Homework Sucks

This year all four of us are taking Spanish lessons. Jacob and Lily have classes at school; Mike and I are taking adult classes. Mike and I believe that this year is an opportunity for us all to learn, expand our horizons, develop an international perspective blah, blah, righteous blah, blah.

My work...waiting to be done.

It's all good except that I suck at homework.

Like many children, Jacob and Lily started to receive homework very early in their academic careers. Each afternoon they would come home from school and I would hover and nag them to have good study habits...do your work before you play, don't have distractions, stay organized, don't procrastinate. As the children received more difficult homework we encouraged them to go the extra mile, have somebody review their work, and never turn anything in late.

Lily doing Spanish homework.

For the first time since Jacob and Lily started school, I now have homework. After years of coaching the children you would think that I would be responsible, efficient and earnest in completing my deberes (homework in Spanish). Turns out that the maxim, "those who can't do, teach" fits me to a T  (apologies if I just offended all the great teachers I know!!).

I suck at homework. I procrastinate, do the minimum, am sloppy and a couple of times have done the wrong assignment. When I first started doing homework back in September the procrastination and mediocrity immediately felt familiar. It was like discovering an old ugly sweatshirt and finding that it still fit and was still unflattering. Even as I write this I have homework to do and yet I am procrastinating by blogging.

Getting it done!

Jacob and Lily however come home from school, sit down at our dining room table and get to it. Until I had homework hanging over my head I didn't realize what a good job they were doing. Watching them dig in is rather inspiring. They have started to say to me, "Mom, have you done your homework?" Often the answer is "No," and then they mock me (which I deserve).

As the weeks pass I am improving, being more responsible about my homework and of course learning more Spanish. I am slowly regaining the moral high ground and this is of course far more important than learning dumb old Spanish!! Hmmpffff.

Why? Whhy? Whhhhy?

After a day of traveling

Traveling with children is not for the faint of heart. It involves planning, schlepping, whining, sweating, sleep deprivation, yelling and an unrelenting outflow of money. Yet, we love it and keep going back for more.

Why????????

Are we sadists? Maybe. But, I think it is more likely that we are optimists and cultivators of selective memory.

Here's how it goes for our family....

Pooped

We get a notion for a trip and I start planning. We have a couple of tiffs as we chose transportation, hotels, and activities. I feel resentful that I have to be our family trip planner...oh woe is me (ok, I understand that this is not a sympathetic position!!). Soon we find ourselves venturing to REI to buy a picnic knife and compact first aid kit. We get excited for our adventure and embrace the fantasy that our experience will mirror the sunny faces we see on Facebook and in travel magazines.

Exploded yogurt

And then we launch. The journey to our destination usually involves overpriced, crappy food, a spilled beverages, an argument either with each other or an airline about who is sitting where, and fairly regularly some vomit. Soon we are in our destination. We are tired, we are hungry and we are discombobulated.

The drama of locomotion quickly ends and settle into our trip. There are highs and lows. We enjoy flaky croissants for breakfast and beautiful afternoons on soft sand beaches but more often than not sweaty, grumpy hours plodding through "important" historical sites. Fairly regularly I fantasize about abandoning my children. Every traveling family I have ever spoken to experiences the lows. Even when it is great, it is hard.

So why do we keep doing it? For two reasons:

First, we do it because even though there are hard parts, there are even more awesome ones. Swimming with schools of fish, the vista from a turret, seeing something up-close you have only seen in books, realizing your child loves calamari, enjoying a sunset cocktail with your hubby while your kids watch Sponge Bob  in a hotel room....

Muddy fun

Equally important however, is that my memory of our travel experiences is totally selective. In my memory a tantrum becomes a humorous story, the lost child an anecdote of new found independence, the emergency room visit an opportunity for cultural reflection and of course vomiting on your sibling is always funny in the retelling. I forget the pain and look back happily on the family memories we have created.

Giggles in Valencia

We are not the only suffers of this selective memory. When our friends tell of their grand adventures it is a pollyanna version. We could be liars but I think that we honestly all forget the cruddy parts and focus on the best ones. Our photos probably help since we take pictures of the best parts and rarely pull out our cameras when our child is proving a urine sample in a remote emergency room.

Just floating around

David Hockney recently said, "Happiness seems to be a retrospective pleasure." This is especially true about traveling with children. In the moment every trip has its highs and lows but as time passes and the edges of our recollection are softened an adventure is refined and distilled into something purely wonderful.

And when we get to the point of wonderful we start the cycle all over again.