diorama days

The hectic end-of-school pace continues unabated. Today's challenge was finishing the second-grade habitat diorama. For some reason my kid chose Antarctica, the one habitat for which I had absolutely no little plastic animal figures. The only reason I keep the danged things around is for this purpose, and does he pick "woodland" or "rain forest" or even "savannah"?

No, he chooses the frozen tundra, and that pretty much only leaves you with penguins and seals—neither of which we had, of course. Thank goodness another penguin-blessed mother took pity on us and loaned us her family's stock of plastic birds.

I think the finished result does the job just fine. The whale tails were my idea, but he formed them. Except for help printing out and mounting the background (because he couldn't visualize how it would work), it is 95% his effort.

Yes, he is a third child.

When we were talking about the projects during field day last week, one mother mentioned another "kid's" diorama of the ocean floor, that included lights requiring access to an electrical outlet.

"Let me guess," I said. "First or only child, correct?"

She thought for a moment, then nodded and asked how I knew.

No mother of a third child needs to explain.