the packout and the letter project

"They work hard for the money
so hard for it honey
They work hard for the money
so you better treat them right"
(The Fink moving team during their lunch break siesta on the balcony)

I'm sitting here in a near-empty apartment. The walls echo but I am sooooo glad everything is gone and I can scratch "the packout" off my "To Worry About" list.

Mac had a total meltdown when he got home and saw that his playroom was now just a vacant space. We are talking Grade A, lay on the floor and cry sort of meltdown. I felt so bad for the poor little guy and started thinking that maybe I should have devoted one of our 4 suitcases just to toys. I told him I'd call the moving people back and they could unload his toys for him to enjoy these last 2 weeks but he'd never see them again OR we could be apart from the toys for these last 2 weeks (plus some months later unbeknownst to him) and have them to play with again in SC. He snapped out of his hissy fit pretty quickly and decided 2 weeks apart was okay. Crisis averted.

We also completed his Kindergarten Letter Project tonight. His friend Edgar chose the letter "O" for Mac while Mac was out with pneumonia. Mac and I had a serious altercation about the letter project. It could be a poster, book, mobile, etc and Mac chose to do a poster. All he wanted on his poster was a big "O" in the middle and some words around the big "O" that started with that letter. I thought that sounded awfully boring. After all, you have but a second or two to make a great impression and to show your display's pop and sparkle and all that. I suggested he draw pictures of the o words or cut pictures out of magazines. No dice. He wanted boring. So he started yesterday on our one sheet of loaned poster paper (did I mention we were packing out? The Kindergarten Letter Project came at a really bad time in my life!). The initial result didn't go so well. A photo follows. The orange words and scratched-out mistakes were the original attempt. The rest is where the magic marker bled through from the finished product.

After we dried the tears caused by making mistakes on our one piece of paper, I convinced Mac that in order to have familial peace and harmony, he really needed to write his o words on other pieces of paper and we (okay, I, but this is really the only part I did in the whole project) would cut them out and tape them on after he did his big "O" in the middle. You will notice some pretty fancy cutwork there. Since we just had the one piece of poster paper, we just flipped that paper over and used the back side. It's not the pretty side, but the rough, brown finish gives some texture and background color to his spectacular display of "O" words. I told him he needed to put his name on it, so where did he put it? Yes, right in the middle of the big "O". You'll notice he's going by James now and not Mac. He told me the other day he wanted to be called James, but that's a topic for another day. He gets his penmanship skills from his moma - pretty nice handwriting, don't you think?