2,600 More School Days 'Til College

What? Me count? Of course not. OK, just a little. Well, and I did also use a calculator. We've only spent three days doing homework and I'm not sure I can do another 2,600 days of this.

Ian has homework every night. We sat down yesterday with a piece of paper requiring him to trace the upper and lower case letters "A" and "a". There was also a sheet with apples that he had to count and then write in a blank space how many apples were on the paper. This is not rocket science, am I right?

We sat at the desk in my office, a space usually off limits to the kiddies. I figured that would motivate him. He had two pencils - one with hearts, one with ladybugs - with matching erasers that were given to him at a little friend's birthday party recently. They were not sharpened yet. I had no idea that the electric sharpener on my desk would take us on a twenty-minute detour.

"I can do it, Mom, let me," says Ian, almost elbowing me off my chair. He taps one pencil in. It spins. I show him how to hold it and apply light pressure. He follows my example, except that his pressure could have tenderized meat. The sharpener smokes.

Once the first pencil is sharpened, of course, we have to sharpen the other one. He forgets about the pressure, so I repeat the instructions while he swats away my hand and insists again that he knows how to do it by himself.

Pencils sharpened, I push the first paper, with the apples, in front of him.

"I don't want to do this homework," Ian whines.

I nudge him. He decides that before he does the homework, he'll do eeny-meeny-miney-mo to choose either the ladybug or heart pencil with which to execute the required assignment. He starts, but has to restart because he messes up the rhyme. I take a humongous deep breath and say nothing. I decided, going into this all-important Kindergarten year, that I will not be one of those parents who push their kid. He will develop his own work ethic, even if that means going to school with unfinished homework and suffering the consequences. He finally picks a pencil.

"You know, Mom, this pencil is really sharp. I think if I have to erase, I need to cover the pointy end with this eraser so it doesn't poke me in the eye," and he picks up the matching ladybug eraser and shows me how he can cover the pointy end. I take another deep breath. He needs to develop his own work ethic I remind myself.

"OK, let's focus on what you have to do here, please," I say calmly, but it's the kind of calm that actually sounds like I'm being held up at a bank and don't want to upset the guy with the gun. What I really want to say is "Let's do the freaking homework already!!" Except that "freaking" probably would have been the less-printable version of the expression.

Ian rolls the pencil in the little space between his top lip and nose. He is totally bored. Admittedly, this homework is stuff he was doing with his babysitter when he was 3. He's been in daycares and pre-schools since he was 3 months old so we might even be ready for Calculus now.

"This is boring," he whines again, the pencil dropping from his face to the paper.

"I know. This is pretty easy. Should I ask Senorita Alfaro to give you harder assignments?" (*Ed Note: Ian is attending a dual-language immersion school in Hoboken called HoLa, in which his class is taught 90% in Spanish through Grade 2, then 50/50 with English. We expect him to be able to run for President of any one of 35 Spanish-speaking countries by the time they're done with him. Either that, or help me at the airport in Madrid if his father isn't around.)

"NOO!" gasps Ian. Are you crazy, wench! his look says to me.

"OK, so let's do it."

Ian counts the apples. There are nine of them. It takes him about nine minutes to count them. I feel ants crawling up my pants and have this urge to run around the block or hit a tennis ball against a concrete wall like it's match point at Wimbledon.

"So how many are there?"

He looks at me and the pencil is back on his lip. His eyes have narrowed to slits and are crossed, like he's trying to see the end of his nose. "I don't know."

What the freak!! I'm thinking. (Again this is not the version of the word I would have used if we lived in a different zip code.)

Then, faster than you can say 'college application essay', I fall prey to being one of "those parents" that "do" their kids "homework" for them. "There are nine apples, Ian. Nine. You just counted them. I saw you."

"Ohhhhh, OK. Nine."

"So write it."

"I don't know how to write '9'," he says, which we both know is a balls-out lie.

So I write it. I put his apple homework in his green folder, but first I mess up the '9' a little so it looks like he wrote it.

Then I write "Screw it" on a post-it and think about sticking it to the folder, but don't. Not this time anyway.