One Week

Next Wednesday, one full week from today, the kidlets should be heading back to school. They are already excited about their new backpacks, shoes, and other necessary items. Two out of the three of them already know of at least one friend in their future classrooms. We have started waking up earlier in an attempt to get back into the swing of things. (Okay, fine. I have been waking them up earlier. I switched around my morning routine so I can still sleep relatively late but still wake them up earlier. It's good to be the Mom.) I am fairly certain we have crossed almost all of the items off of our back-to-school list, with the one major exception of their summer math and reading packets.

Before hordes of teachers start scolding me for neglecting my kidlets' summer educations, let me backtrack a moment. Every week, the kidlets take out five books from the library, which we read ad nauseum. Their summer reading packets consisted of a recommended book list and an area where a person could write down the books they read since school let out. I had my daughters create a notebook where they would write each book title, author, and a sentence (for Rooster) or paragraph (for Horse) summing up the story. Then each kidlet drew a picture of their favorite part of the book, and wrote a caption for it. All we have to do is transfer the book title and author to the list and we are good to go. Their math packets had been mostly completed during the month of July when their brother was still going to school for the extended school year program.

Figuring I should get a head start on transferring the information from Rooster's notebook to the summer reading packet pages, I pulled all of that out today. Unfortunately, going through all of those papers meant I found a packet of papers that had been sent home in addition to the summer math and reading packets. Rooster actually still has about twenty pages' worth of work to do in this final week of summer vacation. Now if it had been Horse who still had twenty pages to complete, she would probably rise to the challenge, buckle down, and finish in an afternoon. Not so much for her little sister.

Rooster is the kidlet with whom I have to plunk myself down and physically sit there while she does her homework. If I do not, she will rush through, put a random scribble (and that is literal, not figurative) on each problem or page, then call it a day. When she refuses to do a particular page, no amount of bribery or threats will change her mind. I have, on more than one occasion, sat down with her to do her homework only to be on the receiving end of a two-hour long sobbing marathon. I have had her sneak her homework pages into the recycling bin so that I cannot tell her to complete them. There have been times when I am torn between thinking she is capable of doing the work but being stubborn and wondering whether she is able to complete grade-level assigments at all.

With more than a bit of trepidation, I sat Rooster down to start working on those twenty mysteriously appearing pages. We got through two before she told me she was tired. Then she became hungry. Then thirsty. My daughter was putting on an Academy Award-winning performance to try and get out of completing her work. Thankfully, she was more than capable of doing the work. Once she realized she was Mommy's homework slave until she completed the four pages I had required, she shut her whining mouth, sharpened her pencil, and got moving. I did have to tell her to erase and rewrite a couple of illegibly scrawled letters, but for the most part, she did okay.

My patience, on the other hand, is shot. Just one more week until the usual homework routine kicks in, and I hope this last-minute summer work gets my kidlet prepared for doing homework once more. Here's hoping.