MotherSoup

Aah - long weekends at the beginning of summer…

End of the school week - Thursday in fact - home comes an Offspring with an item of homework. Nothing too onerous, a nice steady bit of work, and plenty of time to do it in. In fact, with a busy weekend, including socially-pressured events, it’s quite handy to have something which can be used to engineer a quiet bit of sitting-down-time. (The Offspring in question is not yet at the place where they can be held completely repsonsible for doing homework on their own initiative…)

At a couple of points early in the weekend I remember the homework and plan to introduce it…

Then - days of much busy-busy sunshine, visitors and shuttling to different happenings…

It’s during the wee small hours of Sunday night/Monday morning when I find myself dreaming that I am on the Titanic, and it’s sinking and I’m talking to my Offspring’s teacher about their… homework!!! Aaargh!!! I wake in a cold sweat, doze off, then catch Fathersoup as he starts getting up. What to do?

Well, I was the queen of the note-from-home in my day, if I could get one, I’d use it. But this Offspring, we both agree, would hate to be singled-out in this way. Nor would they like to brazen it out on their own at school. The only option we think they’d want (and the Offspring later confirms this) is to be dragged early from their bed, and set to work in their pyjamas, while one parent gets on with the morning jobs and the other parent desperately tries to field the distracting tide of Other Offspring from disturbing the worker.

Homework done, normal routine resumed and the Offspring in question skips off to school. And when they return… the blessed homework is still in their bag! “Nope,” they say carelessly, “change of timetable, not doing that subject today. ” Tuesday: same story. Only on Wednesday does the blasted workbook get handed over! Of course, if we hadn’t run around like mad things, there’d have been handover at 9.01am Monday. Guaranteed.

Now, this happened a few weekends ago. Of course, we’d never get caught out like that again. Not so quickly afterwards, would we? Oh no… oh yes.

So now what do you do? Same old rigmarole, or make a bet on the not-until-Wednesday situation happening again…? Well, we went for the deskwork-at-dawn option once more, and I’m just waiting till hometime to see if it was all a complete waste of effort.

We’ll have just found a nice predictable pattern, and it will be time to break for summer…