Summary
Inspired by Rowley's new Big Wheel, Greg develops a new game for the two of them to play. One of them rides down the hill on the Big Wheel as fast as possible while the other throws a football at the rider and tries to knock him off. Of course, Greg makes Rowley be the Big Wheel rider every time, so the game stops when Rowley finally runs out of breath.
The next day, when Greg is on his way out to play the new game with Rowley, Greg's mom makes him stay home to write thank you cards for the gifts that he received. It's hard to write thank yous for gifts he didn't want in the first place, but he realizes that he can just type up a form thank you on the computer and fill in the blanks. So he prints a few out, writes in specifics about gifts, and calls that that.
But when he finally gets to play the game with Rowley again, there's a complication. Greg throws the football in such a way that it gets stuck under the front wheel of the bike, and throws Rowley off of it. Rowley seems really hurt and doesn't even laugh at the jokes that Greg can normally use to cheer him up. When they're back at school after Christmas break, Greg learns that Rowley broke his arm. Rowley is now getting attention from all the girls who have a lot of sympathy for his broken arm and want to help him with various things, like eating lunch. When Greg sees this he tries to take credit for injuring Rowley, but this actually makes the girls mad at him. Greg wants that attention from the girls, so he wraps his hand in a cast and says he got an infection from a splinter, but he's just not getting the same attention.
Since Greg doesn't want to take Home Economics 2 — even though he's really good at sewing — he decides to take an Independent Study, which is new this semester. He's put in a group and the teacher tells them that they'll have to build a robot. Greg thinks this is cool and leads the brainstorming session. All is going well until the girls in the group take over, and they suggest the robot give dating and makeup advice. Someone suggests that people should be able to tell the robot their name and have the robot greet them, but someone else noted that people might say bad words to the robot to hear them repeated back. So the boys come up with a list of bad words the robot can't say, and when Mr. Darnell finds it, he kicks the boys out of Independent Study.
After a screening of a motivational documentary at an assembly, there is an announcement that there are openings on the Safety Patrol. Greg gets to thinking: since people can get suspended for bullying members of the Safety Patrol, this would give him immunity. So he and Rowley head to Mr. Winsky's office to sign up, and learn that it's actually a pretty sweet deal. They get to miss 20 minutes of Pre-Algebra in order to walk the morning session kindergarteners home every day. They go to school early the first day to get the hot chocolate that is given out to all the members of the Safety Patrol. Even though Rowley and Greg don't have to stand out in the cold at assigned stations, they still get the perks. On the first day of their walk, one of the kids has an accident, but Greg just ignores it since he doesn't want to deal with cleaning up the mess.
The first snow day of the year comes right when Greg was supposed to have an algebra test, which is great timing. He invites Rowley over so that they can make their attempt at building the world's biggest snowman and get in the Guinness Book of World Records. They start by rolling a giant base for the snow man, but have to take breaks as it gets heavier and they get tired. During one of the breaks, Greg realizes that they ripped up the sod that his dad just laid down and, even worse, it has stopped snowing, so the damage won't get covered up. Since they can't build any more of the snowman, Greg and Rowley decide to roll the ball at the Whirley Street kids the next time they come to sled down the neighborhood hill.
The next day, Manny builds a tiny little snowman out of what's left just before the snow starts to melt. For some reason, Greg takes issue with the snowman and destroys it. Their dad sees Greg do it and comes out of the garage with a shovel. Greg thinks his dad is going to hit him with the shovel, but instead, he breaks up the giant snowball Greg and Rowley built. When Rowley comes over, he's upset that they can't roll the ball down the hill, and is mad at Greg for provoking his dad to break up the snowball. Greg doesn't get why and starts calling Rowley a baby, but just before they start arguing, the Whirley Street kids pelt the two of them with snowballs while sledding down the hill.
At school, there's an opening to become the newspaper's new cartoonist when Bryan Little is made to stop publishing his "Wacky Dawg" comic for using it to be mean to his classmates. Greg wants to enter the contest to become the new comic artist since he thinks it would make him popular, so he gets together with Rowley to start writing some submissions. It proves hard to write jokes, so Greg comes up with a comic where all the punchlines are "Zoo-Wee Mama!" When Rowley starts taking over writing some of the jokes and even drawing them, Greg thinks the quality of the comics drops off. Rowley eventually leaves after they get tired of writing together.
Greg develops his own comic, "Creighton the Cretin" about an incredibly dumb middle-schooler, inspired by all the people that Greg finds dumb in his middle school. When he goes to submit his comic to Mr. Ira's office, he sees all the other submissions and feels like he doesn't have much competition. Well, indeed, Greg catches his lucky break when it's announced that he'll be the new comic artist for the newspaper. There's only one problem: Mr. Ira likes to make edits to Greg's cartoons. He renames it "Creighton the Curious Student" and makes the comic about learning.
Analysis
Greg breaking Rowley's arm is the first real turning point in the pair's relationship. We're used to Greg playing mean pranks on Rowley and turning Rowley into an unfortunate guinea pig — such as the weight training session when Greg lets Rowley stay trapped under the milk jug barbell for a long time. But this is the first time that Greg serious hurts Rowley, and also the moment when it becomes especially clear that Greg doesn't really understand how his actions make other people feel. Greg only owns up to injuring his friend in a misguided attempt to steal some attention that girls are giving to Rowley and his broken arm.
Kinney plays that confession as a joke, that it's ironic that Greg would only admit to hurting his best friend when he could potentially get something out of it. But the interaction also shows us the extent to which Greg is still on the uphill climb of maturity, and hasn't made a whole lot of progress yet. Here, we can see Kinney using the format of the young adult novel to teach those blossoming adult readers a bit about right and wrong. The reader isn't supposed to hate Greg or anything, but we do see that this guy we like is handling the situation in a clearly wrong way. Like with lots of books for kids, there are some morals being told.
Of course, one of the morals of the story is that we should take responsibility for our actions. But another moral, maybe a little bit less plainly stated, is that we should value our friends. The January and February chapters give us a lot of examples of Rowley getting upset at Greg, and Greg not understanding that he is personally responsible for those things that are upsetting Rowley. Greg can't take Rowley's point of view and understand why he's upset that Greg's dad busted up the snowball they spent all day making and were doing to roll down the hill, so therefore Greg doesn't understand that he should apologize.
Greg also doesn't seem to understand that the process of collaborating on a comic with Rowley is a fun activity that gives them a creative thing to do together. Greg is so obsessed with getting his own ideas into the comic so that he can take all the credit in the school newspaper that he totally ignores Rowley's own good ideas and makes Rowley so frustrated that he has to go home. Jeff Kinney portrays a really awesome friendship between Greg and Rowley, and shows us over and over again how Greg jeopardizes that friendship because he just doesn't do any work to show Rowley that he values him as a friend.
So when Mr. Ira ultimately alters Greg's comic to transform it from a comic strip about a really dumb kid into a comic strip about a curious student, Greg gets a little taste of his own medicine. Now he has a new collaborator who is going to shoe-horn in his own ideas, but the difference is that this collaborator is a teacher and, therefore, an authority figure that he can't argue with. Kinney seems to be telling the reader that if we don't appreciate the fun stuff we do with our friends, we'll be all alone when it comes time to deal with that inflexible teacher.
