First 100 Days

David's school marks the first one hundred days of each school year with classroom celebrations. Some teachers ask their students to make a project to mark the day. In first grade Kinneret and David pasted 100 cotton balls onto a shirt (cardboard cut-out on a hanger) and they marked it 100% cotton. It was very cute. But it wasn't really David's project.

I don't remember what David did last year, if he did anything at all.

This year he remembered only Sunday night that the following day was the one hundredth school day. He had originally planned to draw up a list of the one hundred most famous people, i.e., Albert Einstein, Jackie Robinson, Rosa Parks, all the presidents--I think he can actually name all of them--, etc. and paste their pictures on oak tag. (I don't remember what he called it, but back in the day I would have called it oak tag.) After much arguing we convinced him that it would take too much time to print out the one hundred pictures. He decided instead to make a list of one hundred musical instruments with pictures.(He loves the school's music program.) We tried to convince him that this too would take too long, but he wouldn't back down.

The final product was sloppy, to say the least, and I'm being really kind. (God save me if he ever reads this.) But he was really, really proud of it. And I was so proud of him. Many parents get too involved in doing their kids' projects for them. Growing up I certainly had my own share of projects that were the result of minimal input on my part. So whatever I thought of David's project objectively, I was so, so proud of him that he conceived of it and executed it on his own.

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