Thursday, February 27, 2014

If you'd just quit complaining and work, we could be done by now

The Beautiful Woman and I spent the better part of an hour last night getting Firstborn to complete an assignment for school. It was something he was supposed to have done during school, only he hadn't done it (or hadn't done it correctly, I'm not sure). He was supposed to write a reasonably detailed narrative about a time when he got hurt.

Firstborn is seven years old. He's in second grade. "Reasonably detailed" in this context means "eight to ten sentences, with transitions".

It took an hour. Ten sentences. One hour.

That means it took him an average of six minutes for each sentence. Six whole minutes.

He dithered. He stared at the list of details to include. He fiddled with his pencil. He got up to go to the bathroom. He talked about what had happened, then got irritated when we said things like, "Good. Write that down." He did, in other words, almost everything in the world except the actual assignment.

Somewhere around the third time I heard myself say, "You know, if you'd just sat there and written the sentences instead of fiddling around, we would be done by now," I wondering if maybe it wouldn't be toooooooo bad an idea to wash my antibiotics down with whiskey. (Spoiler: it would be. I didn't.)

Finally, after dragging the whole thing out for just about as long as humanly possible, he finished up and we put him to bed.

Afterwards, I called my father to apologize.

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