I must have missed that section in the What to Expect books on how to react when your child comes home from school with a Ziploc bag filled with squid parts in his backpack.

Thus begins an entertaining account by Beth Braccio in the Chicago Parent about all the exciting things her son has brought home from school. To her credit, she didn't immediately make him throw the bag of squid away:

I agreed to let the squid remains sit on our kitchen counter (bagged, of course), but after three days, the unwanted guest had to go. The kitchen was starting to smell like the dumpster behind Red Lobster.

Obviously, mother and son could have benefited from some sage advice, garnered from my years of sending squid parts home with children. Follow these two rules, and your prize possessions will remain virtually odorless:

Freeze the soft bits. Rinse and dry the hard bits.

Hard bits are the beak, the pen, and, in the case of certain squid species, the chitinous sucker rings. Soft bits are everything else. Incidentally, use cold water to rinse the hard bits--hot water will melt them into unappealing and uneducational lumps of calcified protein.

Here's a handout I made for the Squids4Kids outreach program.