VIP week

My 4th grader is the VIP for "VIP Week" in her class. Each week a different student gets to plan a week's worth of activities, which include sharing some information about themselves and planning fun activities for the class. Cool idea, especially for this particular child, who has no qualms whatsoever about getting up in front of a crowd and spouting off songs, poetry, or her musings on life. I guess she takes after her mama. I'm somewhat ashamed (well, not really) to say that I do enjoy attention. I have no problem getting up in front of crowds. (Sure, I get nervous, shaky, nauseous, I perspire, break out in a rash, and my voice quivers, but it's still fun.)

See? I have already commandeered this post to make it about me instead of my daughter. Back to VIP week. The first day, she got to put up a bulletin board about her life. I, of course, got very involved in this and became like the dad who does his kid's science experiment for him instead of offering helpful advice. Or my dad, who built a fully functioning scale model of a paper mill for my sister's elementary school science project. I'm sure it was very believable for a 3rd grader. Her teachers still think she was a child genius. (A comical side note to this story: in the process of "helping" my sister with this project, my father inadvertently drilled a hole through our new dining room table. To put it mildly, my mother was extremely unhappy about this, but it does make for quite a amusing anecdote 20 years later. . . .now that my mother finally has a new dining room table.)

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed looking through the thousands of pictures from my daughter's lifetime (yes, thousands - this is the blessing and the curse of having a digital camera). I. . . .uh, I mean *we* chose several photos and arranged them nicely on posters and gave them cool borders with my card-making program. I was actually having quite a bit of fun when Joy discovered what I was doing and she demanded that she be allowed to position the photos and choose clip art, etc. Whatever. The final result was definitely her own work since she went through and captioned every photo in her own words. Very cute.

Today, I went to Joy's class to watch her give a presentation about homeschooling during her VIP sharing time. I had coached her on just the right things to say so that her classmates would be enthralled by her tales of homeschooling. Homeschoolers do come up with some fairly impressive work. However, that wasn't necessarily the case with our homeschool. I just wanted to make sure it sounded like she actually learned something from me in the first 4 years of her education. What I forgot to coach her on was not making me sound like a bum. So at one point during her presentation, she said something to the effect of "We took A LOT of days off from homeschooling because my mom was always sleeping." Maybe those weren't her exact words, but I'm expecting a call from the social worker, or that her teacher will refer me to Narcoleptics Anonymous.

Those were only the first 2 days of VIP week. Three days to go: Wednesday is "show and tell" with her art work, on Thursday, she will play hangman with her classmates, and on Friday, she will bring a special snack. How much damage could she do with those themes? Only time will tell.