Death by Science Fair Project

So, in the midst of the utter chaos a couple of weeks back, I discovered that Firstborn was a full month and half behind on his science fair project. He essentially hadn't submitted anything to the approval site, and so despite the fact that we'd come up with a pretty good set of experiments he wasn't even approved yet. And yeah, the whole thing is due in the middle of November.

Well, Friday night he updated the last of his corrections and Sunday morning he received his approval.

And thank the dark gods for the time change, because without that extra hour of sleep I don't think either of us would have survived.

Setting up the experiments wasn't actually too bad; the real issue was that he has to keep a journal of all this, which meant I needed for him to write down everything that we were going to do before we started doing it. And that took a lot longer than it should have, mostly because he was radically overthinking the whole thing. Finally I made him pull on shoes and the two of us took a long walk while I talked about what the journal really needed to have, which is basically "a lot of sentences". (I did refine that to point out that yes, they needed to be a detailed description of what we were doing and why, and what issues we were expecting to encounter and what we were going to do about them.)

So I finally got him writing while I went off to pick up some supplies that we were going to need to resolve one of those problems, and shortly after I got back we were ready to start. (And, of course, I have to remember to take pictures all along the way.)

So now it's two-thirty on Sunday and we've got the main multi-day portions of the experiments set up, and more journal-writing done, and I am drained. I need to do some laundry. I want to do some writing. But I think this blog entry is about what I'm going to accomplish.

School projects are going to be the death of me yet.