Be-Mused — Karen Templeton

Okay, so #5, whose birthday is Saturday, was allowed to bring a treat to class today (they’re off the next two days, don’t ask) to share. We trek on over to Raley’s, where he chooses thumbprint cookies — shortbread with yummy little chocolate frosting kisses in the middle. 24 in a package, 24 kids, two packages, 2 cookies per kid. Does that seem excessive to you? I didn’t think so, either. Anyway, the whole point was that the cookies were to go to school, never to be seen again. He was not supposed to bring half a package back.

Where they now sit on the kitchen counter, singing their little cookie siren song. What’s left of them, anyway.

Don’t. Leave. Me. Alone. With. The. Cookies.

Naturally, while we were in the store, he pointed out the cake he wants for his party on Friday (sorry, I stopped doing the homemade thing at least two kids ago). I, in turn, pointed out we really don’t need a cake the size of Montana for seven people. “But then we’ll have some left over for the next day!” the kid says.

Yeah. That’s the problem. Because four of the kids will go home and the one who’s left really doesn’t like cake all that much. It’s all about the having, the showing off (”Look how big my cake is!), not the actual ingesting of it. Which means Mommy will feel obligated to eat it because Mommy paid for it.

The holidays start early around here. But the good news is, Wal-Mart was all out of candy corn, so that’s one temptation removed from my path.

I see many, many brisk walks in my future.

Especially when it’s not mine.

Okay, kid’s finding the nouns in the sentences in his language arts book (And what’s up with that, anyway? Since when is it verboten to identify the language as English?) Not a problem, I can do this (and so can he, although it took a few minutes to convince him of that.) Then I see this sentence:

“A baby deer is called a doe.”

And these textbooks cost how much again???

Then we moved on to math, which wasn’t exactly my fave subject when I did understand how to do it. They’re doing decimals now. As in, adding, say, 4.3 and 5.7. You would think all they’d have to do is, y’know, add them and move the decimal down. (I mean, heck I was able to catch on to that concept, and numbers and I have always had what you might call a dicey relationship.) But no. What they had to do, was fill in these little grids of a hundred squares and then — get this — count up the squares to arrive at the answer.

It was late. I’d been reworking this (*%$# book all day, we’re moving into That Time of the Month (which, after four months of not, I’d really, really thought I wouldn’t be dealing with anymore, sigh), and my brain just flat out refused to step up to the plate.

“Take it up with your teacher,” I said.

Then I went and watched COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, which I liked much more this week than last, and now I’m here, trying to type while prompting The Kid who’s trying to learn a poem with words like “maledictions.” Which he’s had for a week and has to recite tomorrow, but of course didn’t start learning until about five minutes ago.

Did I mention that I hate homework?