Mom got an A!

This would be the latest BIG project that Jake was assigned at school. In History they have been learning about Africa. At the end of the unit each child got to pick a country to research. Leave it to our child to pick the country that we've never heard of, Mauritania. I actually asked him if he was sure he was pronouncing it right when he came home and told me! They spent a couple of months on this unit and then were given 3 weeks to complete this monster of a poster. The teacher was very very very specific on the size of the poster, what had to go on it, and in which panel everything had to go. We instantly started having flashbacks to the last

BIG project when they studied the Shakers and we spent a week driving to every bookstore and library in a 50 mile radius to find an "authentic" shaker cookbook, then trying to locate the ingredients, and half the neighborhood staying up all night editing his journal and making batch after batch of bread that never did turn out. We were going to do things differently this time. We made a timeline, Jake got a lecture and we were thinking that this one was going to be different. We were so hard on him. He needed to find better pictures, more detailed maps, well written captions, more accurate graphs, etc. etc. etc. You name it, we kept telling him he could do better! We got down to the weekend before it was due and mom and dad stepped in. We swore up and down that we wouldn't, even told our friends at dinner that Saturday night that he was on his own. 2 straight days were spent making the thing look perfect, we printed photo's off the photo printer, used multiple web sites to verify his facts, we even added sand to the paint before we painted the poster to make it look like a desert.....and we were very crabby to Jake the entire weekend. Jake came home the next day all excited to tell us he got an A, to which Jarrod replied "Your Mom got an A" ! After the posters were all turned in and the kids presented them, they set them all up in the gym and all the families were invited to come and see them. Jarrod took Jake and not 20 minutes later I get a call from him saying "We owe Jake a HUGE apology!" He said that most of the posters were not painted, many of the pictures were hand drawn, and the only specific graph that they were required to do was to compare the per capita income of their country to the US.....apparently ever single poster had a different per capita income for the United States, but we were pretty sure Jake's was the only correct one.....we should know.....we did it! Jake was doing his poster the way a 7th grader would do it and we set expectations that were way to high! A big lesson was learned in our house that day......save the poster so when Cameron chooses Mauritania in 3 years, it's already done!!!