The Partially-Edible Snowman and The Happy Bear! (Life With Unicorns)

As much as that post title might sound like the best/worst fairy tale ever, it's simply describing the two most recent homework assignments that I, as the handsomest parent (that's how you choose who helps with homework, right? The parent that the world would consider the best-looking?) had the luck (?) to help with.

Last night's homework was to decorate a snowman, which Mr F had to do over the weekend because it was a lengthy assignment that involved glue and Sweetie's seemingly-great idea for snowman decorating that actually wasn't so great because almost no great ideas end up with kids eating glue, if you leave aside the invention of the light bulb.

Mr F was sent home with a two-tiered snowman cut out that he (we) were required to decorate any creative way we wanted to, which almost immediately puts my mind into arms race mode because when you say do something creative you're throwing down the gauntlet for me and I immediately want to do the most creative thing anyone ever has done. So when Sweetie said "You have to help him decorate his snowman creatively" my immediate first instinct was "Let's turn that sucker into a hologram."

Which I would have done but I do not, unfortunately, have even the vaguest clue how one would create a hologram, so we settled on foam cutouts, popsicle sticks (the foundation of any good homework project), and, for some reason, cheese puffs.

We decided to do cheese puffs via this conversation:

Me: How are we supposed to decorate it? (I was killing time while my mind wondered if any of the tools I had in the garage would help me build a hologram. Since the tools are a level, a random assortment of screwdrivers that sometimes are Philips-Head and sometimes flathead depending on which one you don't need, a soldering iron, and three toolboxes, that seemed unlikely, but you never know.)

Sweetie: You should use cheese puffs.

Me: Okay (but really I was working through how many flathead screwdrivers I wouldn't need to build a hologram.)

So we sat down last night, with me having pre-made the foam shapes for eyes, nose, mouth, and hat, and gotten the Elmer's Glue, and the Cheese Puffs, and the snowman shape (i.e., everything you need) before getting Mr F, the final ingredient to this homework puzzle.

He set down to work right away:


But by "work" I mean "pulling off the cheese puffs I had glued to the snowman as an example of what he should be doing." I had, upon sitting him down, put two cheese puffs on the snowman to demonstrate what he should do, and he then began trying to pull the cheese puffs off, which resulted in my having to wrestle the cheese puffs away from him because I didn't want him to eat the glued cheese puffs, so I was struggling to get the puffs away while he was struggling to eat them...

... I should point out that we had purposely bought a different kind of cheese puff for this, buying the kind that he won't eat so that we would avoid this exact thing, but Mr F is supersmart and knows many ways of avoiding homework...

...and I kept saying "If you want to eat some eat the ones from the bag not the ones with glue on them," but that wasn't an option.

So Mr F would grab a puff, I'd wrestle it away, get a new one, glue it on, and then say "Now you do it," and he'd grab the one off that I'd just glued which I'd wrestle away and this kept on until he was fast enough to get one in his mouth, glue and all, and eat it, after which he looked smug and also consented to gluing the rest of them down, and also taking the occasional puff and smashing it into powder to show me he could.

Pretty soon, we had the base of the snowman covered in cheese puffs, the result looking far less cool than I'd imagined, and looking a lot more like we'd accidentally spilled a snack mix on it and decided to call that homework which, let's face it, was pretty close to the truth, and then it was time to start gluing on the foam face and popsicle stick arms:


Which we accomplished by me gluing one stick-arm on, and then telling Mr F to do the other one, and then me putting glue on each foam shape and encouraging Mr F to put it more or less in the general area it should be on a snowman. I mean, I don't have a Masters in Snowman Anatomy, or anything, but I have a pretty good idea where the eyes need to go if you don't want your kid to spend his entire life being examined by the school psychologist, so I would help him glue the shapes by gently pointing his hand towards the head region of the snowman, because he just wanted to be done and so was trying to glue the shapes to the table, or his leg, or my hand, or the bottom, cheese-puff-covered portion of the snowman, and our snowman already looked weird enough without having eyes growing out of his bottom.

It only took about 30 minutes of Mr F resisting, having to go get frequent drinks of water (snowman building is hard work!), gluing things to me, and sometimes eating another puff off of the snowman, glue and all, to show me he could) before we were done. I encouraged Mr F to hold it up for the camera, but the best he would do is let me hold him holding it up for the camera:




And here is the finished project,
which I kind of think looks Picasso-esque because parenting is all about improbable comparisons of your kid to geniuses, thereby elevating your kid while reducing the genius.

Which then brings me to The Happy Bear, which was Mr Bunches' homework project last week, and I'm glad they spaced those out because I can hardly keep up with these things.

Mr Bunches' homework was to take a red stuffed bear that they'd sent home with him and draw a picture of it, and then tell a story about the bear. Sweetie said that I could figure out what kind of story to tell about the bear by looking at what other kids had done, but Mr Bunches was second in line on this project and the only other kid who'd written something in the book had done something dumb like "I played with the bear" or something similar; there was really no plot to her story at all and I found it incredibly lacking.

This, though, was not my project (you can tell because there aren't 14 Volumes of "The Bear Story" available on Amazon), so I left it up to Mr Bunches how he wanted to begin, and how he wanted to begin was to do this:


That is Mr Bunches getting up to go play Skee Ball on his iPad, which we bought for educational purposes only and which has caused me, in turn, to hope that there is something educational about playing Skee Ball because that's what Mr Bunches uses it for 99% of the time, and worse, he won't share. But he is very good at Skee Ball so maybe there's a future in that. (Laugh if you want, but these days you can make money doing anything if you do it in an entertaining way, so I am encouraging Mr Bunches to play Skee Ball in iambic pentameter because I figure that'll get the snobs to go for it and he'll get a show on The Learning Channel. That may not sound so entertaining, but my only other idea was Mr Bunches Celebrity Skee Ball Show where he'd have celebrities on and interview them and play Skee Ball with them, but that might mean that celebrities like Ryan Gosling would hang around us and frankly, I do not need the competition.)

Mr Bunches kept getting up to go play Skee Ball, which words I've now typed so often they're annoying even me, but he did work on his drawing of the Bear, which he did entirely by himself:


And he even drew the Bear's little sewn-on heart, but hearts are kind of hard to draw, so instead of a heart-shaped box, he drew a box-shaped heart:



Which would be great, actually, because a box-shaped heart can hold more love, which you didn't think of, did you? Now that you did think of it, it seems kind of sweet, doesn't it?

With the bear drawing done, Mr Bunches' interest level (already dangerously low) waned rapidly, and we still had the story to go. Mr Bunches, unlike his dad, is a man of few words. We had this exchange:

Me: What story do you want to tell about the bear?

Mr Bunches: It's a happy bear.

Me: [thinking well, sure, but what's it happy about? Maybe the bear is happy because...]

Mr Bunches: Black crayon please.

And so he wrote his story, which is:




"IT IS A HAPPY BEAR."

Which I am now trying to option into a miniseries on HBO.