War of the Roses

You might not think one could complain about roses. I mean, who doesn't love the added color, fragrant smell and the generous gesture receiving flowers usually entails, right?

Especially red ones.

Ask anyone and red roses almost always equate love.

Look no further than The Bachelor for heaven's sake.

Red roses. 24/7. Equals= True Love.

For awhile that is.

Yup, my tale starts and ends like that silly messed up TV show. Only mine had lots more drama since it was MY LIFE and not some sorry saps I could simply switch off at the end of viewing.

Sorry folks, this tale isn't one about romance or happily ever afters. I'm here to complain, whine and wonder why I ever wanted these difficult petals part of my life.

I have had various shades of roses in my kitchen for three weeks. While under normal conditions this would have been blissful and a joyous sight to lay your eyes upon every time you walked into the room.

But, alas, this is not a romantic piece.

Unfortunately those darn flowers meant one thing and one thing only.

The dreaded science fair project.

Man, I have come to dislike those things.

Three boys.

Three projects.

Day of stress, work and slow progress.

But those roses had unforeseen thorns that were worse than any prick on my finger I could have endured.

Trey's brilliant plan was to see if adding supplements to cut roses would prolong the lifespan of the flower.

Seemed simple enough when we selected it weeks ago.

And it would be the perfect reasons to fill my counter with beautiful blooms.

I immediately purchased three lovely roses and stuck them in water, ready to begin.

But the days began to drag on and soon those beauties were limp and dull and were certainly not science material anymore.

So I purchased a few more.

And soon those began to wilt too before we divided them and began our rigorous testing.

One wiser than me would have been adding up the days, realizing that ample time had passed to complete our task.

But in the hussel and bussel of life, I simply bought more flowers.

Last Monday I bought our third round of roses, ready to begin that night.

Tuesday arrived unheralded. A simple day of homework it seemed.

But Trey began to act just a bit funny.

Talk about the project soon was all I heard as I was feeding baby Zach.

Comments like, "I should have picked a project I could do in one day." And "I really need to know what to write about these flowers." But it didn't set off any warning bells in my head.

Not until late that night did I finally pull out that purple folder that had been stored in the cupboard next to the gum for weeks and read the middle section about scoring.

Research, data, summary and conclusion due: November 4.

The very next day.

Oh. My. Goodness.

I had no clue that the project was DUE that very next morning.

Panic set in.

We had absolutely NO DATA. Nothing.

In fact, we hadn't totally decided what we were exactly going to be measuring.

What this project needed was time.

And that was the one thing we simply did not have.

And as I soon found out, lots more roses.

As I had been in the kitchen, Trey had be talking to Rich upstairs.

Guilt set in and he told Rich the project was due in the morning. He had been reminded at school that day and knew there was no way we could finish the assignment.

Trey told his teacher he would need more time. She said that would be fine.

Though that fact was not shared until the next day.

I was irrational and angry, because the blame could be equally placed between Trey and me.

I mean, how in the world do you forget about a science fair project, especially when the flowers are on the table?!

After a nice talk with Trey and a lengthy email to Ms. Little, I hoped we had learned a valuable lesson on responsibility, time management and honesty.

I quickly purchased more roses (3 trials- 3 times = 9 roses) the very next morning.

For the next week Trey measured each specific leaf and petal.

Sunday soon arrived and we began to add up our data that evening.

A few trials were probably a bit more precise, but we finally had numbers we could crunch and work with to determine the outcome.

At 1 AM we finally had 2 graphs, a list of percentage of leaf and petal change from the original size and a solid case to present that surprisingly disproved our hypothesis.

Even with the data, it was a bear to figure it all out.

He turned it in this morning and I had my fingers crossed all day that the news would be good.

Trey's face beamed when he showed me 25/25 (late) on his sheet this afternoon.

Who would have thought we could have scored full credit on this section when it was nearly a week overdue.

I think we all learned a lot more than how to increase the freshness of cut flowers.

Honesty is always the best policy.

And procrastination is always stressful and something to avoid at all costs.

But equally important to me is to NEVER, EVER use fresh flowers in your science fair projects. Stick to things like mustard and ketchup or even dental adhesives (my own 5th grade project!) because they are far less temperamental!

Oh yeah, and more more thing- pencil in important dates like science fair projects due dates on the calendar, because you never know when a sneaky thing called Time will creep up far to soon and getcha when you aren't expecting it!