I slept just fine last night because...

The 4-H projects are finally -- FINALLY!!! -- turned in. Meelyn and Aisling each did a Fine Arts project (the only ones eligible for the State Fair, should they receive that honor) and two county-only projects, People in My World and Scrapbooking.

Their scrapbooks have been with us all year and their fine arts projects were completed with Kendra supervising at art class, so the only ones that had to be done at the last minute were People in My World, mostly because their worlds were continuing to happen as the projects were evolving. As in, we had to rush to Walgreen's to get photos developed that had to go on Meelyn's project board right. That. Minute.

Aisling's People in My World project is about her life as a Catholic homeschooler and Meelyn's is about being on the homeschool volleyball team. The only problem we have is that her display, which was supposed to contain her volleyball shoes, accidentally contains her running shoes.

She kind of needs those running shoes; she and my husband are running a 5k on Saturday and the volleyball shoes just won't cut it.

I've put out an urgent email to our club's leader, hoping that she can put us in touch with the People in My World project manager so that we can swap those shoes.

Other than that, everything went smoothly. All projects were properly tagged and turned in and the four of us drove home from the fairgrounds in a jubilant state.

I maintained that feeling of excitement until Aisling said, "I think I want to do a cooking project next year."

Doomed. I am dooooooomed. Do you know how hard those cooking projects are? I have heard horror stories of cakes exploding in microwaves and cakes imploding in ovens and families eating corn muffins for breakfast, lunch and dinner for months on end. At first, the corn muffin thing didn't sound all that bad until one mom said to me darkly, "You'd be surprised at the loathing you can develop for corn muffins over a six month period. I can't even drive my car past a cornfield without wanting to go off road and take down as many rows as I can before I get chased away by some farmer pointing a shotgun at me."

Even packaging the food projects and getting them to the fair for judging requires the organization skills of General MacArthur. There have been tales of paper plates buckling and reducing three fearfully and wonderfully made cookies into crumbs in the parking lot at the fairgrounds; plastic "clamshells" that burst open unexpectedly and released apple streudel topping like shrapnel from the tops of muffins and layer cakes that defied all attempts at engineering them for structural stability and diabolically waited until they were actually in the room for display before breaking free and sliding in three different directions.

I don't know if I'm ready for this.