It has been more than two months since my last post. I have been swamped with work, and in the rare event that I have had time to sit down tow write, I have been working on my book. The last two months have been eventful.
Little Chirp and Brainy Bird have been counting down the days until school is out. Their last day is Wednesday. Little Chirp finished strong with a high B in Language Arts, and A’s in everything else. Brainy Bird apparently took the last few months of school off. He was looking at a low C in Language Arts because of an F on a book report he didn’t do. He followed that up with not doing his Social Studies project, thus taking that grade down to a low B. We sat down for a very long lecture, and assured me that he would work hard the remaining weeks of school. The lecture was so effective that about a week later he didn’t do his science project. I was furious. His father and I had a brief debate over whose genetics were to blame for this, and then a long planning session on how to punish Brainy Bird.
Brainy Bird arrived home from the bus on Friday to find me working from home, and waiting for him. I took away his beloved iPhone, and gave him a phone that can only text and make calls…no internet, no apps, no games. I grounded, and that meant missing his orchestra’s end of year field trip to Schlitterbahn. It also means no video games, no computer, nothing but water to drink when we eat out, no choices on what we eat at restaurants or even at home and no snacks. As of right now, he is still grounded, and still sporting the “dinosaur” phone.
Now, I have a bit of dilemma on my hands. His punishment started at 3:30 on Friday, May 22nd. Before noon on Saturday, May 23, he had taught himself to solve a Rubix cube without help on the Internet. He has always been able to do it by looking at cheats online. By Sunday, he was teaching Little Chirp how to solve it. That same day he sat with Little Chirp while Little Chirp read his first ever chapter book cover to cover. On Friday, May 29th, Brainy Bird arrived home from school, and told me that he could now solve the Rubix cube in under two minutes, and that he would like to use one his gift cards from his birthday to order a Rubix racing cube online. Apparently, a racing cube allows you to solve it faster because it moves smoother that the original Rubix cube, which tends to stick here and there.
Why in the world would I ever want to let him have his phone and video games back if this is what he does with his free time instead? To further the dilemma, thanks to the practice of dropping the lowest grade at the end of each grading period, the would be B/C student now has a high B in Language Arts and three A’s in his other classes. Arguably, he should be freed of his punishment, but I loving the mental productivity that I get from both of my children when they don’t have the mental black hole of videos at work. I haven’t decided what I am going to do going forward. I imagine that a summer without video games would result in more amazing new found talents in my birds!