Will I Never Learn?

We were driving home the other day when Evan started telling me the "kill rating" on every Top Trump card we own. We own two decks, dinosaurs and predators, so that's a lot of kill ratings! I was suitably impressed with this useless knowledge filling his brain and decided to capitalize on his ability to memorize trivial bits of nothing while playing cards. So today I took out some blank index cards and wrote addition combinations on them. The idea was to match the answers. So, if you had 2+2 and 1+3, that'd be a match. First mistake: It's almost impossible to add on your fingers while holding cards. No wait, the first mistake would be deviating from the workbook/white board lessons. You'd think I would know that by now. But I really thought this would be fun and effective. But I digress... He couldn't add b/c his fingers were filled with cards. He fussed and whined when he didn't get a match. He was taking so long with his turn b/c he had to find the sum for every card. I took some of his cards so he wouldn't have to add so many at once. He still whined. I wrote the answers on his cards. He still whined. I gave up. Normally I would have perservered a while but, even though I hadn't quite learned not to try anything new, I have learned you can't fight with a fussy five year old. Let that be your lesson for the day.

The boys love Playstation but they're only allowed to play on weekends. Adam had what he considered to be a great idea today. If all schoolwork was finished, the weekend should start at 3:oo on Friday! I agreed to consider this proposal. Adam was very excited and went to share this development with Ryan. Ryan, ever the cynic, said, "I'm not hurrying on my schoolwork until she says it's definite." ROFL!!! But he must not be willing to risk it b/c he's reading Seven Alone now without any reminders from me.