Battery Powered

I have it all figured out.  There is a battery pack hidden somewhere inside my body that powers all my kids.  It's the only explanation for why homework, chores and practicing grind to a halt when I leave the room.  It's the strangest phenomenon.  The kids will be doing worksheets, reading, practicing.  But if I leave the room, the music stops.  The pencils stop.  The books close.  It's like all the energy follows me.  Yesterday, I set the kids up with their jobs and left to pick up Golda.  When I came back, Freestone had spent the whole time "looking for a pencil."  Too bad there wasn't a pencil on the TV screen, because that was where he was looking.  And may I remind you, (in a much nicer way than I reminded my kids yesterday) that this was a school day, and there is NO TV on school days!  Hellooooo!!!!!  How are we going to get through long division and French spelling lists if we can't remember whether it's OK to turn on the TV?  That's a question that only has one right answer, and the answer is NO!  How hard is that?  I have given you the answer ahead of time!  How are these kids going to deal with multiple choice?

Later, I tested my battery pack theory on Freestone again when he was copying his French spelling words.  If I stood next to him, he would write.  If I got more than ten feet away, he would stop.  His pencil would hover over the paper like it was lost in time until I got back into range.  If he did happen to have some reserve energy left and wrote down a word when I wasn't looking, it was always wrong.  His argument was, "It doesn't matter how we spell it!"  My counterargument was "It's a spelling list."  Does my argument seem as absurd to anyone else as it does to Freestone?

This morning, Scott came home just in time to see the process of trying to get the kids to leave for school.  It's like they don't want to leave the Mother Ship because they're afraid of what will happen if they aren't telepathically connected to me and my commands.  I found Freestone wandering aimlessly in the kitchen after I thought he had gone.  He must have gotten too far from my sphere of influence while I was outside waving to Ari, and he started to shut down.  I snapped him out of his trance, hung his backpack on him, put his lunch in his hand and tried to get him out the door, but he wouldn't go.  The only way I could get all three of them out of here was to put them in Scott's car so he could drive them to the corner.  They were all too happy to glom onto him.  Maybe he has a battery pack too.  I'll have to ask him if he was able to get them out of his car and into the school.  Once they leave, they must be able to access another power source.  I'm sure one of their teachers would have mentioned it if my child regularly spent the whole day with his eyes glazed over and a dormant pencil in his hand.  Then again, that's pretty much what I did all through algebra.  What can I say?  My mommy wasn't there!