A few weeks ago, my husband attended a progressive party for the kids’ school while I was out of town with a friend. A progressive party is one where you have apps and drinks at one location, move to another location for dinner, and then somewhere else for dessert.1

At these dinners, you’re encouraged to sign up for various future buy-in parties. A buy-in party, if you’re not familiar, is an event you pay to attend, and the money goes to the school. The buy-in parties, hosted by the parents, have different gimmicks and themes, like Pilates + cocktails, a holiday-time Home Alone viewing party for kids, grownup dodgeball night, moms and sons night at Dave and Busters, paint and sip, maybe a cooking lesson, things like that. And yes, this stuff can be tricky to get psyched for if you are socially anxious/are tight on funds/don’t drink.

But the general idea is that at the progressive party, you get drunk and merry enough that you sign up for a shit ton of the buy-in parties, so then the next morning, you look at your statement and realize you just gave hundreds of dollars to the school and signed away a lot of your free time to do even more school-related events. (This is the kind of situation that, like many parenting things, maybe seems like something you want to completely avoid until you realize that it doesn’t help your kid if you opt out completely [and also, maybe you actually like some of the parents at the school.])

I was thinking that someone clever might want to host an anti-progressive party someday, where you bid on items to avoid doing. Whoever makes the lowest bid has to take part in things such as:

• An entire month of theme dress-up days for your child
• Agreeing to provide tech support for someone’s Boomer dad two time zones away who also refuses to get his hearing checked
• Volunteering to clean and install three dozen used car seats used by children who are always snacking and always car sick
• Hosting an indoor beach party at your house in the winter for the lower grades
• Hosting a screen-free sleepover for all the middle-school boys
• Being the carpool parent for the 6:30 AM homework catch-up study hall
• Coming in to teach the fifth graders sex ed (you must have a fifth grader in the class)
• Serving as the go-to pickup and dropoff parking lot traffic coordinator (rainy days only)
• Being the lunchroom parent on Sloppy Joe day right before school pictures
• Hosting a pre-pre-pre college test prep lock-in weekend for the eighth graders.
• Laundering all the gymnastics leotards and storing all the kids’ hockey gear for one school year
• Being in charge of getting all the preschoolers dressed in their costumes for the Halloween parade right after a juice party
• Your child automatically making three simultaneous travel sports teams
• Hosting and leading a two-hour intensive shoe-tying workshop for all the first-graders
• Anything at Chuck E. Cheese

Plus, if you don’t attend the anti-progressive party to sign up to not take part in these events, you cannot sign up to not-do them. I think it could really encourage party attendance and raise a ton of money for the school.

On the topic of fundraising