Science Fair=Mom’s worst nightmare

I HATE the science fair! It’s really a competition of who is the most dedicated mother with the least amount of children. You can immediately walk in and see which students made their own projects and which students have parents that work for NASA. When you have ten kids, you have a LOT of science fair projects. When your kids all go to the same K-12 charter school they are all due THE SAME DAY!

I’m not talking about little science fair projects either! My elementary school age kids want to create a science fair project that has never been done before-yeah try searching for that on Pinterest! The first graders are all randomly assigned a landmark and they have to create a 2 FOOT by 2 FOOT replica of said landmark. In past years we have done Big Ben (the clock in London) and Niagara Falls. I thought surely nothing could be worse than a 2-foot replica of WATER, but I was wrong. This year Preslee was assigned the Roman Coliseum. She’s 7. It’s supposed to be two feet tall! We can’t use sugar cubes or legos or we’d finish when she was in third grade! Anything edible isn’t strong enough. We opted for cardboard and the project is coming along, but it’s basically MY project. I can’t exactly hand a box cutter to a first grader and say “Here-cut out a billion arches in this cardboard while I make dinner for the rest of you.”

My sister in law suggested we boycott the projects this year (she has 8 kids) but she had a valid point- they’d need therapy later if they were the only kids who showed up without projects and who has time for more appointments? Did I mention that these projects are due FIVE days before school gets out for summer? Cause we are barely brushing our hair before school at this point!

I saw this picture floating around on Facebook today and I laughed out loud cause it’s SO true!

But I can do hard things, so I’ll buckle down and get the project done, I’ll take the obligatory pictures to post on Instagram with my kids smiling faces, and I’ll go and pretend like all the other moms aren’t just as excited as I am to smash those little suckers in the trash! The projects, not the kids. No kids will be thrown away. I worked hard for those.