Cute Enough to Eat

Jackson came home from school on Monday with a "Family Turkey Project." We were all so excited to spend a few minutes (hours) decorating this paper turkey. That's much more appealing than renewing our 2008 Medical Benefits or paying bills in a timely manner.

Priorities, people.

Brad and I felt this was our first real chance to prove ourselves as worthy school-project parents. And you know, the Junior High Science Fair is around the corner.

I was slightly outdone by the crafty parents in Jackson's room on Scarecrow Day and embarrassed Lilly (cough...myself) when she showed up in pastel colors on Red Day. But success on the Turkey Project might just help us earn some Street Cred.

Jackson's teacher suggested cute little glue-ons like buttons, feathers, macaroni etc. Do we have any of those Martha-ish items in our house? NO! I am too busy wasting time on the world wide wonderful to build deco-modern bird houses out of popsicle sticks and glitter.

So we turned to what we know best: candy.

Despite our best attempts at gorging ourselves on peanut butter and chocolate, we still have enough Halloween treats to melt into a Guinness Record Breaking Blob O' Chocolate.

With Thanksgiving around the corner, we must leave the candy behind and turn to the finer things in dessert: pies, trifles, cobblers, bars, and cookies.

And folks, we are green. I mean, we recycle, and watched a lot of shows during NBC's green week. And we love penguins.

So, in the name of reusing Earth's precious resources, we carefully created Jackson's turkey out of Halloween candy and wrappers, with an emphasis on hot glue.

The personality differences of my Sweet Spouse and I came out during this project. He took the time to create TEMPLATES of all the feathers--complete with identifying position labels--so that we could trace, cut, and glue the feathers (while using a smoothing device he constructed for this special operation).

As you know, I am all about EYEBALLING IT. As far as I'm concerned, "Measure once, cut twice" only applies to those who aren't good at estimating. Which I am. And sometimes am not. And the joy of not being a perfectionist, is that I don't care!

But I did let Brad get giddy with excitement over the precision measurment of kindergarten candy wrapper feathers.

In return, he gave me creative direction over the color of the candy labels. Something about the blue in Almond Joy and purple of Laffy Taffy just didn't work with our Thanksgiving palette.

At one point during this blessed event, Brad and I realized the children hadn't been in the kitchen in about an hour. Just remember, the more you have to do, the more engaging your children's homework becomes!

So here he is:

I would say the crowning glory of this turkey is his red gobbler-thing made out of Watermelon Nerds. The texture is so lifelike, y'all!

(You know you can click the picture to enlarge, right?)