Busy Sunday

Tab and I both helped Daniel today on a school project that is due tomorrow. He is supposed to depict the life-cycle of a butterfly, using any medium he chooses.

I suppose the easiest way would have been for Daniel to draw pictures of the egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly. Easiest, but most boring. I thought we could jazz it up a bit, so the other day we stopped at Walmart and bought pipecleaners and gauze. I had some crazy idea of shaping butterfly wings out of pipecleaners and gluing gauze to them.

Arts and crafts were never my strong suit, however. Did you know that you can't glue gauze to pipecleaners? I didn't, but now I do. Next I tried plain paper, thinking that Daniel could paint markings on the wings. Well, you can't glue paper to pipecleaners, either. Can you glue anything to pipecleaners?

So plan B was to make the butterfly entirely out of pipecleaners. It actually came out pretty well. Daniel used different colors within the wings to give it a colorful appearance. The caterpillar was easy to make out of a couple twisted pipecleaners.

Tab's job was to help Daniel make the chrysalis out of modeling clay. I was expecting the clay to be something like Play-Doh, but it was lightweight and airy, almost like pliable foam. With a little guidance from Tab, Daniel shaped the clay into a chrysalis, saving a tiny bit for the egg.

When the clay was dry enough, we mounted the egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly to a piece of cardboard. Daniel wrote out the identifying labels and stuck them under each. It actually came out pretty well.

Daniel's class is having a Valentine's Day party tomorrow, and I offered to bring in a plate of fruit. While I was washing and cutting up strawberries, pineapple, oranges, and grapes, Tab was helping Daniel address his Valentines for his class. Then Tab made me leave the kitchen while he called the boys in to work on a Valentine's Day surprise for me.

"Sheesh, Valentine's Day is getting to be almost as much work as Christmas," he jokingly complained.

After dinner, the boys presented me with the fruits of their labor: a lovely, three-paneled card, one panel of which was colored in by each of the boys, and a bookmark that Daniel colored in that reads, "I love reading with Mommy."

It was so cute watching them troop in together, the twins each holding one end of the envelope and Daniel flourishing the bookmark. Their eyes were shining with barely-suppressed excitement. It's one of those perks of being a mom.

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