Last Monday Miss C came home with her first school project assignment. The project was to make an animal habitat and being a beach lover like me and her daddy, she chose ocean life.

Thankfully her teacher is no sadist and gave the kids procrastinating until the last nanosecond parents through the weekend to complete the project.

We hit big box craft super store last week and picked up some plastic fish, sharks, and other ocean creatures. The hubby came up with several cool ideas. Thank God I’m married to him or I’d be calling the 1-800 please help us not have a lame project hotline. We helped Miss C paint the inside of the box with sparkly blue glitter paint and we used spray adhesive to glue sand to foam for the ocean floor. Miss C and I had some real mother/daughter bonding over cutting green pipe cleaners and poking them down through the foam for seaweed.

I scouted out the house for anything else we could add and found some blue plastic fish tank seaweed that we weren’t using in Violet the betta fish’s bowl. I added that for a realistic 3-D touch in the back corner of the habitat. It would be perfect for the miniature orange octopus. I was seriously channeling Jacques Cousteau. I was starting to scare even myself, but blamed it on the spray adhesive fumes.

I’ll admit I dipped my toe into the pool of Living Vicariously Through My Children by turning into zealous science project mom for an hour or three, but I was having horrible flashbacks to my own failed school projects. There was the 5th grade science project I got a big fat disappointing C on because I couldn’t bring myself to murder bugs, no matter how disgusting, in a Mason jar gas chamber filled with bug spray soaked cotton balls. There was also the truly pathetic bunny pinata I made for 10th grade Spanish that looked absolutely nothing like a bunny, or any small furry creature for that matter. I remember on the bus ride to school the bunny’s paper mache head falling off.

Yes, as God is my witness, my daughter would have a fabulous ocean habitat!

Yesterday was the day to transport our, I mean Miss C’s, precious ocean habitat project to school. The sky was gray and looked forebodingly like rain as we headed out the door but we made it to Miss C’s room without feeling a drop. All her friends were excited about their projects and everyone was checking them out. Miss C was beaming with pride.

On Monday afternoons Miss C rides home with my neighbor and when she ran in the door after school I asked how her day was and then nonchalantly asked how it went when it was her turn to talk about her project.

“Mommy everybody loved it but I told them NOT to touch the poop in the box,” she said.

“What are you talking about? There wasn’t any poop in there.”  For a minute I thought maybe I’d missed a bird pooping on the box as we’d rushed into school that morning.

“Yes there was poop mommy. It was on that blue seaweed from Violet’s fish bowl. It was fish poop! Kelly saw it!”

I’m fairly certain that the “fish poop” was just dried fish food but even so I sent my kid to school with an ocean habitat so realistic it even featured fish poop.

She is so getting an A.