Research project

Some time ago, Michele started a fun little family tradition - enclosing a hand drawn picture in Caroline's lunch box. This was cute when she was in preschool and only had lunch at school maybe once a month, but it got old pretty quickly once we had to start sending her lunch with her every day.

Still, never one to willfully disappoint our darling little girl, Michele continued to supply a daily artistic reminder of her undying affection. Continued, that is, until Caroline decided she wanted to have school dinners instead of a packed lunch. There was much rejoicing in our household on the occasion of this pronouncement. School dinners meant that Michele could get back the 20 minutes a day she spent drawing and packing lunch. And at £1.85 a day, it's actually cheaper to buy lunch than to pack it.

Everything was fine until suddenly, for no obvious reason, Caroline decided to switch back to packed lunch. This week. The week Michele's away. The week I'm doing the childcare. Figures.

Any artistic inclination I may have had at birth was mercilessly stamped out of me in the fourth grade by that jackbooted thug otherwise known as Mrs. Sauter, our school principal's secretary. I'm not really sure what jackboots are, but as the word itself sounds fascist and repressive, I can only assume that she wore them. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say that as the crayon-work of my construction paper snake evidently wasn't up to her exacting standards, she felt compelled to publicly critique my creation, much to the delight of my tittering classmates. Her constructive criticism, like "you went all different ways with your crayon," was just the sort of brutal honesty I needed at that age to quash any notion I may have had either at that time or in future of pursuing anything even loosely affiliated with the world of art.

Many years and many thousands of dollars worth of psychotherapy later, I still vividly recall that painful little incident from my formative years, which is why Caroline could not possibly have chosen a less inconvenient week to revert to packed lunches. I suppose I could have just packed the sandwich and left out the note, but backing down just is not my style.

Scrambling for some acceptable replacement for Michele's quotidien sketch, I hit upon a seemingly simple and foolproof (even for me) plan: a daily joke. What little kid doesn't love a joke? OK, so their sense of comedic timing is a little underdeveloped, but surely someone who thinks the 'orange you glad I didn't say banana' knock-knock joke just gets funnier with each retelling can't be that hard to please.

Or can she? There is a distinct lack of acceptable jokes for first graders. A google search for "first grade joke" turns up any number of jokes about first graders (a priest, a rabbi and a first grader walk into a bar...), but few which are actually for first graders.

A few websites seemed promising on the surface, but their categorization of jokes was utterly useless. Rather than grouping jokes by age range or by type of joke (e.g. knock-knock/what do you get when you cross x with y/dirty limerick/whatever), they choose to classify the jokes by their subject matter. Why on earth would anyone need to find jokes which are exclusively about elephants? Does anyone have that specific a sense of humor? Would they find other pachyderms equally humorous, or is it just the elephant that tickles their fancy? Talk about a fetish.

Anyway, I made do with a few old chestnuts on Monday and Tuesday: 'why did the banana go to the doctor' (extracted from the jokes about fruit section of the aforementioned website) and 'what time is is when an elephant sits on your fence', but I was a little panicky about finding material for the rest of the week.

So today I was browsing for books in the local thrift shops (absolute goldmines those places, by the way, Grandma seems to be on to something with her Nearly New addiction. Oh, and happy 21st birthday, Grandma (Feb 29th). I hope you weren't too hung over the next day...) when I came across the serendipitously titled "1,001 Cool Schoolyard Jokes". It was in new condition, and only 75p. It was bathed in a heavenly light. There were choirs of angels. It was manna in the desert.

But, as so often happens, the euphoria of a seemingly perfect purchase quickly dissipates under the harsh light of a closer examination (closer, anyway, than a glance at the title). Many of the jokes are too complicated or abstract, or just plain stupid to make their way onto that carefully crafted scrap of love in Caroline's lunch pack.

The book is also British (no surprise there, considering where I live), and I encountered, with a surprisingly high frequency, jokes which make absolutely no sense to me. One would think that any random string of words would be uproariously funny so long as at least one of the words is 'elephant', but sadly, I must either lack sufficient cultural context or possess a too high a degree of education to understand such knee-slappers as:
Why do elephants have Big Ears?
Because Noddy refused to pay the ransom.

Still, there are a few chuckles in the book, though almost none of them are going to help me out of the little jam I've gotten myself into.

At least there are only 3 more days. Hey, heard any good jokes lately?