I’ve been so busy over here trying to breathe and watching Youtube video demonstrations on the proper use of a neti pot that I’ve completely neglected to tell you about something that consumed the better part of my week last week.
(By the way, I’m totally lying about watching the neti pot demonstrations. There isn’t enough money in the world for me to watch someone do that.)
(Also, when Andy Warhol came up with the notion that we all have 15 minutes of fame, do you think he could have imagined a world where people would rinse their sinus cavities for all the world to see?)
Caroline had the day off school last Monday for Columbus Day. We celebrated in our usual way, which is to say that we decorated our Columbus Day tree and left cookies by the fireplace in the hopes that the ghost of Christopher Columbus would show up and hide eggs in our yard.
What? Is that not how you celebrate?
I’m glad that we commemorate Columbus Day because I appreciate that he took the time to load up some ships and head off in search of a new world. If not for him, there would be no Starbucks and who would want to endure that kind of existence?
When Caroline got home from school the following Tuesday, I opened her take home folder and discovered a note that said her homework assignment for the week was to create a replica of one of Christopher Columbus’s ships and include five things in the boat that they would have needed to survive the long voyage. The end of the note said that this was something fun to do with your child and to remember “the joy is in the journey, not in the destination”.
I’ll bet five dollars and a raging case of the scurvy that Christopher Columbus would beg to differ with that statement.
The note also suggested that we could use a shoe box or perhaps a can to construct our ship. Because, yeah, you want your kid to be that poor kid that shows up with an empty Spaghetti-O’s can with a paper sail attached to the top of it.
I asked Caroline if she knew what she wanted her ship to look like because I realize now that she is in first grade that I need to involve her in these high-level academic decisions. She looked at me blankly and replied, “I don’t know. How many Twizzlers can I eat before dinner?”
“Well, which ship do you want to make?”
“Maybe the Santita Marita”.
Perfect.
Fortunately, I was scheduled to volunteer at her school last Thursday and was able to do some ship reconnaissance and check out the ones that other classes had already made. If these ships were made by first graders, then Caroline is going to school with some future engineers. There were some sails made of rope material that would make Christopher Columbus weep at the beauty and structural integrity.
I went to Michael’s armed with my limited knowledge of faux ship building and decided that popsicle sticks were the way to go. I’m pretty sure the staff at Michael’s refer to me as “the crazy lady who comes in here once every six months with a desperate look about her and has no idea where anything is located”. However, I found the popsicle sticks, some brown paint and a few other ship-building necessities.
When I picked Caroline up from school that day it was a total score because she informed me that she wanted to make her ship out of popsicle sticks. We were totally simpatico. Unfortunately, about five minutes after I put her to work coloring popsicle sticks with a brown paint pen, she totally lost interest.
But that’s when P happened to come home. He was lured in by the sight of the shoe box and the popsicle sticks and apparently forgot for a moment that these types of projects bring out my particular brand of crazy. I was trying to configure the sticks in just the right way and he said, “I think they’d look better with straight ends. I’ll go get something to cut them with so it will be more symmetrical”.
I don’t know that I’ve ever loved him more.
Sadly, he ultimately decided that it was too difficult to cut every one of the approximately 112 sticks we’d need to complete the project but, for a brief shining moment that was my Camelot, I thought I’d finally brought him around to my level of OCD.
Caroline and I worked tirelessly on her float for the next few days. And by tirelessly, I mean that she watched several episodes of Phineas and Ferb while I tried to figure out how to make a sail out of foam and construct a ship’s wheel from parts from her old train set.
By Sunday afternoon, I knew I needed to reign it in a little bit when I heard P tell Caroline, “Be careful with that. You don’t want to mess up Mama’s ship.”
Is this what I’ve become? A neurotic Thomas Andrews wannabe?
But, you know, without the whole iceberg debacle.
So I handed the paintbrush and the glue to Caroline and she finished the rest of the ship. In fact, she even came up with the five items they would have needed to make the voyage after she rejected my suggestion of wine, toilet paper, and Pepto-Bismol. Our ship contained a barrel of apples, a wooden cow, some hay for the animals, rope and a compass.
Oh, and the piece de resistance was a pink rooster absconded from her old train set and glued to the top of one of the wooden things that holds up the sails. I want to call it the mast but I don’t know if that’s correct and I’m not about to look it up.
In the end, we looked at our replica of the Santita Marita and we were well pleased.
And still reasonably sane.