Chain reaction

 Last week at virtual school, Dorothy's class was studying chain reactions. Her teacher asked the kids to make a video of a chain reaction, and Dorothy immediately decided she needed to set up an entire rainbow line of dominoes. She started this project at 1pm and spent 20 or so minutes sorting her dominoes. Then, she tried to set them up on the kitchen table, but after the 10th time she knocked them over setting them up and shouted, I made her relocate to the basement, where she had to start the sorting all over again. From 1:45-2:30. she kept setting up and knocking over her rainbow chain. Cooper and I suggested she scale down her project and choose only 5 of each color, but she wanted a 6-foot chain. She was getting rammy at this point, and Cooper and I convinced her to let us help. The three of us worked together setting up and prematurely knocking down the dominoes until FINALLY at 3:30, we had a really impressive rainbow line. At first, I was frustrated by the whole thing because Dorothy kept knocking over our chain and refusing to stop helping, but then I just sort of lost myself in the zen of it all. When the whole line was assembled, Cooper sat at the purple end, and Dorothy sat by the red end.  I sat to the side holding Dorothy's school Chromebook at a weird angle so we could video the chain reaction using the SeeSaw app. I pressed record, and Dorothy gave the clip a really cute introduction, explaining that she had butter fingers and we spent 2.5 hours working on the dominoes. And then COOPER knocked over a purple domino, and Dorothy was SO MAD because it was HER chain reaction, so she SMASHED THE RED END TO PIECES, stopping the whole thing mid-orange. More than 2 hours of work ruined milliseconds from completion! And then they had a screaming fight about who was the bigger jerk and woke up the baby. And if that's not parenting in a nutshell, I don't know what is.

Cooper's still-baby hand pointing out the place where the reaction was thwarted: