Thanks so much for all the sweet thoughts about Bruiser yesterday. We appreciate it so much.
In other news, I need it to be summer already. There is just something so wrong about having to send a child back to school after Memorial Day weekend.
And speaking of wrong, let’s discuss the Science Fair project that was due last week. While I completely appreciate that teachers are every bit as eager to be out for the summer and have to manufacture activities to keep kids busy for eight hours a day, a Science Fair project just seems harsh.
If you wanted me to be enthusiastic about a Science Fair project, then it should have happened sometime around October. Back then the school year was full of promise and possibilities, but at this point I am a shell of the person I was then. I have written multiple checks to the PTO, I’ve had to watch Youtube tutorials to remember how to convert mixed numbers, and I’ve lost hours of my life in the carpool line. We’ve eaten a healthy breakfast on standardized testing mornings, practiced spelling words, written book reports and I’ve packed somewhere in the neighborhood of 542 lunches. (I might be rounding up.)
So to have to think about Science (A subject that has been my nemesis since I had to memorize the Periodic Table) at the end of this long stretch of school year was almost more than I could bear. This exhibit I saw on Facebook pretty much sums it up.
But Caroline was excited about it. Mainly because it was an excuse to order a pack of ten petri dishes with something called blood agar in them. So this is still in my refrigerator since it’s the gift that keeps giving. She can’t wait to test things for bacteria ALL summer long.
(Sheep’s blood. Pancreatic digest. In my refrigerator.)
In fact, she took the initiative to go ahead and begin testing various objects, starting with one of the dog’s chew toys. She swabbed that sucker, put it in the petri dish to grow and then failed to mention it to me. Which wouldn’t have been a problem except that she chose my laundry room as the best place to leave the petri dish to grow and fester all manner of bacteria. I walked into the laundry room yesterday and began to dry heave. I was certain a rodent had crawled in the walls and died.
If only I’d been that lucky.
But then I spied a bacteria-laden petri dish labeled with masking tape that read “Dog bone”. And now my life will never be the same. I’m not the naive, simple girl I was just 48 hours ago when I didn’t know such bacteria existed.
Anyway, back to the actual Science Fair project.
Caroline decided to test whether or not food preservatives keep bacteria from growing. And so she needed to choose two foods, one with preservatives and one without. She chose a piece of beef jerky and a carrot. And then she left them out in her bedroom for three days along with this helpful sign.
She clearly meant business even if her spelling of “project” makes me want to cry.
Also, that dried up carrot will give me nightmares for the rest of my life. It looks like someone lost their pinky toe and left it lying on that piece of paper.
After they’d sat out for a sufficient amount of time to cause me to question the meaning of life, she swabbed them and put the samples in her petri dishes that we placed in the garage because pancreatic digest, sheep’s blood, I’ve lost my will to live, etc.
And then we brought home the puppies and life got even crazier than it was already and so I was given the task to go to Michael’s while she was at school to buy all manner of supplies for her presentation. It’s moments like these when I am never more aware of my lack of science acumen because I was concerned about things like the color of the tri-fold board and finding sticky letters that matched and even debated if glue-on rhinestones might be a nice touch because while some believe in the science, I believe in the pretty.
She worked on the presentation while we chased puppies around the house and I wished that science wasn’t a real thing until she finally had it ready to bring to school last Friday morning.
Please note that her “Fun Fact” at the bottom is that the most common bacteria on petri dishes is staph and strep.
This is not what I consider to be a legitimate fun fact. A fun fact is that if you wait long enough eventually everything at Gap is 40% off.
And that’s the kind of science I can get excited about.