Friday, February 10

go fish!

Punkone was sick this week.
Yea, remember him? Sweet little guy is in FIFTH grade. Yeoza. He's so amazing, such a sweet soul and seeming in a constant struggle to cope with the crap that life dishes out.

Sounds a bit jaded, I know.

But the US version of 4th and 5th grade have not been easy on this guy. More specifically, homework is sucking his will to live. As you can imagine, this doesn't sit well with me and I keep myself up a good many hours, devising how I might reverse the tide and inject the joy back into our weekday nights.

OK, so just for clarity... this isn't about "do your homework" kind of stress. This kids does his homework. He's organized, he plans ahead, and just gets to it. It's amazing to me he's related to me at all.

This is about having our time as a family being delegated to providing a right environment for him to do homework in. The environment that we spend a great deal of energy shaping to mean "family" for us. The space where we share stories, act silly, discuss news, laugh at bodily functions, connecting with each other in a way that only we can.

School has him all day. So, yes, it irritates me that it hedges in on my time with him. It irritates me that we can't have a few hours, everyday, in which we do just what we damn well please.

We're evolving. I got us a huge dining room table and it's surrounded by boxes of pencils, glue sticks, rulers, scratch paper... we sit around it all night and chug away at our homework together. We still act silly, discuss, and laugh at our farts. But we all have a bit of sadness in our hearts. A longing for nights when we could sit around the table and play a game of "go fish!"

4 comments:

  1. Ah ! how we wish. For just that extra space to do our own thing.

    Fabulous post ! And heres wishing you the best in making the big round table become the most happening place, on planet earth ! :)

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  2. Anonymous9:36 AM

    Have you explored the Montessouri option? There are thousands of public and private Montessouri schools in this country. They do not give homework.

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  3. Long overdue update... We used to Montessori... There is an excellent school in our town. When we returned from Italy we decided to go public to enable us to diversify their realm of experiences by redirecting the 40K that Montessori was costing us to other things.

    Homework has worked itself out. As my kids value our family time, they became highly motivated to do their homework efficiently and earlier in the day, before I return home from work. They were in school until 4 in Italy and they get out at 2:30 here... So I suggested they just think of that hour and a half as homework time and our evenings could start to resemble what we had in Italy. It kind of works.

    I'd really like to start blogging again. Lyrical lines have been swirling around in my head with greater frequency... Itching to surface. I think first Ill take a look around and see what the rest of you have been up to ;)

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  4. very good! I found the perfect theme used!

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...and you may ask yourself, well...how did I get here?