Today is my daughter's 100th day of school. To commemorate this momentous occasion (ha!), her teacher has asked her to bring in a hundred similar things or a photo of a hundred similar things.

But that's not all that easy to find in our home. Books, maybe. But, that's almost too obvious and who wants to lug those into school?

'How about a hundred hairballs?' my husband offered up. 'I bet the cats have left at least that many for us over the years.' (I know what you're thinking ladies, but, sorry, he's taken.)

'Hey, how about the 100 lbs that I've collectively gained and lost and gained again over the past six years?' I countered.

One hundred hours of lost sleep? One hundred gray hairs? We were on a roll.

'Mom, I could bring in a hundred stuffed animals' our daughter chimed in, clearly unimpressed by the ideas that we'd floated thus far.

Although it often feels like my daughter has a hundred stuffed animals, I knew without even counting that we would come up short. That's when it hit me.

'What about your Playmobil people?' I asked. 'We might have a hundred of those.'

We had found a winner.

I have been blessed with an aunt who had the foresight to save every Playmobil item that my now 20-something cousins ever collected during their childhood. A couple of years ago, we became the beneficiaries of this legacy, when she handed me three or four giant plastic totes full of Playmobil sets.

Since then, our daughter has spent many hours constructing castles, westernfrontier towns and circuses, or an eclectic combination thereof.

We were galvanized into action, combing through the plastic totes. We hit 20, then 30, then 40. It was around the 80 mark that we realized we were going to have to dig deep on this one.

Like a pack of bomb-sniffing German Shepherds, we combed the house in search of more people.

'I found five in the closet,' my husband called from deep in our daughter's bedroom.

'Check the tub toys in the bathroom!' I shouted, remembering the Playmobil mermaid family I purchased on deep discount last summer.

'Hey look, I found a chimpanzee,' my husband said coming into the living room holding a tiny plastic monkey. 'Can we include this?'

After about 20 more minutes of digging, we had assembled a virtual United Nations of Playmobil, complete with Santa Claus and a one-armed clown. I think the final count may have topped out at 102 or 103 but to be perfectly honest, once we hit 100, I stopped counting.

But, sadly, for my husband, no chimp.

Jugglers, did your child bring anything in for the 100th day of school? If so, what did he or she choose? What do you think of this school assignment?