Carol’s Column

There's a blight in my bath

HAVE you ever had breakfast with a dinosaur?

It shouldn't happen to anyone.

Especially on a Monday when the washing machine has died an agonising death, spewing forth its watery innards not to mention the half-attacked washing over the kitchen floor.

Nobody who has just mislaid their upper and lower sets of false teeth should be confronted with a dinosaur at breakfast.

It is difficult to clamp a jaw together and look dignified. Especially when the dinosaur is slopping cereal over his front scales.

A nightmare indeed.

I thought I handled it well under the circumstances. "Do I know you?" I said in a rather off-handed way.

The dinosaur flashed his molars at me.

"Hi, Ma," he said.

"Oh, I do know you?" I replied. It's a wise mother who recognises her own child.

"Why are you dressed like a dinosaur?" I asked. Reasonably I thought.

"Because we're doing a school project on dinosaurs this week."

That explained it all.

After he'd left for school, trailing his tail behind him, I had a few quiet words with my husband.

"I'm sick to death of these school projects," I screeched. "They've taken over our lives."

He nodded his head sagely and fell asleep, which is what he always does when I'm stressing a point.

"You're over-reacting," he said. His standard reply.

Over-reacting?

The last two weeks have been unbearable.

Take last week.

I couldn't find my lounge. It was lost under a pile of cardboard, paint and plastic sheeting.

After much investigation I discovered it was going to become a TV set for a project my eight-year-old daughter had to do on weather.

"So why do you need to build a TV set if you're doing a project on weather?" I wanted to know.

"Because I knew you wouldn't let me take our set to school, and I need a TV for when I deliver my report."

"Couldn't you just have read it from a piece of paper — or said it spontaneously to the class?"

"Oh, Ma," she replied, "that's puerile."

It took me an hour to look up the word puerile in the dictionary and that was because I couldn't spell it in the first place.

Then my oldest son dropped his bombshell at lunch.

"Ma, can I pop along to Sun City for a spot of gambling with Jonathan Sacke tomorrow night?" he asked.

I thought he was joking.

"You must be joking."

"No, we're doing a school project on the economic viability of Bophuthatswana, and Sacke thought we should do an in-depth on-site investigation."

"He did, did he?"

Barry was delighted with my quiet understanding.

"Yes, Ma. This is the New Method teaching.

"Doing projects enables a pupil to become involved with his subject, and Sacke thought we could both benefit from a direct involvement with the high finance of the one-arm bandits, so can we go?"

I answered him in the only possible way. "Ask your father."

On Tuesday afternoon I received an irate call from a travel agent I'd never heard of before.

"This is Wizzaway Travel" said a distinctly superior-sounding voice on the phone.

"Do you know a slender young gentleman with longish hair, a freckled nose and a dimple in his chin?"

"I could do," I replied cautiously — recognising my second son from his description, but not wanting to sound too enthusiastic. "Is there a problem?"

"This young man, who says his name is Ralph Lazar, has just tried to book a first-class return ticket to Italy."

"He has?" I replied weakly wondering to myself where as parents we'd gone wrong. Oh the poor lad, there was no doubt he felt unwanted, unhappy, miserable to want to run away to Italy like that.

"Your son says he has a Latin project," continued Mr Wizzaway, "and he felt a trip back to the original Roman ruins would enlighten him immensely."

Fair enough.

On Wednesday 10-year-old Jamie blew the electrical system of the house when he installed his home-made solar heating unit "for a project on the sun".

On Thursday, I came home to find a bulldozer removing our front lawn.

"What's happening? What's happening?"

"Ma, cool it," said my oldest son. "It's just for a project I'm doing for physics on displacement."

But the finale came this morning when I found my bath full of black specks darting about in merry abandon.

"There's a blight in the bath!" I screamed in terror, wakening my sleeping family.

"Relax, Ma," said my youngest son. "Those are baby tadpoles. They're for a project I'm doing on the digestive system of the frog."

That project never came off, but the digestive systems of those particular tadpoles have been broadened by introducing them to the drainage system of greater Johannesburg.

■