Shrek Lives

Being an ogre takes a lot out of you.

Fourth grade is where the homework starts in earnest at Not Bad President Elementary School. Prior to that you get a page here and a page there, nothing that you can't knock out in a couple of minutes before spending some quality time on YouTube watching Brittany Spears videos - that's Lauren's attitude anyway. I find myself curiously untroubled by this, since I regard Ms. Spears as goofy but essentially harmless and I know that YouTube has fairly strict policies about what can and cannot be shown, even if those policies do lead to an excessive number of videos about cats and the history of dance.

No, in fourth grade, you get not only spelling and math, but reading, essays, and then more spelling and more math - math involving multiplication of numbers with multiple digits, and spelling involving words that, frankly, even I have trouble remembering how to spell, much less use correctly in a sentence.

These assignments cannot be whipped out in a few minutes, although they need not take as long as they do. Tabitha has inherited my procrastination gene and topped it off with her own self-distraction mojo to create a perfect storm of homework blues.

Why, yes, I do own a blender specifically designed to handle metaphors. Why do you ask?

Keeping her on task is thus something that requires Mean Old Dad to come out from behind the mask of Nice Dad that he prefers to show so as not to curdle all the milk in the house, and this is not really much fun for any of us. And then when this starts to wear too much, Mean Old Mom has to put in an appearance to reinforce things, and since this happens after Mom has spent the previous ten hours wrestling with Home Campus bureaucracy (you'd be surprised how much bureaucracy a tiny little campus where everyone knows everyone and generally gets along quite well can generate), this is not good.

And to top it off, it was check-up day yesterday and there was a surprise booster shot, and the whole day just went skidding off the rails and into a big pit full of overripe bananas, which never really come out of your outfit, not really.

So bed time just couldn't come fast enough for anyone around here, except possibly for Lauren since the supply of Brittany Spears videos on YouTube is just inexhaustible.