social stud

Apparently I am a little out of it as a mom. When #1 came home with the assignment to cover her book, she said that we had to “buy a book cover.” I thought that sounded ridiculous when we had perfectly good brown paper. I was reminiscing about doodling whatever my heart desired as my teacher droned on about stuff that I thought was too boring to hold my attention. It was like a little history lesson on it’s own to study my brown paper bagged books at the end of the school year.

After refusing to BUY a book cover, I had a furious, crying child on my hands, explaining that everyone in her class had already bought their book covers and only one boy had covered his in brown paper. I pointed out that Martha Stewart said that we could use the comic section of the newspaper or maps to make it more interesting–she even made the suggestion that we could use contact paper and make them even more durable. What a concept! But no, my daughter told me that these fancy new fangled book covers had lots of cool designs that you can choose from and some of them even smelled!

Through all the crying and anxiety, I slowly started to realize that this was a social issue. She wanted to be like everyone else. I pointed out, to no avail, that I had a barn full of cool stuff and that we could decorate her brown book cover and make it super cool. But it’s hard to get others to grasp my vision of things, especially a stressed out 9 year old. So last night after she had finished her miles and miles of homework, I ran out to the barn and secretly covered her book in brown paper and got to work covering the brown paper before she could see it. When she found me in the middle of it, the crying began anew so I told her we could finish it in the morning.

This morning I got things ready for her before she could join me in the barn. But inevitably she found me out there and through lots of tears, the conversation went something like this:

B: Do you want red letters for “social studies” or would you rather have these black ones. Or we could do a combination of fun letters. Calm down.
A: I like the black ones. *deep inhale with side of blubbering*
B: okay. Take a bite of your cereal.

B: Here are a bunch of fun decorations and rub ons that would be cute. Do you like any of them?
A: I like this one, but not this one. I like this owl and these tickets.
B: We could put this one here like this, or up here like this.
A: I like it like this.
B: Okay. Take a bite.

B: It needs something red here, I think. Would you like a tag or a flower? Or we could do buttons.
A: I like buttons.
B: okay, are your shoes on? Go get your backpack ready the bus will be here soon.


And when the last “a” finished her name on the label, the tears were gone and she was beaming. “I love it! Everyone’s going to wish they had a book just like mine!” She didn’t want to put it into her backpack; she wanted to carry the book proudly, fancy side out for everyone to see.

SIGH.