Unsinkable

So Dillon got to take his project to the MPS District Wide Science fair, which was held at the zoo at the end of March. It was pretty fun, I chaperoned. There were five projects chosen from each school to move forward, and at Maryland this meant that it was fourth, fifth, and sixth graders competing.  So I was pretty proud of D for making the cut, though his BFF also made it from the fourth grade class…

So part of my chaperoning duties involved driving D and two girls to the zoo for the judging, after which we got to hang out at the zoo for a bit, then return to the fair for the awards ceremony.   The two girls I drove were sixth graders and both D and I were silently wondering what the heck we were going to talk to two sixth grade girls about when Dillon asked if he could DJ in the car.  My car has an audio input and a really long cable, so the person in the backseat can play with my iPod while it is plugged in (it is a safety feature, I am sure, so that the driver isn’t messing with it).  Dillon does this a lot, and is developing an eclectic sense of the kind of music he enjoys.  His favorite songs are (not necessarily in this order as it changes every couple of days): Defying Gravity from the musical Wicked; War Pigs performed by Cake though written by Led Zepplin; Walk like an Egyptian by the Bangles; Rockstar by Smashmouth; and Bang Bang by Kaanan.

So he played all those songs and more on the way to the zoo from the school.  We were stuck in the horrible I-94 construction traffic, but he kept rockin’ it.  I had to veto a Jay-Z song due to inappropriate content (it happens occasionally, but I thought that I’d better be especially safe seeing as there were strange kids in my car).  Generally I just know where the naughty words and cough strategically in the same spot every time.  My kids probably think Estelle & Kanye’s American Boy has a cough in the track – “reluctantly, ’cause most of this press don’t [COUGH] with me.”  So I vetoed a couple but for the most part D was fully in control of the iPod.

And when we got to the zoo the girls were overheard saying to one of the other Maryland kids, “Dillon played a lot of cool music but I had no idea what it was.”

So I was pretty proud of that too.  Totally cut the sting out of him not placing in the district wide fair.  But that gives him a goal for next year.

Being a mom can be pretty darn hard work.  Yesterday, I spent pretty much the entire day (less working six hours) receiving and counting and accounting for girl scout cookie money.  Today, as soon as I got off work, Dillon and I started work on his Science Fair project display.

Thanks to a set of weekly deadlines from his awesome teacher, we didn’t have a lot to do, just assemble the final display board.  I was glad to see that he was taking it very seriously, being as type-A as I tend to be about trying to line everything up properly.  We laid everything out on the board in the required format for projects, and adjusted, and adjusted again.  Then a dog ran across it and we had to adjust one more time before we glued everything down.  Doh.  Here is his final effort, though:

At one point, I had a bit of a flashback to when he was a little guy who didn’t particularly like to fingerpaint.  He inadvertently grabbed the cold, gluey part of the paper when he was going to affix a title, and dropped it immediately.  He told me, “Some people might not have been born with the reflex to drop something cold and wet and gross when they pick it up.  That is not me.”

He’s pretty much always been a kid who didn’t really like to be wet and dirty.  Which I am generally okay with, but I still like to fingerpaint.