Lately I’ve been super cranky and I actually started a post that simply listed all of my complaints: I sliced my finger cutting onions leaving a trail of blood when I started to type; Adam left for a conference in California so Pie decided to see how many meltdowns she could have in an 18-hour period; I appear to have plantar facisitis (at least that’s what my medical experts, Dr. Internet and her able assistant Nurse Duchess, inform me) so I’m stuck using the elliptical for a week, which is boring and I can’t watch morning news as it depresses me, but there’s nothing good on demand so I keep watching these HBO documentaries which turn out are even more depressing than the news, and the one I watched this morning sucker punched me with a horrific ending that came out of nowhere; sleep has been lacking because Pie is having nightmares again, and I probably will have some tonight after that documentary ending…
But you’re not going to get that post. Because something happened that made everything right in the world again. Passover ended last night. So I just devoured an entire box of Peeps for breakfast.
Happiness can be as simple as a box of sugar.
Last week the kids’ school had a Math and Science Night, and for it they invited the 3rd to 5th graders to submit a science fair project. That 80 kids (working both individually and in teams of two or three) turned it almost 50 projects when there was no credit given and no prizes awarded–these projects were simply for the love of science–impressed me mightily. My own son, as I’ve mentioned before, did an experiment that necessitated many petri dishes of bacteria growing on my dining room table.
He tested various products on the bacteria to determine what killed it the best. Hand sanitizer worked the best. Cleaning products worked surprisingly poorly. Coke did a terrible job. The hand sanitizer soon became bacteria filled again and the boy hypothesized that once the alcohol in the sanitizer evaporated, the bacteria then re-grew. Clever boy.
He clearly gets it from me. Evidence: My elementary school science fair project.
It is a stunning display of an “eaten seagrape leaf” and a “not eaten seagrape leaf.” Notice the three holes? That’s where I had collected bugs. You see, the bugs ate one leaf. They didn’t eat the other leaf. But the bugs I caught? If you look carefully, you can see that I noted that the bugs all died. That’s what happens when you put them in little jars with the lids on. (Note, my father informs me that I received a blue ribbon for this mind-blowing discovery; when I asked how that was possible, he said it was possibly the only child-created science project in the room.)
Ah, the science genius. You can feel it flowing from my veins into my son’s.
Of course, it turns out the boy had an ulterior motive for doing the project. He wants to go to a private school in 7th grade. One that’s notoriously hard to get into. When the fair was over, he said to me, “I can put that on my school application, can’t I?”
It’s all good. Because I still have another box of Peeps waiting for me.
