Everything bad always happens on a Friday. It’s a rule. Not a good rule, not a rule I’m happy to follow, but a rule. Don’t believe me? Take a moment to reflect.

What day does the hot water heater decide to quit? Friday.

What day the engine light go on in the car? Friday.

What day does your child start complaining of a sore throat — just as you are reading the email about several classmates and the teacher coming down with strep? Friday.

Friday. Typically at the end of the day, when everyone — the doctor, the mechanic, the repairman — have all gone home from work. Not that it matters if your child’s doctor’s office is open or not, because you can’t drive there anyway because the car is on the blink.

So all you can do until Monday is sit and stew. And try to wash away some of the stress after you get the kids to bed by running yourself a nice, hot ba—

Oh, for the love o’—! I forgot.

Thank God it’s Monday.

The night before last, my seven-year-old came home from school and announced that she wanted to host a party at our house. Not a birthday party. Just a party. With bags of chips and a pony keg of lemonade. I thought about it and said okay — once the weather turns nice and kids can run around outside. But okay.

Yeah, it sounded like an eerie foreshadowing of what I should expect in another seven years, but I thought that by saying okay, with a plan, she would, you know, forget about it.

Forget about it.

Later that evening, my wife walked up to me with a smirk and a sheet of paper. This is what was on the paper.

You saw item number three, did you?

Yep, I got some serious trouble ahead in them teen years.

Misery loves company, but also discretion. After writing about parental involvement versus homework, most of the comments I received were not publicly posted. I even received private comments on publicly posted ones. Regarding the poor dad who has suffered through three dioramas this year alone, one reader inquired if his kids went to a school for architecture.

Me, I just figured that the school fears American children sinking lower in the international rankings for diorama skills. Perhaps dioramacists are really the Jobs Of The Future, and the rest of us are just clueless. Ever think of that?

Or perhaps the diorama itself is not the thing. Call me an optimist, but the true lesson may be in developing the various skills required for constructing a diorama.

My aforementioned reader, however, had a preemptive retort. “All my kids are going to learn is that mom is impatient and annoyed with the school sending homework for me to do.”

I found that comment regrettable. Regrettable, that is, in the sense that I did not write it.

But enough about dioramas. Someone brought up a subject I could really identify with. It was a mom who asked not to be identified. I presume this is because her children have been accepted into the Best Schools, and she fears they might be less accepted if their mother was on record complaining about School practices that are somehow less than Best.

So, to protect her right to complain, I will fictionalize her as much as possible.

She lives on Mars in a giant pink mushroom, and— No, wait. Perhaps that’s a little too fictionalized.

This mom may or may not have three sons, whose ages currently span pre-K to 2^nd grade. Give or take, for fiction’s sake.

All of them occasionally get the same “homework” assignment (this part is true). It’s one you may also be familiar with. I sure am (also true).

It’s the “traveling animal.” You know, the plush toy that is sent home from school on a rotating basis.

If you are childless and read this blog out of sheer Schadenfreude, or if you live on Mars in a giant pink mushroom, you may not know the drill. Your kid gets a stuffy on a Friday and is expected to return the next Monday with interesting photographs and a written report of the family’s adventures with it.

Yes, that’s a written report. From your preschooler or kindergartener.

The mom who wrote in called it “The Pink-eye Bunny Project.” At first I thought this was her school’s cutesy little name, what with bunnies having pink eyes and all. But then I got it.

From the sound of things, so did her kids. Pink-eye, that is.

This bunny has — how shall I put it? — slept around. With every kid in the school. (All together now: “Eww!”)

Beyond the sanitary issues, a lot of these beasts are expected to travel. So, if you’re going on a trip, say, to Memphis to visit relatives, Pink-eye Bunny is expected to go with you and be photographed at all the historic sites. Like the Stuckey’s along the turnpike, and in front of the world’s third largest ball of yarn.

Every time you get back in the car to leave one of these landmarks, you are in a panic about whether or not you forgot the Beast. It’s one thing turning around, paying two extra tolls and driving an extra 70 miles to rescue your child’s one-of-a-kind superfriend. That’s a mission of mercy. It’s something quite other when you have to do all that for a festering scrap of synthetic fur foisted upon you out of some misplaced notion of Parental Involvement.

One family in our reader’s son’s class took ol’ Pink-Eye on a trip to England! Golly, who wouldn’t want to be on a plane, with dry, recirculated air, for 12 hours, with a sponge full of infectious diseases? If Customs had any clue, that family would be on the Terrorist Watch List.

Then comes the really fun part. On Sunday night, once the kids are tucked in one last time with their stuffed tramp, mom and dad get to divide the chores of printing out the pictures and penning the travelogue of the weekend fun.

And searching the internet to determine which shots their child will need from the doctor after the three or four day incubation period.

…of homework.

In case you were wondering, yes, I did get in a lot of trouble when I was in school. Please don’t mention that in front of my children. Our little secret. Thanks.

The number one factor in a child’s success in school is parental involvement. Experts in every field — not just parenting and education, but also fishing, knitting and stamp collecting — will tell you this. Parents need to be involved.

