The Wetu (Wee-too)

OK, so for those not versed in Pilgrim/Indian lingo, this is a Wetu. This is what the Wampanoag Indians lived in. Kenda was given a list of fairly simple ideas for her Thanksgiving class project. Of course, she chose the hardest of the options, which was to make a model of an Indian home. Louis still holds firm to the idea that she should have baked a pumpkin pie and been done with it. However, we honored her wishes and began brainstorming how to create an Indian home. We had 3 weeks to complete it. Kenda gathered pine needles etc and we cut the milk carton. We tried a few glue options.....then we did nothing. Honestly, we had a busy month and just let this little priority slide down the list, knowing we still had lots of time. 2 days before it was due, Louis helped her glue some of the needles down. I figured we still had all Thursday night to work on it when she got home from school. Now, the story gets good when my sweet hubby surprises me with a night out. He showed up with at the house with a babysitter, and with dinner reservations. He also reserved a session for us at the temple. He then suggested that the babysitter help Kenda with some of her project that was due the next morning and we head off for our evening together. To our dismay, they did not get too far on it. We returned home from a great night together to find a half finished Wetu on the table. I warmed the glue gun up again and we set to work until midnight finishing the Wetu. The next morning, she wrote out the paper that went with it and she headed off to school. As we were glueing and cutting pine needles for this little project, we both looked at each other and realized this was what other parents had talked about.....staying up until all hours of the night working on school projects for their kids. Lesson learned: when you have 3 weeks to do a project, it is way better to work on it all week and get it done early. Kenda was so proud of the way it turned out and was excited to take it to school, which was worth the midnight hours we spent finishing it.