Is it summer yet?

This happens every year. The day when the kids (or namely just the kid, you know, the ADD kid) just give up for the year. Classwork gets blown off and homework is a nightmare. It's like they know that it's ALMOST summer, so it should be goofing off time, right?

Yesterday I get an email from the teacher. "Kimberly refused to do ANYTHING today, I'm sending all the work home [for you to deal with]." Fabulous. Because I had soooo much extra time in MY evening to deal with homework PLUS three assignments she didn't get done in class.

Yesterday after school we had a meeting to review Kimberly's 504 plan. It went well. We made a couple of changes, took out some stuff that was outdated, and looked at what would need to be done differently for 6th grade. They start switching classes in 6th grade, so things are going to get interesting. Some things were rephrased, much to my delight, since I was a little miffed that the previous teacher's label of "disruptive" had remained in one section. All in all a good meeting, but because of it we had an hour and a half less time for homework and stuff that should have been finished in class.

Needless to say we weren't able to get it all done, so it carried over to today. When I picked the kids up from school Kimberly was rambling on and on about some video assignment she had to do. Now I have to admit I wasn't completly listening. For one thing, I have ADD too, and for another, Kimberly loves to talk. I swear she talks just to hear herself talk. Really. Like she will read the makes and models of all the cars we pass on the road. So I kinda tune her out sometimes. So I'm all whatever, she has some kind of report, it will probably be due in a couple of weeks and we will have some time to work on it. I tell her that we don't have a working video camera and I'm thinking to myself maybe some kinda powerpoint presentation will suffice.

We get home and I tell her to start on her homework, that she has a lot to do, because she has to get the rest of the assignments done tonight too. She asks "so you want me to do tonight's homework first, then work on the assignments from yesterday?" I tell her yes. She goes off to her room. An hour later I go to check on her thinking that she should be done by now and I need to prod her to get to work on the other stuff.

I find her sitting on her bed watching tv. I ask her where her homework is and she pulls her assignment sheet out of her backpack. Wanna take a wild guess what it said?? "Read for 20 minutes. Timeline - didn't do in class. 10 events in her life. She wants to do a video instead of writing." So not only has she wasted an hour doing nothing, we have last night's assignments PLUS now a timeline video thing that I don't have a video camera to do.

So I tell her "guess what? since you spent an hour goofing off AND this timeline thing could have been done in class to begin with, I'm not going out of my way to help you do a powerpoint on it, you are just going to write it." I'm such a mean mommy. For Kimberly writing is the most difficult thing on the planet. Not that she isn't incredibly creative, it just requires the kind of sustained attention that she is so terribly lacking in. So it's in her 504 that she can do alternative assignments that don't require as much writing.

Now it's time to play "let's make a deal". Kimberly loves to try and bargain. Someday she's going to make a great lawyer or snake oil salesman. After 15 minutes of her trying to bargain, now I'm getting frustrated. "YOU AREN'T GOING TO CHANGE MY MIND CHILD, NOW GET TO WORK, YOU ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME TO GET THIS DONE".

Finally she sits down to work. On one of the assignments from yesterday. Answering 3 questions about a chapter in a book they are reading in class. Five minutes later she's whining about how she can't answer the questions because she didn't read the chapter, because she was still working on one of the other assignments that she didn't get done yesterday. ARE.YOU.FREAKING.KIDDING.ME??

I tell her to go work on the timeline and I start thinking of how to solve this little dilema.
I search online for the answers.
No luck.
Maybe the library that is 3 minutes from my house has the book.
Nope.
Call Barnes & Noble.
They have it.
Hold it for me, I'm on my way.

Forty five minutes later I'm back with the book. She's finished the timeline and showered. She reads the chapter. She answers the questions. It's 10:15 and she finally goes to bed. Bedtime is supposed to be 8:30. Tomorrow she will be tired. When she's tired she has bad days at school. So her inability to get her work done yesterday is going to snowball and ruin our whole week.

I just want it to be summer. No more school. No more homework. I'm done too.