And schools are taking that expert knowledge to heart by doing everything they can to get parents involved.

Which is why I couldn’t help my daughter with her homework this weekend. I didn’t have time. I was too busy “being involved.”

First of all, those of you who read Captain Dad regularly and have been blessed with good reading retention skills will recall that my older daughter is only in first grade. What’s a first grader doing with homework anyway, you may ask? The answer is: learning to hate it, just the way third- or fourth-graders of my generation did. Hating homework early is yet another way that kids these days are precocious by design.

Fortunately, the distaste for homework is not something they’ll burn out on. You can retain it well into adulthood.

Take Parental Involvement projects like fundraiser auctions, for example! Every family in our school is required to sign up for a committee for the annual auction. I tried to sign us up for the Simply Writing A Check Committee. But it wasn’t on the list.

Since my introverted personality would cause me to implode if I had to go out and solicit auction items, I volunteered to hide in my studio and draw cutesy pictures for the catalog (like the ones here, for trips to the children’s museum, theater, or water park). The hardest part was scheduling the meeting for when all the parents on the committee could make it. What with modern parents’ dearth of time and abundance of scheduling conflicts, finding a mutually acceptable date ate up most of our time before the deadline.

After that, for me it was merely a matter of me finding five or six hours of not helping with homework to knock out some drawings. Except it had to be this weekend, when my daughter had the once-a-year event of homework on a weekend.

Miraculously, it all got more or less done. So I shouldn’t complain. Despite the fact that I had to make an extra, emergency run to school this morning to bring part of the homework that my daughter — and her time-crazed parents — forgot as she was rushing out the door five minutes before the bell and was all but hysterical without it.

But the point of my rambling is not to rail against the system. It is merely to apologize to all the new readers who heard me on the radio yesterday and have come here expecting a post packed with parental wit and insight. It’s not here today. I’m sorry.

I only have this dog of a post. You see, my homework ate it.

To all of you fine folks living near the Chicago airwaves, please tune in your radios to WBEZ, 91.5 FM, tomorrow morning (Monday) between 9 and 10 to hear their popular 848 morning program with acclaimed host Tony Sarabia. Captain Dad will be one of his guest panelists to discuss the economic worth of a stay-at-home parent.

If you live far away, you can stream it from your computer by clicking the “Listen Live” button near the upper left corner of the WBEZ web site.

Talk to you all in the morning.

***UPDATE***

The producers of the show also welcome any Captain Dad readers to call in with questions and such. Their number is 312-923-9239. And they are @wbez on Twitter, for any of you who do that.

So I will indeed talk to you in the morning. I just hope they know what they’re getting into.

It’s a bugbear for parents, at least. There is a genuine — and contagious — fear of not getting into the “good” schools. Even preschools!

We all like to believe that we are willing to make sacrifices for our children. But it is also normal to doubt if you will be able when the time comes.

Don’t worry. You will be able to do it. In fact, you may be amazed at how much you are willing to sacrifice.

Indeed, there will be a time when you see your 18-month-old tearing the pages out of that New Yorker article you actually intended to read for six weeks but have yet to find the time. When she starts shredding the pages into identity-theft-prevention-sized bits, will you shriek at her to stop? Or will you make that sacrifice for ten minutes of relative calm?

Sacrifice.

Or you may see your just-turned-toddler crawl into the shower. You will instantly envision the eighteen different ways she could slip and scramble her brains all over the tub and you will want to rush to save her. Yet you will make that sacrifice — for five minutes of knowing that she is in a confined space and you do not have to chase her all over the house.

Sacrifice. Sacrifice.

Or when you’re trying to load the kids in the car, they may be crying out for a brownie. You will want to tell them, “No. You’re on your way to Grammy’s house. There are always treats at Grammy’s house.” And you know that it wouldn’t be fair to deliver the kids all amped up on sugar, but it’s a long drive to Grammy’s house and they are still crying for those blasted brownies. So what do you do?

Sacrifice. It’s what makes a good parent great.

Once the balm to any parental worry, “normal” — or, worse, “average” — has become an insult. A feared epithet. “Gifted” is the only acceptable status for a child.

But, if I may be permitted to get nit-picky here, the word itself tells us something. Giftedness is a gift. Not a virtue. It is something to be happy about, just so long as you remember that you didn’t earn it. In the end, you’re judged not on the cards you were dealt but on how you played them.

So it’s okay to be less than gifted. Which is good, because it is the vast majority of the planet.

Take a certain daughter I know, who shall be nameless, who is… well, un-gifted in athletic pursuits. Her parents wince in sympathy every time she tells of playing tag and can never catch anybody. But! Yesterday at recess, she scored two goals in soccer — even though she wasn’t entirely aware of one of them except for the fact that other students were cheering for her. Two goals! Out of a total of four in the game, because they didn’t count the other four goals “where somebody was hurt” (I didn’t have the heart to inquire what that meant).

It made me happy, not because she scored half the goals (because I know that is only likely to happen again in a 0–0 tie), but because she got a turn to wear the mantle of glory that all her fellow student’s have worn before her. She got to feel more accepted. Normal. Average.

And for a young person trying to find a place in this world, that is truly a gift.