Late Night Or Early Morning?

How is it that kids' school projects for homework somehow wind up being your homework, too? Maybe it's just me, but it seems to be a common affliction with many other moms I know. Last week, Trey brought home a sheet of paper with school projects to do, and was to choose one. He chose to make a board game. His idea involved a bunch of boxes, four of which were somehow going to become elevators via string, and the contraption was going to be about 3 feet tall when he was done. That idea got nixed fast! So, while we thought about how we were going to do this, a week somehow slipped by, and this past Tuesday I suddenly remembered that Trey had this project due! So Tuesday night Trey and I hit Wal-Mart to acquire all needed supplies for this undertaking. A piece of black foam board, a piece of bright lime-green poster board, a laminated map of Wisconsin, four Hot Wheels cars (hey, it was a good idea for game pieces, just too bad it didn't work :o( so now Trey has four new Hot Wheels), glue, blank business cards to be used as game cards, and a color printer cartridge, because somehow I psychically knew that we were going to need more ink than we had available in the half, okay probably almost empty printer cartridge. Fifty dollars later, we were ready to start.

We destroyed the brand new map in order to trace it onto the poster board for the game board. After those were cut out, and the new bright green Wisconsin cut-out was glued to the foam board, we called it a night. Then, Wednesday night we plotted out major cities we would use as spaces in our game, and drew a path to all of them. We also finialized the rules of the game...which probably took longer than cutting out both Wisconsins! That seemed like enough work for one night, so we decided to finish up after school Thursday night, last night.

See, I have a problem with time. I always think everything is going to go smoothly, and we'll be done in a relatively reasonable amount of time. I am an idiot. Last night was the night Trey and I finalized his game, printing out stars for the major cities and gluing them to the game board, and printing out the 50 game cards we had decided to use instead of dice (fewer parts to throw across the room at fellow classmates), tracing the game path in magic marker, hoping to hide the zillion other erased pencil marks, printing out the rules and gluing them to the foam board so no one could lose them and then make up their own rules. Trey and I started this endeavor at 5:30 last night. Everything was going smoothly until we got to the business end of things...the business cards that would be transformed into game cards. Printing out 50 copies of the same design seemed to be no problem for our printer, but ask the stupid thing to print one copy of something, and it has a meltdown!! I had Trey go to bed at 10:00 PM, two hours past his normal bedtime, because he was starting to scare me with his, um, creative ideas to stay awake, and I figured it was probably safer for him to be sleeping at that point. Dancing in your boxers at 10 PM in the rain doesn't sound like the greatest idea. Nor does banging your head against a wall until you're fully awake.

Bubba was my champion last night. He stayed up with me, tried helping me get the printer to work better, and at 1 AM the devoted man re-installed the printer driver because everything else we'd tried didn't work. That actually did a good job of things, and I was grateful I only had the very few 10 cards left to print out, and was probably more thankful that there weren't more since the printer was starting to bog itself down again. I tried explaining to it that I didn't want to be up that late either, and if it would work faster, I would, and we'd both call it a night early. Apparently my printer was made in China or something, because it didn't understand English. Bubba finally tapped out at 1:30, and I had the distinct honor of calling it quits at 2 AM. Of course, then I couldn't sleep. I mean, I only had to be to work earlier than usual this morning, so of course it's perfectly logical that I deprive myself of more sleep, right? Ugh.

But, what made this all worth it was Trey's gratitude this morning, his exclamation of, "Wow mom, that looks awesome!" when he saw the cards made up and the rules glued onto the foam board. He thanked me for helping him, and I told him he'd better thank Bubba too, since he helped out a lot with the printer. So Trey went in and woke Bubba up to thank him for his help, too LOL Trey and I played a quick game, I won, so I know it's a great game LOL Just our luck, it was raining this morning, so when I drove the kids into school (I normally don't, but I kinda wanted Trey to have his project last longer than 10 minutes), I carried the game up to the door for Trey, so the front didn't get too waterlogged. We got to the doors, I handed him his project, and in they went! He better get an A++, darn it!!

On a different note, Derrick has his first session of speech therapy with his new therapist, which is conveniently located at Trey & Talin's school. Seeing as how Trey forgot his swimming gear, and I forgot to have him pack it in all of the excitement last night and this morning, I'll pop in and give it to him during therapy today. How handy is that? With any luck I'll get Trey & Talin's school pictures cut out and labeled for Derrick's party this weekend, so we can hand them out to everyone while they're here. Their school pictures, and Derrick's 3-year-old pictures we had done yesterday all turned out really nice. I have such handsome men!