Okay, moms and dads out there.  Time to ‘fess up.  How many of you have crossed that invisible line where one of “our child’s” projects becomes “our” project.  We don’t mean for it to happen, do we?  We just can’t help ourselves, and our children are sure happy when we can’t.

My son sometimes asks me to help him type a report.  I watch as he tries to churn it out, one laborious keystroke after another.  “It will take forever at this rate,” I admit to myself.

So I begin to cave in.  “Sure,” I say.  I try to help when I can.  Besides I can type really fast.

But then I come across a gross error in his spelling, and I automatically correct it.  Or he has an incomplete sentence or verb tenses that don’t agree, and again, “we” correct the mistakes. 

Or I’ll ask him, “Is this really what you meant to say?”

He smiles back at me knowing the translation means, “This needs to be changed.”  He makes a feeble attempt to correct it, hoping that if he fumbles long enough, good ol’ mom will finally make a suggestion.  He knows me too well.

You see, at some point I became interested in my son’s report topic, and it somehow became “our” report.  I encouraged him to look up more information in the encyclopedia because he was leaving out some important stuff.  We ended up brainstorming and the end product was definitely a joint project.

I couldn’t wait to get our grade back.

We did well.  We were so proud.

Next week we get our report card.  We can’t wait.