After dinner this evening I found myself sat at the dinner table with our eldest daughter (the artist formerly known as Miss 10). I had just finished washing up, and wandered in with the iPad to continue listening to Leo Laporte and the gang’s coverage of the iPhone 4S announcement.
Within seconds I was flanked by Miss 7, and Miss 11, both brandishing homework.
Miss 7 tends to employ most of her energies into driving us up the wall. She is the “middle child”, and this apparently unlocks all kinds of famous attributes that her sisters don’t have access to. Apparently she can roll a 20 for naughtiness, fibbing, deviousness, and nastiness at will. When she does focus more of her attention on something constructive though, she tends to outshine anybody we know.
She sat at the table, churned through her spelling homework, and then sat shouting answers to the math questions in Miss 11’s homework.
I’m sorely tempted to hire a tutor to help our eldest with Maths. The children’s trip through the care system before they arrived with us coincided with the time she should have been learning number bonds, money, fractions, and all the other basics we all take for granted. The holes in her knowledge are like yawning chasms, and we tend to find them completely by accident.
I never give them answers when doing their homework; I explain strategies, break problems down, and give lots of lateral examples. This doesn’t work with Miss 11, and she think’s we’re too stupid to know what she’s doing.
Tonight she claimed to not know that 1 and 9 make 10, or that there were 100 pence in a pound. She does knowshe just thinks if she drops into “random guess” mode, we’ll spoon feed the answers.
You should have seen her face when I calmly explained;”I have just shown you an example, and you could do that. Now read the question in your homework again. I’m not going to help you do the questionif you can’t do it, your teacher needs to know that you can’t do it”.
While putting the last of the dinner things away, the younger children came bundling down the stairs in their pyjamas like rugby players chasing an errant ball. I saw them turn the corner into the bathroom to brush their teeth, heard a thud, and then the beginnings of a howl.
Stepping silently into the doorway, Miss Six was busy brushing her teeth like a maniac, and Miss Seven was crouched over like an old lady, holding her arm, with her mouth agapegetting ready for lots of noise to come out.
It’s worth mentioning that Miss Six used to get monstered by her older sister all the time. It’s also worth mentioning that Miss Six is now as big as, if not bigger than her older sister. She is now faster, just as strong, and is dishing out the payback by the bucketload.”I don’t care who did whatI didn’t see it, so I’m not telling anybody off” more howling”If you’re crying, why are there no tears?”She turns her back on me, puts her face in her hands, and leans against the wall”I DON’T LIKE YOU DAD!”“Ok. Brush your teeth then.”I think the fact that I didn’t react made her an order of magnitude worse for a few seconds.
Upon escorting them upstairs following the histrionics in the bathroom, and W giving them both a talking to, I looked in on our eldest’s bedroom. The same bedroom she had promised to tidy up since the weekend.”Are you going to tidy this up?”No answer.”If you don’t pick this stuff up off the floor, I’m going to take your music system away. You have until 9that’s 45 minutes”.”Oh, but that’s not FAIR!”“It will take you five minutes to tidy upget on with it. If you got off your backside now and started, you’ll have done half of it before I even get downstairs”.
I didn’t really hear the rest of the complaints; I walked back downstairs and put the kettle on. I could hear something coming from her roomperhaps evil incantations or something.
If anything the room was worse when I went to checkshe sat atop her bunk bed and looked at me like a piece of dirt.
She lost her music system.