The 4 G's Kicked My Ass Last Month

• Over at FADKOG, you may want to read about her recent 'excursion' to Jamaica. Here, I've been suffering through a 1922 Great Gatsby party, a Geometry-from-hell project called a polyhedron helix-something, and German II adjectives. It hasn't been pretty and explains my blogger absence.
  
  When Middle Child came home with a handout on possible projects to do after reading The Great Gatsby, I erroneously thought a poster re-creating a Gatsby party sounded much easier than a power point presentation on a single subject of the roaring 20's (like music, art, etc.). WRONG! After she signed the paper to do the project, she kept coming home each day with new 'rules' for the assignment.......like comparing the costs of food, a 12 piece orchestra, and clothing from 1922 and today. Or recreational activities from 1922 (drinking doesn't count). I just thought it was going to be creating a menu and slapping on some flapper pictures. Oh, and she also needed an MLA works cited page.
  
  Any idea how many hours of research would be needed to do a project like this? Well, I'd guesstimate I spent about 12 hours hunting down websites and printing off the info for her. I'm not sure how the teacher thought a kid who is in school ALL DAY could possibly have the time to research this much info in one week. Middle Child spent a good 4 hours on google images looking for photos and printing them. All in all, we probably went to well over 50 websites looking for info. I narrowed that down and came up with 8 work cited entries. And I don't really want to talk about using rubber cement and fancy scissors with my 18 year old child who has motor skill issues. I'm happy to report we earned 98% for our efforts. Now it's time for a book burning!
  
  Then Son came home last Friday saying that he needed a box of solid colored straws for a geometry project by Tuesday. Nice. I have to spend Memorial Day weekend hunting those down. You think many places carry straws that aren't striped?? After unsuccessful attempts asking a few neighbors, I ventured out to local drugstores and grocery stores. Success was found at my 7th stop. Please don't leave comments that you have some in your kitchen cupboard. Anyway, Son came back home with the straws on Tuesday, along with a 4 page handout on how to create a polyhedra helix-something. After a few hours last night, he became very frustrated, telling me it didn't work. I tried following the directions (pushing yarn through straws is not exactly a good time), and I too became increasingly aggravated. Finally, I told him it made no sense at all as written or pictured and said, "are we missing a page or something??" He paged through and sure enough, it went from page 11 at the bottom to page 13 (the thing was copied from some evil math book). I refrained from e-mailing a nastygram to his teacher and just told him to take the instructions back to school and point out the problem. It's due tomorrow, so I suppose we'll spend our evening tonight trying again.
  
  I don't even want to go into the dative, genitive, accusative and nominative/masculine, feminine, plural and neutral forms of German adjective deklinations that I've been suffering through with Middle Child. And they say English has a lot of rules?? This year can't end soon enough.