worry for him in another ten years. One family carted four boys. Eesh.

And I played with the best of them. I enjoyed myself so much more than all those days I'm sitting in a cube, staring at a screen, surviving only because of Pandora and worrying about what the IT people think when they read through my emails with too many references to poop and boobs (again, thank you Jess). I enjoyed making kids smile and laugh. I would have made a great preschool teacher...except that after about three days I would go completely nutso. So yeah, pretty much props to my mom for doing that for twenty years. Eesh.