When you’re in grade six, every week has a theme, which in my humble opinion, is really stretching it some weeks. I mean, a week is OK if it’s like the environment or government or something. But when you start doing a theme week on Depeche Mode, which is our teacher’s favourite band, or the important humanitarian contributions of Angelina Jolie, who is our teacher’s favourite humanitarian, then I think you’re pushing it.
But then I’m only in grade six, and I thought Angelina Jolie was a cartoon character, not a humanitarian, so I guess that’s my bad.
This week was Mother’s Day Week. On Monday, when our teacher, who just mentioned that her favourite movie is Finding Nemo, so you can pretty much guess what next week’s theme will be, told us that it was going to be Mother’s Day Week, I put up my hand and asked if it was Mother’s Day Week or Mother’s Week because there’s a pretty big difference if you think about it.
I guess I ask a lot of questions like that, questions my mother would call “smart,” but not in the good meaning of “smart,” because the teacher never answered me. She just got this look like she wanted to throw the chalk brush at me, so I imagined that she did, but I ducked and the brush hit Jimmy Hooker in the head because he never pays attention and it made a big cloud of chalk dust and at recess Jimmy said he was just collecting evidence for the hearing, which I didn’t really understand even though it was my day dream, and then Jimmy promised that I would get a subpoena, which I remember them talking about on Law & Order once, so that was cool.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure teacher meant that it was Mother’s Week because our activities weren’t focused really on the day, but rather on our mothers, which can be embarrassing for the kids who have mothers you can’t really be proud of, like the ones who go to Rick Springfield concerts and buy jeans at the same store as my older sister, Shania-Lynn.
Shania-Lynn, by the way, just had a big fight with her boyfriend Jordin because she saw him kissing her best friend T’Ashley, and Shania-Lynn called T’Ashley a skank, which you got to admit, is pretty obvious, especially if you take into account that Jordin looks a lot like a monkey would look if you shaved it clean, gave it pimples and dressed it in giant pants. Jordin told Shania-Lynn to shut the f**k up and so Shania-Lynn said to Jordin, “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” which is why I’m telling you the story because of the theme of the week.
I remember back in the old days, like in grade one and stuff, when Mother’s Day just meant that we got extra time in art because we had to make our Mother’s Day presents. My favourite was the candy dish that we made by gluing popsicle sticks together in a square, kind of like a log cabin, but a lot smaller. My dish was a bit unusual because of the way I put everything together with the popsicle sticks on their edges. It was pretty tall for a candy dish, to be honest.
My favourite one, though, was when we traced our hand prints onto coloured paper and then cut them out to glue them onto pieces of wood. It was a pretty good idea, really, but I’m not good with scissors, so I’m not sure my mother knew it was supposed to be my hand and she thought it was a plant or something, so she hung it outside in the garden where the rain pretty much destroyed it, so I never told her it was supposed to be my hand, so it’s like this big family secret now.
Now that I’m in grade six, we don’t do kid stuff like that any more. The last time I traced one of my body parts and cut it out to give it to my mother was during Britney Spears Week, but that’s a whole other story.