leave your marx

I am not sure if I have told you but this is our last year of elementary school. For a little bit I was all upset about it what with my kids getting older and all. Worry not though I have found a loop hole which has taken my self pity to self congratulations. You see Thing One did his last year at the same school that Thing Two has found himself in. Turns out that Just as the tradition of elementary schools having a strong odor of hamster and urine the homework is also a part of the learning tradition. Two years ago I was googling the crap out of all of the ridiculous assignments that were coming home and putting forth my best effort. Now it has become old hat.
Last week I was informed that it was Veterans day- the war fighting kind not the animal saving kind. There was a veteran to be found and researched, a report written about their service and a poster to prove that they were in fact real. My laziness and inability to throw out poster board came in handy because I totes recycled the exact same poster and report that we turned in for Thing One. I am choosing to Ignore the fact that the silly thing collected dust under my bed for 2 years and instead putting a firm check in the win pile.
I am experiencing a little deja vu this week in the form of the great turkey disguise project, only this time I wasn't smart enough to save the first bird so we had to go back to the drawing board.
I kicked around a few ideas and mentioned them to the actual student who didn't seem all that interested in actually doing his homework until I finally just took the reigns. I may have fallen down a rabbit hole while doing my google search and somehow decided that Groucho Marx was a perfect disguise. This was a two part project and required a persuasive letter to convince the folks not to eat his pretend turkey. So as I was cutting and gluing in peace he was trying to write his paper. He kept asking me over and over again who the guy was and after showing his picture after picture I finally gave him a rough outline of what his paper should be about. I tell you it was super clever and included things about how his lack of talking would take away from the fun of eating him and so on and so forth. It only occurred to me AFTER he had written the whole thing that I had confused him with Charlie Chaplin. Needless to say the nine year old was not impressed. We reworked a few things and I am sure people won't know his mom was a little drunk and couldn't even keep two separate characters from two different decades straight.
Given that the project is due tomorrow we came down to finish putting the final touches on the thing and after examining him he informed me that he needed to have a cigar. I tried to explain that promoting smoking in elementary school was a bad idea.He didn't see it that way and after trying to reason with him for a few moments I realized two things. 1. I am too tired to deal with this crap. 2. I should probably never have been given kids.
So while the first turkey looked like this

This years turkey looks like this.

I guess no mother of the year award for me- suprise suprise