Adults and their kids
My son (like my daughter before him) attends a co-op nursery school. This means I spend a fair amount of his pre-school time at the school, cleaning, conflict-resolving, playing, and so on. At this particular school, it also means that I spend a fair amount of extra time with parents from the school performing various administrative functions. These functions are sort of inherently unpleasant, extra work on top of our crazy lives taking care of kids in a worried, industrial, and child-unfriendly society.
But there is a miraculous effect that comes about from combining these two tasks.
When you get to know people's two year olds, working with them in meetings becomes transformed. I hear people bringing up another item even though the meeting end time is now 10 minutes in the past, or people asking me about some task or other that I am negligent in not having done yet. But I see their kids face in their face, and I've seen their kids acting just like them, only two, and I just can't not take it all in stride. At the beginning of the year, when I was still sorting out who all the parents and kids were, I'd feel tense at all of the adult only meetings. I've been out of the dress-up fancy adult world for some time, and our family has been more or less chronically at "overwhelmed" most of the last year, and people would ask me about some thing or other, and I'd be all fumbling and trying to get the right answer out.
But now, having compared the board meetings to the play-dough table, and found many correspondences, I swing through through it all, talking to the small people about not crawling under the table and assuring the tall people that it's on the web site or that I'll put it on the web site, and did we get the Kinko's discount, and I have a bit of a smile the whole time.