we don't fart rainbows and sunshine, we poop sequins.

Last week W's teacher sent home a turkey cut out on cardstock with instructions to decorate it, as a family. You could use whatever you wanted, but the goal was to make it a family project. Uuuuuuuhhhhhhhh. Yeah. Because I am Mother of the Year, I stalled, and stalled, until the night before it was due. I had planned to use cereal and pasta and some finger paints and way more glue than necessary, but W wanted to make his turkey "fancy" and the babies really weren't into having their hands dipped in paint and pressed onto a piece of cardstock. MJ just looked at her hand like, "this is dumb" and A quickly discovered that orange paint didn't exactly taste like sweet potatoes. So we scrapped that idea and I dug through my massive craft box to find something, anything, we could use to make a turkey "fancy".

Good thing this mama's always got some tulle and sequins on hand and I happened to have some feathers and a couple of googly eyes. We also had a bag of torn construction paper left from a Thanksgiving project we had just done for our Thanksgiving Wall of Fun so we had to use that too. W got to gluing the construction paper while belting out Christmas songs (yo. could we please get done doing this THANKSGIVING turkey before we move on to Christmas??) and because it was a "family project", CB wanted to help too. And she helped by pouring out all of the sequins onto the table and the floor. And then the babies helped by putting the sequins I didn't get to right away in their mouths. It was awesome. And because it was close to dinnertime there were meltdowns and lots of crying from everyone, including me. We aren't really the "family project" kind of family, I guess.

We took a break, ate some dinner, and started in on the project again. This time it was just W and me as we had put the babies to bed and CB was only interested in sticking feathers in her ears, so she got sent to the playroom, far away from the ear drum perforation devices. W pretty much lost interest and told me that I needed to have his "super fancy turkey" done by the time he woke up in the morning, and then went to play. And then I had visions of what life was going to be life in 6 years when it was science fair time.



So it was me, some feathers, some sequins and a lot of glue. Since this was a "family project", W had wanted a picture of his family on the project. He is very literal. I kind of thought it was appropriate. I mean, really, where better to put a picture of a bunch of turkeys than on a turkey? I put the pictures of us on the belly of the turkey and then got to gluing. Soon that turkey started looking less like a turkey and more like a Vegas Showgirl with all of the feathers and sequins I had put on it. It was pretty gaudy, walking on a very fine line to tacky. So gaudy/ boarding on tacky that I half expected it to get up and start a kick line. But W got his wish, it was definitely fancy.

I was kind of embarrassed to have him turn it in, especially because anyone could tell who it belonged to with our big ol mugs pasted to it but he was really proud of it and was excited to show it off. I'm pretty sure I heard it scream, "I'm HEEEEEEEEEEERE!!" when we took it into the classroom. It was for sure the loudest and fluffiest and shiniest turkey of all the turkeys. Fitting, I guess.

I'm still cleaning up pieces of hot glue I pulled off my fingers before they were seared together and itty bitty feathers. Those feathers are nasty little things and infiltrate every crevice they can. Then this morning I realized I didn't do as good of a job cleaning up the spilled sequins as I thought I did. While I was changing MJ's poopy diaper, I noticed something shiny, and then saw another one. Low and behold, there were two silver sequins, in her diaper. The girl won't eat some real foods because of their texture, but she will eat, and swallow, sequins? I have to say though, it is pretty cool to have a real life confetti cannon at your disposal.

I think we will hold off on "family projects" for a little while. At least until we are past the "let's taste everything" stage. We tried. We had good intentions. But I really don't think it is an experience we need to relive for a couple of years.