I’m a bad, bad mommy. I know this because my child told me so. And even worse, it might be true.
You see, I made Junior toss out some school projects today. In my defense, projects are the bane of every mother’s existence. From the time your child first attends pre-school until the day he or she finally leaves school forever, your child’ll bring home projects.
The good part is, kid projects start out small. Every day in preschool, your child makes a new project – usually a picture of stick figures in front of a square house or a macaroni necklace. No problem. Look, there’s always enough room in the spare closet for a new macaroni necklace, right?
Wrong. At some point before your child dons his cap and gown and is promoted to kindergarten, you will have enough macaroni necklaces to make salad every day for the rest of your life. And you will still have more necklaces stashed in the closet.
Unfortunately, as your child grows, so do the projects. So you resort to storing them in the garage, and then one day, you open the garage door and realize that you can’t fit the car in your garage any longer because your garage is a graveyard for old projects.
Now a logical person would figure that they could toss out most of the projects and just keep the ones that are … meaningful. But parents can’t be logical. If we could be logical, we’d have added up the pros and cons of parenting and still be on birth control.
But, logical or not, at some point, you’re going to need that garage space. And that’s why I’m the worst mom on earth. Because I stood my ground and reclaimed my garage. Sort of. OK, the truth is, I tried to reclaim it. Turns out, Junior is very attached to his projects.
Take Junior’s solar oven, for example. When I look at his solar oven, I see an old shoebox covered in foil with streaks of crusty chocolate on it. Junior sees an alternative source of food preparation that he insists we keep “just in case.” You know, in case of an emergency like a day when the power goes out so we can’t cook, the BBQ breaks so we can’t even grill our dinner, and we are forced to sustain ourselves by melting chocolate chip cookies in a shoebox covered in foil. Excuse me, I mean solar oven.
Of course, the solar oven sits in the garage next to the already-launched rocket with a half ripped parachute dripping sadly out of it. We’re keeping that just in case one day Junior really needs to send a message to a friend and the phone doesn’t work, so he will put a note inside the rocket and toss it over the fence to his friend’s house. I know. Apparently if the phone doesn’t work, neither will Junior’s very loud voice. A rocket will be his only method of communication. So we can’t possibly toss that, can we?
And that sits next to a Spanish Galleon made from a milk carton and covered in skeleton pirate characters. And let’s not even talk about the tiny volcano replica, the numerous clay masks, and paintings that consist of poster paint with noodles, rocks and/or sand glued on for a 3-D effect. He has reasons to keep them all.
And then there are the dioramas. I didn’t even know what a diorama was until Junior was in the third grade. Now, the dictionary says a diorama is “a miniature scene in three dimensions. ” Any parent will tell you that the true definition of a diorama is “a #@%^& shoebox filled with expensive stuff from Michaels.” Junior has two dioramas. I swear to you, one more, and we’d have been dipping into his college fund to pay for the miniature 3-D scenes.
But the big daddy of all projects sits on its very own shelf. It’s the mining town replica that Junior created using 40 bottles of Elmer’s glue, two birdhouses stained brown, $200 worth of miniature miners and cowboys and a tree with an empty noose hanging from it.
And among all these incredibly necessary projects is stuff, which, according to my son, we don’t need. Like toilet paper. And canned goods. In fact, according to Junior, if we’d just toss out some of the big Costco club packs of dog food and paper towels, we’d have more than enough room.
For future projects, of course.
