Our Ironman Turkey

Last week Nick came home with an assignment: a photocopied turkey on plain white paper. The top of the paper was titled "Family Turkey Project," and the instructions were to work together as a family to decorate it.

It didn't have to be fancy ... Mrs. P said we could use buttons, cotton balls, cereal, pasta ... anything we had around the house. Just to have fun and decorate it together.

But of course, Nick wanted to do more. He asked her if she'd ever seen an Ironman Turkey. AN IRONMAN TURKEY.

She had not. (I would, in fact, be willing to bet that the majority of the world has never seen the likes of an Ironman Turkey.) So that is what he decided would be our theme.

Our theme necessitated a trip to Michael's, since we don't keep a lot of crafty red, royal blue, gold and silver things on hand in the house. I will spare you the play-by-play of taking the 8-, 4- and 1-year-olds to Michael's on Sunday afternoon, but suffice it to say, I've experienced trips to the gynecologist that were less painful and more fun.

Nick and I ended up doing the bulk of the project together, as most everyone else couldn't be bothered.

I think, all told, we spent about seven hours on it, including the shopping trip. How could something like this take seven hours, you ask? Well. The glue stick we first used to stick stuff down didn't work. So we had to find a new adhesive (Elmer's). The pipe-cleaner things have wires in them, and they all had to be cut down precisely to size. 

The glitter glue that we used decoratively took more than 24 hours to dry, and if we tried to work on other elements in the meantime, the glitter glue would smear everywhere.

Not to mention that the three types of glue we then had on our paper made the paper itself bow up, making it nearly impossible to get any of the elements to STICK TO THE PAPER, so I ended up stacking heavy books on top of it ("BUT DON'T SQUISH THE PUFFY BALLS, MOMMY!") to make everything stick down.

I don't know if we ended up with more of a Liberace/peacock hybrid than an Ironman Turkey, but regardless, Nick is about as proud of this guy as he is of any craft we've ever done.

So. Happy Thanksgiving from all of us and Liberace Ironman Turk-a-Lurk.

Gobble gobble.

*Liberace image source, Ironman image source