My Epic Parent Fail

This failure was not entirely my fault, but mostly.
About six months ago Marcus and all the other 6th graders at his school were given the assignment to do 10+hours of community service.  A big packet full of information was sent home and I had to sign a document confirming that I knew what the assignment was and that I had read the {HUGE} packet.  Of course I skimmed through the packet, rolled my eyes, and told Marcus good luck.  The suggestions for service were things like, "You visit a local food bank and notice there isn't much food there so you organize a food drive, gather hundreds of cans of food, create a website so people can continue to donate food/money, and through your continuous efforts you have eliminated world hunger."  Okay, I slightly exaggerated but the ideas were big.  And complicated.  Marcus got together with some friends and found out about a local place where people donate new/used baby items.  He and his friends signed up on the website to go sort through donations which would use up a couple hours of service.  Then they got the idea to host a huge party and invite the entire 6th grade class over to my house.  What?!  Admission to the party was a donation of a baby item for this local thrift store.  And yes, the hours spent prepping for the party, partying, and cleaning up after the party would finish up the last of the ten hours of service.  To make a long story short, the party never happened and Marcus never got to help sort at the thrift store. 
Several months later I get the idea that Marcus could help coach Landon's soccer team with Randy.  I thought it was a brilliant idea.  He planned the practices, played with the kids, hauled equipment, and missed out on social things so he could be the coach at their Friday night games.  I thought all was well.
Last week, out of the blue at dinner Marcus casually mentions he's got to turn in his poster display for his service project that was due the next day.  This announcement was met with much lecturing and frustration from Randy and me and we quickly panicked.  I had marked on my calendar that it was due the next week but figured I must have been wrong and headed off to the store before the 1-hour photo closed.  We got the whole thing done at about 9pm and I left Marcus to put the finishing touches on things when I heard him say, "Ohhhhh nooooo!"
Then silence.
I ran back into the room and he's holding up that blasted packet that I hadn't glanced at in 6 months.  The last page of the packet was a form that needed to be turned in with the the poster and on the previous page was an entire paragraph about how COACHING A YOUTH SPORTS TEAM DOESN'T COUNT FOR SERVICE HOURS!!!  Seriously.  A whole paragraph explaining why Marcus had wasted his time coaching Landon.   It said,"So you want to coach a youth sports team?  That's great but it doesn't count.  However, if you realize poor starving kids in Africa could use some new soccer balls then you could organize and collect donations of new soccer balls for kids in Africa."  I'm not even joking.  That's what it said. 
Then the real yelling and hysterics began.  Randy and I scrambled to come up with a Plan B that looked like it had been in the works for 6 months while Marcus cried in his room.  Pretty sure he cared less about how his grade would suffer and more about the hit his social life took to coach those kids and it was all for nothing.  I drove back to 1-hour photo (still open thankfully) and we threw a pathetic excuse of random service projects together and stayed up way too late doing it.
Since it was my idea to have Marcus coach soccer without consulting with the packet first, I had to take the heat for this one.  And since Marcus put off making his poster until the last minute, resulting in me staying up until almost midnight, he was in big trouble.  And Randy was just mad.
Here's the kicker:  Turns out the poster wasn't actually due the next day.  He had the whole weekend to finish it.  I stayed up until midnight for nothing!

Here's the other kicker:  After talking to all my friends who have suffered through this service project thing with their kids over the years, they said I should've just done the soccer project anyway.  The teachers don't really grade them on what they do but on whether they did something or not.  Grrrrrr!!
Epic parent fail at its finest.