Butting Heads

Sometimes life is rough. Sometimes you bring it on yourself. And sometimes, your mother is just plain more stubborn then you are.

This morning, while pulling out Bailey's math page, I discovered, to my chagrin, that she has been putting her incomplete papers away claiming to be done. I'll admit right now that part of it was my fault. I hadn't stood over her shoulder making sure that she did all her work, and I had not double checked her work for some time either. But she was still in BIG trouble. She had cheated. She had lied. And she hadn't done what she was told. BIG BIG trouble!

I found almost 12 pages of math work that she had not completed. Most only had a few blank problems here or there. Some had a lot. One of them, she hadn't done anything but draw pictures.

So, I decided that she had to do all of them. Plus todays math page. And nothing else until she was done. Harsh. But I was pissed.

It's now almost bed time. She's been sitting at the table all day, mostly griping that it's not fair. Honestly, if she had actually focused instead of played around, she could have been done in a little over an hour. But no. She was being stubborn and wouldn't do the work. Three simple problems of "what number comes before" took her an hour and a half. Then, when she thought I wasn't looking, she slipped some of her undone papers in with her finished ones and claimed that she was "almost done". The girl was not happy when I looked through her stack and found them, placing them back in her "not done" pile. She also got in trouble for lying again. No video games for a week.

Oh, did I mention that she didn't get to come with us to the store today? She also didn't get to watch a movie with Sierra and Blake, and she didn't get to have story time with daddy either.

As it stands, she still has two pages left, each with a lot of problems to finish. She'll be sitting at the table tomorrow until she finishes them plus her new page for tomorrow as well.

It's been a real pain. I feel bad for her, but I can't just let this one slide. I hope she learns from it. If she doesn't, she'll have an even harder time in the future.