100 days

My kid — who was born just yesterday, it seems — is celebrating her 100th day at school today.

Her first 100 days in the public school system.

100 days of kindergarten full of running noses and time outs.

I don't know what I expected, but I am simultaneously awed and horrified by what has transpired in her first 100 days of school.

She can read now. That fact alone humbles me.

Her whole world is shifting because she can read things for herself.

And I don't mean that she can recognize the number of sight words she's been loathe to memorize, but, when she's in the mood, she can sound out all the words in her beginner reader books.

Here's an appropriate example: Wee One can read this book, One Hundred Days (plus one), from cover to cover.

To celebrate their 100th day of educational bliss, each child was to create a poster with 100 things glued on it.

I get all uptight about these projects. Mostly because I want Wee One to have — not necessarily the best (but I won't cry if she did) — definitely not the worst project in class.

I worry that she'll see her poster next to the other children's and rue the fact that her lazy-ass mom couldn't help her come up with a better project.

As soon as we got the notice that she was to create a poster of 100 things, we began brainstorming.

I came up with the idea of gluing beads and sequins into the shape of a flower.

Wee One immediately nixed this idea.

She wanted to use the many rubber stamps she got for Christmas and put 100 stamps on to a poster board.

And really, I wanted to let her do that. It is a perfectly good idea, but my obsessive-compulsive self couldn't fathom a poster covered in stamps declaring "Happy Kwanza" and depicting menorahs and turkeys.

I mean what if some of the stamps didn't print well and we ended up with half of an Easter greeting?

I tried not to pooh-pooh her idea, but she's smart and quickly figured out that the idea gave me the vapors.

Much to my gastric relief, her second idea was much more palatable. She wanted to use her paper punches to punch out 100 flowers and hearts and glue them to the poster board.

Ding, ding, ding ... we have a winner!
(She's drawing stems and leaves on the flowers and faces on the hearts ... some of the hearts have big toothy smiles and look just like the Blue Meanies.)

So we spent one evening punching out flowers and hearts in groups of ten organized by color. (Oh, the joys of an organized poster project!).

The next evening we glued. Actually she glued, I held the glue stick.

It took every ounce of will power to not glue the hearts and flowers myself while she watched the Family Guy.

I so wanted to glue them into nicely arranged clusters, filling up the space evenly, in order to create a unified appearance.

But I let her do it all willy nilly.

OK, I glued a couple when she wasn't looking, but I was harshly chastised by both Wee One and Uber-husband.

So now it's done and 100 days of school are behind us ... but Valentine's Day is just around the corner. Oh, the fun I'm gonna have ... er, I mean, we're gonna have making homemade Valentine cards.