I haven’t written in almost two weeks. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say, but rather that I have had too much to say. I have grappled with more weighty issues for my little brain in the past two months than I have since having Rollie.
I thought being a parent was hard. It’s only gotten harder in many ways. Sure, they are out of diapers, and they can play by themselves. They can feed themselves, and sit up in a chair, and put themselves in the car and buckle their own seat belts. They can dress themselves. The physical marathon of parenting a baby or toddler is over.
But now the problems are more about doing the right thing. Teaching them the right things. Having realistic expectations. Right from wrong. Setting a good example. Teaching good citizenship.
And in the last couple of months, I had to wrestle with the Boy Scout dilemma. Yes, we made a decision, and no, I haven’t posted about it, even though it occupied my thoughts for days on end, and pretty much gave me an ulcer. It will be a long post. And I just haven’t had the time or energy to write it.
And now, for almost two months of First grade, my kid has been struggling. He comes home from school saying he “is bored” and he “hates school.” He has had, I swear to God, an ISS already. Yes, my first grader had in-school suspension before August was even up. Homework, which he breezed through last year, has become a chore of monumental proportions. He rushes through it, so quickly that half the time I cannot even read what he has written. I have to make him go back and do it neatly. He cries and slams things around and gnashes his teeth.
He makes 105s on all spelling tests (they get a bonus for spelling “robust vocabulary words”), even after they started sending home the “more advanced” homework packet. He gets smileys on all his classwork. He gets As on the tests. The only times he hasn’t was when parts were illegible, or he disregarded upper and lower case letters, or he just skipped questions altogether. Except for that one time when he got two wrong. I asked him why, when I knew he could easily answer the reading comprehension answer. His reply? “I thought those answers were funnier.”