The Island

It's been a real struggle to recover from Spring Break and get back to our routine this week. It's not that Spring Break was so wonderful and relaxing. It wasn't. There was an immense amount of sibling squabbling, which made the whole week exhausting. But before that...

The week before Spring Break was Open House at the elementary school. That meant that I spent an inordinate amount of time and plastic laminating and binding all the second grader's stories for the teacher. It also meant that Smunch had to finish a model of his island.Sometime in the previous couple of weeks, the kids in his class had all written adventure stories about their own make-believe islands. There were candy islands, snowflake islands, Lego islands, volcano islands...and Smunch's ever-so-inspired "Tropical Island".

I'm still not entirely clear on what happens in Smunch's adventure story. I never saw it before stirring up some play dough and guiding him through his own interpretation of his story. I read the story at Open House, but it didn't resemble the story I'd imagined as we put his island together. Whatever. There was a jaguar (or jajuar, if you were Smuch).And there was a monkey in a tree.There was the main character, Rob, who had arrived at Tropical Island by surfboard, which you can see in the first picture.There was a goo swamp (the round greenish area) and the ever elusive "banjo leaf"...pictured next to the monkey. I'm told it was supposed to contain "helpful medicine". And now you understand about as much about the story as I do.

By the way, don't try to paint drying play dough unless you're looking for texture. We got a whole lotta that!