Monday, October 20, 2008

First Homework

My father used to complain that he was "still in school" because he had to help me with my homework. Well, I think I was hitting him up for help with CALCULUS and CHEMISTRY. Plus, I was in honors and AP classes, so there.....

Chip is two years old and I had to do his first homework assignment. Dear lord, is this the start of 16 more years of this?

Last week Chip came running out the door of his class room waving a paper lunch bag. Stapled to the bag was a cute little note with colored leaves as clip art, it read: Please collect as many leaves as you can in this bag and return it to school. Obviously there was some autumnal project on the horizon. Now, as you recall, I am from New England, the epicenter of Fall Foliage. Leaf peepers come from all over the world to see our leaves turn each October. I now live in Los Angeles and as far as I am concerned, we have no foliage season. I look into our backyard with new eyes. But, just as I had thought, the palms, lemon tree and avocado tree weren't exactly dropping leaves. Let me rephrase: There were no leaves anywhere in the yard. Perplexed, I asked Surfer Guy. He responded that he thought there were some oak trees in the park and we might find leaves there.

So I started to stress. Mind you, Chip has no idea. He can't read and when I mentioned the leaf assignment to him, he pretty much seemed to have no clue. Ha! The teachers know it's the parents doing this and they know there are NO leaves in LA. So we went to the park today. I found some decent leaves I guess. Not really much for color and pretty dried out. But passable I guess. I ran around like a fool stuffing the leaves into the bag. I asked Chip to help but he just laughed, pointed at me and ran to play on the slide. On the way out of the park I noticed some nice red leaves on the ground so I stuffed some of those in the bag. Now, I'm wondering how many kids (read: parents) actually are going to complete this assignment. I hope the teacher gives me extra credit.

1 comment:

VJ said...

Your story about the lack of Fall foliage in your yard brought me to tears. In fact, I cried all afternoon as I raked. :)

Signed,
Makin' it (and rakin' it) in Massachusetts