09/16/2009

There’s just not much to say these days.  I mean, we start school at 9 after getting up at 8.  It’s kind of nice because it feels like we get to sleep in, even though it’s not that late when we get started.  I am quite frustrated with Sydni, who got herself on Facebook by lying about her age, and this morning, at 9:20, I found her playing Farm Town instead of doing her work.  Now, SHE says she wasn’t playing it… but I do believe she was lying, and I told her so.  I grounded her from Facebook, since that was the second time I’d had to tell her to get off the farm games (she’d been playing Farmville up til 9, and when school started, I told her to get off it… and this is also part of the reason I believe she was lying… she had FarmVILLE up, but then FarmTOWN was up later.  Yea.)  She’s such an attitud-y child sometimes.  Shabree, too.  I’ve lost my temper and my patience many a time, asking "Would you treat your teacher like that, if you were in school?" And Shabree especially would have the audacity to say "But Mommy, you’re NOT our teacher!" making me want to choke her, I swear.  Little brat.  I would yell "I AM your teacher!  And DON’T YOU DARE SPEAK TO ME LIKE THAT!"  Just yesterday, Becca said "My teachers, who went to school for four years to become teachers, wouldn’t check my spelling (in a paper she was writing)"  Ooooh…. I mean, where did we get these disrespectful, bratty, mouthy children?  Becca, she’s always been mouthy, and it doesn’t help that Jerry has let her get away with it, and occassionally we’ve changed things because of what she said.  So she’s somehow gotten this idea that she can say any darn thing that comes into her head.  And if she thinks that an adult is an equal, in other words, an adult that acts more like a child, then she REALLY gets mouthy, to the point where I’m embarrassed as hell.  She is SO disrespectful… ugh.

So yea, tha’ts the downside.  I’ve nipped most of that in the bud, because I am NOT going to accept them speaking to me so disrespectfully.  Now Syd… she just does whatever she wants to do at times, and that’s something I’ve got to get her to stop as well.  I told her the other day, because it is MANDATORY that they get 20-30 minutes of exercise each day, so I told her to go outside and play.  Well… she went out and sat in the van.  Shabree tattled on her, and I was LIVID.  It hadn’t helped that she was already snotty with me that day, and completely disobedient.  She got yelled at for it as well.  I mean, it’s mandatory that she get some exercise, but she’s SO slow at her work, that it takes her 2 hours, easy, to do a page of pretty simple 3 digit multiplication problems, so she sits there, getting angry while she works, and when I tell her to take a break and give her brain a rest, she will NOT do it.  She sits there and tells me she HAS to do this, and I tell her she HAS to do something else, and she gets mad at me, and I get mad at her.  
 

On the other hand, they’re learning, and they’re getting to do hands-on experiments in science, Syd and Becca are learning a language, Syd is studying Latin, Becca German.  Becca chose German because…get this, her favorite BAND, Tokio Hotel, is German, and she wanted to be able to understand what they were saying.  I told her that was lame, but let her take German anyway.  I mean, whatever.  If I’d forced her to take a different language, she’d have been resentful, and she’s still learning a foreign language.  I guess it doesn’t matter, it’s just kind of…well, she may not always like this band, though who am I to say for sure?  I just think her reasoning could have been beter, but had she told me "Because I want to study German" I wouldn’t have questioned it…but like I said, she’s taking it anyway.  I don’t know… I like most of the bands I knew as a kid and still do, music is one of those things, though I’ll listen to anything except for country and rap.  And there are exceptions to that.

I’m still playing Farmville and Farm Town, though just over the last 24 hours, have started to feel kind of bored with them…  but I’d like to get to level 34 in Farm Town, and I’m just short of level 30.  It’s just affecting everything and everyone in this house…. I’m playing, so the kids want to play… I don’t exactly ignore the baby, but I don’t give her tons of attention either, I’m not getting enough sleep because of the games…

So yea.  Starting to bother me.  And I’m THIS close to taking Facebook away from Syd.  And maybe Bec as well…they’re both always on, and they both have access to computers all the time.  Becca, to her credit, does her work when she’s doing school.  She gets it done though, and gets on Facebook.  Sigh… and she really SHOULD be working ahead, because she’s once again in 7th grade, where if she were on track, would be in the 9th grade, but has been held back twice.  And I don’t think she did well enough on her placement tests to qualify for the 8th grade… I will be surprised (pleasantly so) if she does place into the 8th grade.  Her math, which should have taken about an hour, took 20 minutes… and they start off a grade level down from where you are, so the test started with 6th grade questions, and she finished in 20 minutes.  Basically, it keeps asking questions til you get more wrong than right, then stops.  So for it to have only taken 20 minutes kind of indicates that she did poorly on it, and may not even have gotten to the 7th grade questions.  Algebra… not Bec’s strongest subject… not Jerry’s or mine either.

Well, I am going to get going.  Jerry’s working with them right now, but I have to get to work with Sydni so she can complete her work.  She rarely actually completes her work, and is often working on it til 5.  So, gotta go.