School work

When I picked the kids up from school today, the teacher gave me a picture Sawyer had made of a fire truck. The outline of the truck was formed by a line of very tiny holes. I looked at the picture closely and couldn't figure out how Sawyer had made such a straight line. When I asked, the teacher showed me a big square piece of styrofoam and a tack. The preschoolers place the paper on top of the styrofoam and use tiny pen-dots drawn on the page to guide them as they punch the tack into the dots on the page to make the picture. The teacher showed me a sample from another kid. The punch holes were all over the page and I could see the dots she was supposed to use as a guide. Looking back at Sawyer's picture I still couldn't see a single pen mark on the page. I pointed this out the the teacher, and she stared at it kind of baffled and then took it to the window. Even holding the page up to the light there wasn't a single pen dot visible. Sawyer had used the tack to perfectly punch through each pen dot on the page. The teacher was almost speechless. Not because this means Sawyer is destined to be a genius. It's just so quintessentially Sawyer. He's a perfectionist about some things. I don't know where he gets it. But to hit each of those hundred tiny dots so exactly must have taken incredible patience — something he doesn't always have. And because he's a perfectionist, he often get frustrated about projects like that. I can't even imagine how long it took him. I'd have taken a picture of it and posted it here or framed it or something, but as we were walking out the door he gave it to his little friend Sydney who was crying because she'd skinned her knee. And that, too, is so quintessentially Sawyer.