3rd grade projects

Emma came home several weeks ago with the exciting news of her Solar System Project.  They picked their planet by drawing from a hat and for weeks my budding solar system expert had been ready.  She was more than elated.  After school she came running towards me at full speed, she shouts out with excitement, 

"I got my planet, I got my planet!" 

I said (with fingers crossed for a cool planet like Saturn, Jupiter, or Venus), "What is it?" 

"You will never guess mommy! URANUS! It's the gassy planet!"

I couldn't help but let out a chuckle, "Uranus?" 

"Yeah, mom. What's so funny?"

Later that night when Brian got home, she reported with equal excitement, "Daddy, I got my planet today for my Solar System Project! Can you guess what I got?"  Without giving him time to answer, "URANUS!"  I tried to avoid eye contact for fear of more poorly timed, uncontrollable bouts of laughter.  It was too late. She kept on about Uranus and it being a gassy planet and we preceded to giggle like junior highers.  For a month, all we heard was, "Uranus is the best."  "I can't believe I got chosen to study Uranus."  "I'm going to go read more about Uranus."  "Uranus is much bigger than the planet Earth."  "I never knew learning about Uranus would be so fun and interesting." And with each quote, Brian and I edged closer and closer to being 12 all over again.

Thankful parents weren't invited to the oral presentations, we tried our best to prepare her for the possibilities w/o exposing the issue altogether.  We kept our fingers crossed, hoping 3rd graders would be more mature and more oblivious to the word "Uranus" than we were.  We tried to go with the fancier pronunciation: urine-us, but she protested, "I like Uranus (yur-anus), that's the way my book says you pronounce it." Okay, here we go.  Fully embracing Uranus and all its splendor.  If I were in charge of Solar System types of things, I would have thrown out Uranus as a planet and kept cute little nicely pronounced Pluto.  For now, everyone from family members to the grocery checkout worker are getting a brief, insightful education on Uranus. They all look at me the same.  No matter how old we are, when Uranus comes up, our inner junior higher creeps out.

 Here is the final construction of Uranus (I know what your hearing when I say that). She used tissue paper & decoupaged around a big balloon, added fun wire with stars on it and beamed with pride.  She picked everything out on her own and did a wonderful job.  She even had a blue light she put inside that made it glow in the dark. It rocked.