Oct 31, 2017 3 min read

My dad passed away earlier this month, and then my husband’s best friend died as well. The emotional roller coaster of those two deaths left me reeling, and I now find that, somehow, the month is over without me having much recollection of it even occurring.

Which is why, even though my son told me that he had two big projects for school due at month’s end, we still waited until Sunday to start them.

For the first one, he was supposed to build a three-dimensional replica of a medieval manor house, complete with feudal village, meadow and wasteland. It was to be no larger than two feet square, and everything on it had to be glued down. You also were supposed to use items laying around your house as opposed to buying a ton of supplies.

Unfortunately, we are not a crafty people. We don’t have popsicle sticks and wooden blocks just sitting around willy-nilly in our house. So, we made a run to the craft store after church to pick up some items from which we could build our project. This included a new glue gun, because I tossed the last one in the trash in one of the overzealous, if-it’s-out-of-place-it-gets-pitched moments that come upon me every once in a while.

We built the manor house, established the village, made a pond and decided that the scale of this thing was going to be extremely off. The smallest cows we could find were half the size of the serf church, but we stuck them in the field anyway.

Despite having purchased popsicle sticks expressly for the fence between the manor house and the meadow, my son decided that there would probably have been a stone fence row instead. Begrudgingly, I agreed. He asked if he could grab some small rocks from the driveway, and since we were supposed to finagle this thing together that way anyway, I told him that would be fine.

He grabbed a handful of things and brought them inside. Because they were muddy, he rinsed them under water in the sink. Then, he wanted to microwave them to dry them off. I told him to put them on a cookie sheet and pop them into the oven for a few minutes, instead.

After a few minutes, I could smell something awful coming from the kitchen. Thinking perhaps there was a pan of cake or something forgotten in there, I rushed out to inspect for fire. Instead, I discovered that some of the “rocks” we were drying had actually been hunks of blacktop that were now melted all over one of my best pans.

When we were finally able to scrape the rocks off without burning ourselves on molten tar, we glued the stone wall to the model. He made his labels, wrote his paragraphs, and cleaned up the mess.

Exhausted, I sat down to relax, but he quickly reminded me that the other project is due as well. An amusement park ride – that functions – was next on the agenda.

Perhaps he can just turn in my emotional roller coaster and call it a day.