Valentine's Boxes

I just wasn't up to it this year, so when child #2 wanted to make her box into a puppy, I sold her on making it more abstract, with various shapes in lieu of actual, realistic puppy parts. She bought into the "Picasso's Love Puppy" concept and she seemed genuinely pleased with the final product.


I told her I thought no one else would have ever seen anything like it. I certainly hadn't.



Gratefully, nearly two weeks have passed without any obvious signs of emotional scarring, well not from this any way. Given my track record, that really is an accomplishment.

Because I Didn't Kill Him the First Time...

The unmentionable child has done it again. This time it was Monday evening, during dinner, where it came out that Child 0 had a solar system project and that he was making a stop-motion movie using LEGOs to complete the project. All well and good, until two fateful questions: ‘when is it due?’ and ‘how long have you known about it?’ Apparently it didn’t occur to Child 0 that he had scouts tomorrow night and that he still had to develop the storyline, film it, edit it and then render it before he could actually complete the assignment.

So late Tuesday evening the cinematography is mostly complete and I ask Child 0 if the movie needs dialogue so he can discuss the key elements that had to be included in order to get any credit for the assignment. “Oh, I hadn’t thought about that.” Child 0 went to bed around 1am; I got to bed around 3am. Julie got said child up again around 6am so he could complete the written portion of his assignment.



When he got his grade, I wanted to scream and not in a good way. (He got 100% on the project.)