Give me a break!

My kids are on Spring Break this week. In England we usually call this interruption of instruction half-term or Easter Holiday, but as school is divided in to two semesters here and we're not constitutionally permitted to celebrate Easter in schools unless we celebrate every holiday in every religion, we call it Spring Break. It does usually fall conveniently right before Easter, but as the Burbank Unified school district likes to do things a little differently (and is a predominantly Jewish community) we break two weeks earlier than everyone else!

It's really rather nice as most other schools are not out so the usual over crowding on this break is conveniently avoided. I think living in Burbank makes Spring Break even better; it's typically in the high 70's every day, the beach is a mere thirty minute drive away, Universal Studios is ten minutes away, and Disneyland only 45 minutes away. So we've had a near perfect week with the exception of one little blemish...my daughter has a science project to complete!

I'm allergic to science projects. Now don't get me wrong; I love to be involved in my children's education and truly enjoy helping them with their studies, but this Science Project enigma is enough to ruin any spring break.

For those of you who have yet to encounter the joys of science projects; they are "at home" projects that start appearing in third or fourth grade and don't go away until high school. The project is supposed to be completed entirely by the child, but as any involved parent knows; that's a sure recipe for disaster...especially when everyone else's parents are helping them out! They're really just a parental competition to see who can be the most creative and put together the best presentation. Burbank is populated by the majority of television techies that work in the near by studios...so you can imagine the creations they dream up; some of them need trailers to get their projects to school!

Being an all or nothing type of gal....I find myself getting a little too involved with my kids science projects. So far this year we've had the exploding volcano, which completely ruined the dining room table on it's practice run, we've experimented as to whether or not our pets are affected by different types of music, which has resulted in a tremendous amount of howling anytime we turn on any type of classical music, and most recently we had a multi colored meal of blue chicken, scarlet potatoes, and green cupcakes, to see if color is directly related to how we perceive taste...it does.

I wasn't warned about this parental responsibility! When I write my parenting handbook, I shall reserve a whole chapter on how to teach your child to relentlessly compete against it's peers, cheat wholeheartedly, and rely on one's parents to win, win, win!