Dog Training

Beefeater just might the smartest boy in my house.  He knew enough to run away from Karen (over and over again) and he took to agility courses like a teenaged girl to an eating disorder.

Merlin has several science fair projects he is working on, and one involves Beefeater.  He told me he was going to teach Beefy to “speak”.  I was pretty excited because, just imagine; I could send the dog out to observe our neighbors and report back.  It turns out that he is just trying to get Beefeater to touch different computer things with his nose when he wants to go out or eat or something.  Apparently it would be helpful for me to watch him do this all day long.  I am busy!  Hummus goes to school now and I have to meet with the PTO and book club and Pilates won’t be much without me there.

Merlin sure loves that dog.

Instead of me working with Beefeater all week, Merlin has been working with him on the weekends and after school.  Merlin is also growing some kind of aquatic parasite in the basement.  He had better win something good for all of the inconvenience this is causing me.

Injustice Towards Women!

I am fired up right now!  Starling just told me that she did not place first in the science fair.  Once again some dopey boy from the genius class won with some ridiculously boring project that he had spent months holed up in his basement working on.  Starling’s board looked absolutely darling.  We hired a photographer to take pictures of her looking sciency to include on it and I put it together for her so it would be profesh and nice.

Believe it or not, this is not an actual experiment!

If they had allowed Starling to continue with her original experiment I am sure she would have gone on to nationals!

Meanwhile, I guess I’d better confess that the nerdy kid who won the science fair is my own lil’ Merlin.  Why does he want to be so weird and unpopular?  His boards had way too many words on them. and the whole project was so boring that I can’t even deal.

He tried to explain this to me but just, ugh!

I didn’t make it to the science fair last night because I forgot all about it, and of course Merlin never mentioned his win to me.  He said that Mr. Williams and his girlfriend were planning to take him out to lunch to celebrate today, but I put the kibosh on that.  I don’t need that Renata person being cruel to another one of my children.  I explained to Merlin that we can’t really celebrate because Starling didn’t win and she would feel bad.  Of course he understood.

Do we have to go to the regionals?  That just sounds like such a bummer.  Why can’t girls win in science sometimes?

Outrageous!

When I was picking the children up from school on Friday the Principal told me that she wanted to meet with me on Monday (today) about Starling’s science fair project.  I was sure that meant she was going to get the gold medal or whatever they give to science fair winners.  I was thrilled, but I didn’t mention it to anyone (except Cari, since Amber was also working on the project) because I didn’t want other parents to feel bad about their children not winning science fair this year.  I am humble like that.

Imagine my surprise when I was told this morning that Starling’s project was being disqualified from the competition.  Apparently they think that rating her classmates based on both appearance and popularity is arbitrary and “mean”.  I did point out that Starling was not  rating her classmates’ appearance herself, it was being done by a scientific sampling of strangers online.  Also, the popularity rankings are pretty obvious to everyone else in the class, it isn’t something that they are arbitrarily making up.  Mrs. Swedburg was very firm about it though, so now Starling and Amber have to start over from scratch.  Honestly, all of this political correctness is getting irritating!

Starling decided to do a blind tasting of lemonade to see whether boys or girls prefer lemonade sweetened with sugar or lemonade sweetened with artificial sweetener.  They are going to make a third jug of lemonade with quite a bit of added sugar to see if the fatties, like Fat Alice and Julia prefer that, but we may have to keep those results to ourselves.

Yesterday Röbert did have some earrings for me at lunch time.  The stones are smallish, but baby steps, am I right?  They are such an improvement over kayak lessons, and I have big hopes for my birthday this year.  He also made dinner last night.  There is nothing sexier than a man with a gas grill!

Yum! My hubby is hot and so is the chicken.

School News

Merlin came home from school with some great news today.  Mr. Williams is going to be his teacher again next year.  Apparently my pal Ty enjoys being with all of the weirdos in the Gifted Class.  Merlin adores him, so that is great news for us.  I don’t think that having such a good friend among the nerds’ parents made Ty’s decision harder either!

Amber came home with Starling to work on a Science Fair project.  They have taken photos of all of their classmates faces and are posting them on an app where other people can rate them for attractiveness.  Then they are going to personally rank them for popularity and make a chart comparing the numbers.  It should be interesting.

I wonder how Fat Alice is going to do?

They posted the pictures and then went out back to play.  They are just such happy, fun lovin’ lil’ gals!  I am sure their photos would be very popular but they said they can’t use their own pictures because of scientific principles.  Oh well!

They are both tens on my app!