I have a big presentation coming up next week and must really focus on the layout, content and design before things get ahead of me.

I’ve become distracted clipping pictures of cartoon animals from my parents’ magazine collection and inserting them into old photo albums. I then have Ellie guess what animal I’m looking at based on the sound it makes, as acted out by me.

I will be presenting my family tree for no longer than five minutes to my grade two class. I’ve been asked to come up with five defining moments to best describe my family. My mom laughs and says she’s thankful we are a family of five and three of the five special moments can be automatically assigned to our birth dates. She feels sorry for the families who have just one child. They must be making up memories and events to fill in the rest of the timeline.

I should probably help her cut, paste and brainstorm about the project but she seems to have nothing but time on her hands and looks awfully angry with that pair of sharp scissors and construction paper on her sticky, glue covered fingers.

One item that I can probably work on myself is the world map on the 8 x 10 piece of white paper where I’ve been asked to colour in my ancestor’s countries of origin. Unfortunately, no amount of sharpening my pencil crayon will narrow the tip enough to colour the space allocated to England alone without also including Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

My Mom’s caffeine levels appear to be at an all time high and she made a comment to my Dad about pulling an all-nighter, whatever that is. She wondered if my teacher was at home laughing today due to the complexity of the assignment. My mom finds humour in the strangest places.

She referenced a conversation in the school parking lot with some of the other mothers, all hoping for A’s on their presentations. She thinks a couple of them faked being sick for work to be the first in line at the Dollar Store when word arrived they had a new batch of stickers of the Ukraine. Fingers crossed, they’ll be bubble stickers and I’ll get a few too.

My Mom handed me half of my completed assignment and I told her it looked bad. She wondered if it would look worse if the page was blank which incidentally, is my preference.

Kung Fu Panda is on t.v. today and despite owning a copy without commercials, it seems strange I would be forced to sit next to my Mom at the dining room table and watch her google interesting facts about Germany.

I’m hours late for a game of Barbie whack-down/smack-down where Ellie and I take turns sliding Barbies down the railing. I’ll try to sneak out soon as my Mom appears to be reading about the harmful effects of Red Bull.