I was walking with a colleague of mine, Maura, last week and she said that she had been thinking of me. Of course I was perplexed. "Oh?" I asked, "How so?" She told me a story about her daughter's school project that just had me so excited about all that I have to look forward to. I thought it was the perfect story to share this week.  This is what she said.

"My daughter had this project to write a journal from the point of view of someone from the Civil War. The journal writing was not the issue, but how she was going to present it. We began crafting paper that looked weathered. This included burning the edges of the paper and even cooking it on the griddle so that it had a more sepia color to it. So here I am in the kitchen essentially grilling paper to help my daughter with this project.

We work on this for an hour or so and we finally get to the end of it and we think about how to bind it together. My husband says, 'Why don't you just staple it?' That was of course not good enough for me because staples were not invented back in the Civil War time and couldn't honestly ruin the integrity of the project by simply stapling it."

I interrupted her just then and said, "Yarn of course. You would put holes in the papers and tie it up with yarn."

"Yep," Maura responded. "That's exactly what we did. It had to be authentic to the time period."

"I can't wait for school projects." I said enthusiastically. "School projects will be so much fun."

"I knew you would like the story," she said. "The part that you won't like is when you have 10 minutes before the bus comes in the morning and your kid needs 3 paper towel rolls, so you have to run through the house and take all the paper towels off the roll.... I think they were making telescopes today."

"The joys of last minute parenting." I murmured. "She couldn't have told you that last night?" I asked.

"Of course not." She said. "But it certainly makes it fun."

Thanks to Maura for this gem. I can't wait until craft projects are the new normal in my house!