Friday, June 6, 2008

Welcome to the Hotel Simutown

And I was thinking to myself,
'this could be heaven or this could be hell'

Is anyone else's kid doing "Simutown"? It's where the kids learn the bureaucracies of running a city or town and they elect a mayor, city council, etc. and make laws, etc. On top of that, each kid also owns a store. The kicker is that the kids are going to be selling from their store so they need to make 80 products.

Velina initially wanted to sell kolaches (Czech pastries--kind of like danishes), but she didn't submit her business proposal in before the teacher decided to limit food items. She eventually settled on the idea of making charm necklaces and bracelets. Good girl, I thought, that's simple enough.

Holy cow. This was neverending. Don Henley smugly continued in my head. You can checkout any time you like, But you can never leave.

Velina was assembling these things for, like, ever. I felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day in the first half of the movie. I'd nag her every night, how many do you have now? And the numbers were slowly, slowly crawly up, 28, 34, 38, 42...

I don't think either of us grasped how long it would take an 8-year-old girl to make 80 of anything. Or how exhausting it was for me to keep cracking the whip on aforementioned 8-year-old. Even though the bracelets and necklaces were pretty simple and straightforward, you would have thought that she was crafting the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings for all the time it took. She finished everything down to the wire, including her "storefront":


her pricelist:


The best part was when she finished about 50 necklaces and they all got tangled. I'll confess that Paul and I pitched in to help untangle them well into the night. We figured out a display option to keep them separated--folding cardstock-covered cardboard (she chose the paper) with slits cut in them. The bracelets she hung on pushpins in the cardboard:


Here's a close up of the bracelets:


and the necklaces (arrgh, blurry--darn point&shoot!)

So glad these are done...we are so ready to sleep now...

3 comments:

dad said...

I can't wait til my kids are old enough to learn all about Apathyville, from the master of course!

Pound said...

bwahahahaha the one ring. and wth, 80 necklaces got tanlged?? sorry, but i'm LMAOOOOOOO.
they came out cute though, did she sell many?

susan said...

so cute! she did a great job! we did simutown too and for days and days all my son did was draw baseball logos. Then he needed to move inventory so I had to bake baseball cookies for buy a card, get a cookie free!