In this case however, my Copy Place ate my homework!! I have stored our programs and graphics files on the same Zip disk for the past three years. All the advertisements, logos, cover art, and design stuff that I need is on that disk. On Tuesday I finished the program. On Wednesday morning I took it in to said nameless Copy Place on Zip, so that I could output camera-ready copy on a higher resolution printer. The Zip drive at said Copy Place couldn't read my disk. Neither could the Zip drive at the copy place downtown. Frustrated, I took it home, and discovered that my OWN Zip drive could no longer read the disk, either. It's toast. Close to 100 MB of work, gone.
Ordinarily I would have backups of these things... however I have switched everything recently from MacOS to WinNT, and in so doing, I cleaned house. I got rid of a lot of stuff that I thought was no longer needed.
Was I ever wrong!
So now I have to scramble around and try to get this done. During my lunch hour, and late tonight.
Of course I'm extra bummed out because of the amount of time this has already taken above and beyond what I had budgeted for it.
Last night was truly a trial of my patience. For the THIRD night in a row, Kirstin had a pile of homework. As I have said before, I'm not against homework. I understand when the teacher assigns it, kids should do it, and I'm very supportive of that.
WE get homework far above and beyond what the other kids at school are getting, because every single day that Kirstin stays at my house, she DOESN'T do her work in class. I don't know what the hell she is doing with all that time at school, but her teacher sends the work home with her when she doesn't finish it, and it's due the very next morning every time.
For the past three nights and every night I have had her in the past two months we have literally had 3 HOURS of homework each night. It's frustrating, because I would like to actually be able to do some nice things with Kirstin. Forest would like a chance to get to know her better, too. Last night I wanted to take her out to Caesarland to play and have dinner. On Tuesday there was a storyteller at Barnes and Noble she would have really enjoyed, since it was one of our favorite authors. I'm trying to read her a chapter a night of the Black Cauldron series. But because we are always doing homework, we don't get to do any of those things.
It makes me feel like I'm a terrible parent, because at her dad's house she only has one or two nights of homework a week, which she can always get done in an hour or two. What am I doing wrong???
At the gut-instinct level, I think she's doing this to get attention. She's not a stupid kid, and she's more than capable of getting this stuff finished in school. I could understand dawdling and procrastinating about a math assignment, since she doesn't like those. But last night we had 20 pages of reading a story, and answering questions. She LOVES that stuff!! Why didn't she do it in class?
I also have a serious problem with her attitude about all of this. I expect when she brings home a pile of work that she will start it right away, and make an honest attempt to get it done, and ask me questions when she needs help. Instead, she sits down. She fidgets with her papers, rifles through her bag, and sets all her stuff where she wants it. She doesn't start anything until I am down her throat to start it.
Then she stares at her paper, twirling her hair around her finger, dangling her feet, and OBVIOUSLY not even reading it, for a solid minute or two.
Then she says "I don't get it."
It's like fingernails on a chalkboard to me now.
"I don't get it, " she whines.
"Read me the question," I say. "What do they want you to do?"
At that point she actually bothers to read the first question.
If it's reading or comprehension or spelling, she's generally cool to continue on her own, only asking occasional questions, only some of which she obviously already knows.
"Mom, how do you spell cat?" she says.
"How do you think you spell cat?" I reply, frustratedly, barely holding on to my patience.
"C-A-T" she spells, pretending that she's thinking really hard about it, drawing it out so it takes three or four minutes. She hams it up, striking a 'thinking' pose while she drawls out her spelling.
Why does she want to play stupid when I am around? I don't understand it at all. She's known how to spell "CAT" since she was 4 years old, damnit!
Then there are MATH papers. This is the part that absolutely is going to drive me to drink. Practically every night she brings home math, because she NEVER EVER does math at school. She also apparently either doesn't pay attention to her teacher's math lessons or forgets them before she gets home, because inevitably she claims she has no idea how to do these things.
Last night she had 8 story problems. They were the kind that contain extra information which isn't necessary to solve the problem, so you can't just pick out all the numbers and add them all up, or something like that. You actually have to think about it a little bit.
These 8 problems took from 5:30 PM when we got started until 8:30 PM when I put her to bed. We worked on them during dinner, even.
She won't do a single problem without asking someone to explain it to her. Particularly frustrating is the part where she MAKES UP a number for the answer, as a guess, and pretends to get all upset when she's wrong. Forest and I together spend hours just trying to get her to come to the answers herself, instead of giving them to her, which is what she staunchly wants us to do. She resists doing the work herself as though it were a holy mandate from God - "THOU SHALT NOT DO THY HOMEWORK" says the booming voice from the heavens. She whines, she fidgets, she giggles, she pretends to listen, but then can't repeat back something you said to her. She would rather throw a crying sobbing fit than actually do her own thinking. So it's a constant willpower struggle.
Forest and I win out after a while, but it's a very trying, stressful three hours, and I must admit that while I love Kirstin dearly, I can't WAIT for her to get to bed, so I don't have to deal with it anymore!!! Isn't that awful? Her behavior is simply intolerable. It makes me sick to my stomach. She's too smart a kid to act like such a screw-up all the time!
Maybe I should just give up and send her to live with her dad all the time. He doesn't seem to have this problem. He gets homework once or twice in a week, and gets it done in an hour.
I have tried and tried to explain to Kirstin that I would love to do some more fun things with her, but that I can't do that when she makes homework into such an ordeal. She doesn't buy it. I thought perhaps this was because I'm seen as the "serious" parent, and her dad is the "fun" one, so when Forest offered to talk to her, I took him up on it. I didn't hear the conversation, since it was in another room. Apparently tonight if she can get done by 7:15 we will all be watching Anastasia together and eating popcorn. I will keep my fingers crossed.
The thing that drives Forest nuts is that when he told her she needed to take less time on these things, she got mad, and wanted to know why we didn't just do it for her.
He explained that we would love to do it for her, but that we couldn't, because she needed to learn to do work for herself, because there won't always be one of us around to help her out.
She said "yes there will."
He told her that no, someday she would grow up and move out, and then she would have to be on her own.
At which point she got upset and said she was never moving out.
Obviously that kind of irrational response pretty much ended the conversation.
My *GOD* I hope we don't have homework tonight. I think I will go completely insane.
