Last minute dash still wins the race... or at least crosses the finish line.

This year was Anna's first school science fair. She brought home the paperwork in late October, absolutely THRILLED and pumped up about doing a project with her dad for the whole school to see. The fair was set for the beginning of January, though, and foresight is not one of Anna's strengths.

Every week or so we'd remind her it was coming up, ask about what she wanted to do, what topic she wanted to explore. Every week the answer was, "I don't want to do that right now, I don't know, let's do it later". I suppose as parents we could have forced the issue, made her sit down, focus and get started. But we kept thinking about the stereotype of the parent who "helps" a child do a project by just DOING the project for them. So we left it to her, with frequent reminders.

Anna had no interest at all until, in a sudden fury, she came home from school on her first day back after the holidays.

"Mrs. Ziegler wants to know who's doing the science fair! She said everyone needs to turn it in on Thursday next week! All my friends are doing it, I need my project!". She was in a SNIT, anxious, worried and mad at US that she hadn't started yet.

Oh, boy. Or in this case, oh, girl.

We quietly pointed out that the project is supposed to have around 6 weeks of study with a science notebook documenting the steps and observations and that she had ignored all our reminders. We also pointed out that we had, in fact, only 6 days. We told her it was too late, but maybe next year she'd learn from this and start early. The drama that ensued was akin to what would happen if we let her bring home a puppy from the store and then took it back about an hour later. Devastation and anger. It was so UNFAIR. WE, her miserable parents, were so UNFAIR.

In truth, we did feel bad. She was genuinely upset, begging over and over again. Eventually, after talking to her teacher and deciding that she could learn the lesson here without having to lose everything, we decided to let her go ahead with the project. The understanding was that she would do nothing BUT the project until it was done-- no playdates, no leaving it up to daddy. And daddy, in case you didn't know, is all about the scientific method. There would be NO skipping of steps.

It was a marathon. Kurt took the lead while I held the other kids back on the sidelines. He guided her gently through each observation and hypothesis without doing any of the work for her. When I asked him how that felt for his analytical mind to step back and let her figure stuff out, he sighed, stretched his tired neck muscles and muttered, "it's really, really hard".

But Wednesday night, at not-quite the eleventh hour (but not far from it)., Anna's project was finished. The display created, the notebook complete, the detailed report written in laboriously tidy print by her own small hands.

Her experiment was to see what floats and what doesn't, with two evolving hypotheses based on her observations and a suggestion for the next project about WHY certain things float and others don't. For a 1st grader, it was quite a feat. And as she dragged the big poster board creation into school on Thursday, Anna said fervently, "Next year, I'm going to start on November 4th (the day after her birthday), right away. I promise."

I think she still had cramps in her hand at that point, but it was worth it. "What Floats and What Sinks" won second place for the K-2 Fair. She was modestly pleased, dismissive and mostly just happy to be done. But you have never seen a prouder papa.