Tuesday, August 05, 2008

The Last Tuesday...

...before it all begins again. The Girl had a pool party with her friends as a last hurrah this afternoon, and her father fed them all grilled hamburgers and hotdogs before they all went back to their homes to dream dreams of periodic tables and verb tenses. Or more likely, the cute outfit they have planned for their first day back to school or co-op, as the case may be.

Tonight there is a serenity in our house that won't be present on Tuesdays from here on out. Nobody has any assignments to be lost or held hostage by an uncooperative printer, no last minute spelling or vocabulary words, no science experiments to gather, no cramming one last bit of reading in before class. But Tuesdays from here on out will have a certain degree of desperation, especially once AWANA begins and there are Bible verses to be memorized on top of everything else. John and his dumb old PS3 and his giant TV (The Precious) have actually come through for me, though. Sure, I'd just as soon not have the thing at all, but he has used it to bribe the boys, and a very effective bribe it is too. Generally, we only allow PS3 playing one night a week IFF all co-op work is completed and there are no bad grades or other complaints from teachers. Whoever said you shouldn't bribe kids never had kids.

Even though co-op has not started yet, the Math Wars have begun. Well, that's overstating it just a bit, but there has been much unhappiness on the part of the 10th grader who managed to forget some critical information regarding quadratic equations and imaginary numbers over the summer. But even with this brief memory lapse, he has officially surpassed my knowledge of all things math. I barely squeaked through Algebra II and I have no desire to learn it again, so it's just a really good thing that I am married to The Engineer, for whom we spent the first eleventy years of our marriage paying off the college loans which allowed him to become such an expert in imaginary numbers. He's pretty handy to have around, because it allows me to get back to doing the things which I do best, which would seem to be commencing projects destined to remain unfinished forever and for always.

But anyway, tomorrow it begins again. I'll be sure to keep you updated.

1 comment:

Stephanie said...

Yes, but good moms never CALL it bribery. We call it "reward" or "incentive" . . . sounds so much nicer. :o)