When I saw a familiar gleam in her eye I knew my 5th grader had hit on one of her patented ideas. My mom’s birthday was coming up, and my daughter was planning what to make for her present. She has mastered the art of the homemade gift and always crafts something unique and personal in that I-made-it-myself way. We’d been kicking ideas around in the kitchen when she got her inspiration.
“I’ve got all the supplies I need in my room,” she offered coyly.
I stared blankly.
“The corks, remember?” she prompted.
Oh, yeah. My mom had been wanting to make a wine-cork trivet like one she’d seen at a friend’s house for some years now. She persuaded us to save her our corks, but always ran into some obstacle when trying to recreate the trivet. She’s a woman of many talents, but crafty-ness has never been Mom’s strong suit.
We’d kept saving corks, though, year after year, until we had several big bags of them, which I eventually passed on to our daughter to keep in her under-bed box of miscellaneous-supplies-that-might-come-in-handy-someday. I just couldn’t bear to throw them out.
Now I’m wondering just how my daughter is planning on creating this mythical wine-cork trivet. I admire her ambition, but admittedly am a bit skeptical. “All I need is some cardboard and the hot glue gun,” she says.
I persuaded her to let me find something a little sturdier for the base after envisioning the catalog-worthy project which had inspired Mom, and came home with a shadow box frame from Michael’s a few days later that we pressed into service.
From there it came together remarkably fast, with very little input from me, I’ll add. A few layers of cardboard in the bottom to prop up the corks, a flurry of hot-gluing, and the project was finished. The corks weren’t all the same size and there were some gaps at the bottom of the rows, but, Voila, one cork trivet completed.
A week later Mom opened her present. “Oh, wonderful! You finished the project I was never able to do!” She was so happy and appreciative of the thoughtfulness that it didn’t matter that it wasn’t a perfect replica.
This isn’t the first time my daughter has charged ahead with a project that, if I were to do it, would be fraught with nitpicking over details and handwringing over the One Best Way to achieve perfection, all resulting in a good deal of procrastination and guilt.
I’ve mastered division of fractions and the finer points of grammar, but in some regards my 5th grader is definitely smarter than I. Better a slightly imperfect project gets completed than a perfect one sits in a dusty corner of my brain.
