We finished Henry’s turtle project, without any tears or yelling, although I have to admit to having very little to do with the diorama part, for obvious reasons (hello, NO CRAFTING SKILLS). Fortunately, I married a man who used to build models and dioramas for fun when he was a kid, so that worked out well.

It’s really a habitat, Henry says. Whatever.

Last night as we were getting ready to sit down to dinner, my phone rang; it was a call I really needed to take, so I went off upstairs to consult and Wade fed the kids and cleaned up and then moved everyone up to the playroom to make a turtle habitat. By the time I finished on the phone, the turtle was living large in my shoe box.

Well, not too large; they were small shoes.

You will notice that this is a mixed medium piece, with various contributions from Charlie’s dinosaur box (the trees and rocks) as well as from his extensive plastic turtle collection, in addition to some original construction paper cut outs and a small selection of rocks and sticks from our yard.

Sea turtle, in a stream, chasing mulch.

Land turtle, leaving her nest. Henry couldn’t get over the fact that the mama turtle lays her eggs and then leaves them there. “Why does she DO THAT?” he asked.

Probably because she knows that 100 turtle babies is too much for any one mama to deal with.

When I came upstairs, the grass was cut out and glued on. “Did YOU do that?!?” I asked Wade, worried that he was taking over the diorama. “Nope,” he said, “that was Henry’s idea and he did all the cutting.” The crappy sun, on the other hand, was done entirely by my husband. Nice.

The directions for this report said that it was to be a “family project.” I honestly didn’t know how that would go; I imagined the worst. But this has been a fun week. We’ve read books about turtles and Googled pictures; Henry wrote his whole book by himself, with very minimal coaching from me (which consisted mostly of saying things like, “Just do the next TWO things on the list and then we will take a break”). He had great ideas for his habitat, and Wade was able to step back and let him make (almost) all the decisions.

I declare Turtlerama 2008 a success.  I have two years to recover before Charlie has to do this.  I hope that’s enough time.