Family Project Night

As a rule, I hate these things.  The twins have one project every month for kindergarten that the whole family is supposed to help with.  This is in addition to daily homework, the occasional send-home project to do "on our own time," and daily reading and writing and reviewing of high-frequency words.  To me, it's one more activity that I have to jam into the family schedule.  The due dates range from early in the month to the end of the month.  This time, it's really early in the month...tomorrow.

I understand the purpose.  I really do.  It's supposed to foster family time and cooperation and other necessary group skills.

But they drive me nuts.

Some of them have been fun.  Some have been irritating.  We've done them all:

• August: a decorated book box (something to hold their little paper primer readers)
• September: a family picture banner
• October: decorate a pumpkin
• November: decorate your turkey picture to help hide Tom Turkey from the farmer who wants to make him Thanksgiving dinner
• December: another family banner, this time with tracings of everyone's hands and details about their favorite things about the holidays

So I raided my office for Christmas stickers that I knew I had in my scrapbooking stuff, and printed off pictures of the kids from each Christmas we've had with them.

Large Fry was kind of put out that she didn't get to use any stickers or determine how the twins' banners were going to be decorated.

Here are the end results:

Medium's.

Small's.

Meanwhile, Large was doing her own thing.  She traced all of our pinkie fingers.  Then she drew "pinkies" for each of the kitties, asking me to spell their names.  I thought it was cute that she drew little claws.

Large's masterpiece.

It wasn't until she was done, and I looked at it again, that I realized she had added our two late kitties, without asking me how to spell their names.  (The spellings are pretty creative.)

And...

She'd made them angels.