The past two weekends, my youngest son (who’s in sixth grade) has been slammed with homework. Projects, tests, quizzes, homeworks… It’s been an endless stream of challenges.<\/p>\n
His older brother, however, has managed to get ahead of the curve, and has been\u00a0getting quite a kick out of\u00a0watching his brother work while he lounged around, reading and relaxing.<\/p>\n
This morning, after another weekend of “everything’s done!”, I found\u00a0him at the computer, typing fast.<\/p>\n
“Last minute homework?” I asked casually.<\/p>\n
“No!”<\/p>\n
Last minute homework is a cardinal sin in our house. Last year, we\u00a0had way too many “I forgot to mention this project that’s due tomorrow” instances, and I finally blew my stack. It was a pretty epic explosion, and\u00a0it left an impression.<\/p>\n
“Maybe it’s just something you forgot until this morning?” I asked. “No big deal.”<\/p>\n
He didn’t look away from the screen. “It’s not homework.”<\/p>\n
“Are you playing on the computer?” I asked. “Because that’s something we don’t do before school.”<\/p>\n
“No,” he said, exasperated. “It’s just something I have to do.”<\/p>\n
“Something that’s definitely not homework.”<\/p>\n
“Right.”<\/p>\n
“That your teacher wants you to do?” I asked.<\/p>\n
“Yeah.”<\/p>\n
“And she wants to see it today.”<\/p>\n
“That’s right.”<\/p>\n
“But it’s not homework.” I said.<\/p>\n
“No!”<\/p>\n
I have to give him credit for ingenuity, if not creativity.\u00a0He should have at least come up with a word for his “not homework.” Maybe “duties outside of class” or “extracurricular responsibilities.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At first I was a bit annoyed at this one. I mean, how dumb do my kids think I am? But then, I started to appreciate the approach the big guy took. If he’d just gone a little bit farther, it might have been enough for him to get away with it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-GO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2654\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}