Bad school mom

I am kind of over blogging right now. Not only updating my own, but reading other people's. So I will just say that the only reason I am updating this at all is because my mom wants me to and I think she is probably the only one still reading it.

The school year is almost over and I can now truly say this was absolutely the worst school year I have had as a mom. I have done NOTHING to contribute to my children's schools this year, and I do feel kind of bad about it. I think the most I have done is occasionally reminded my kids to do their homework (thank goodness they are self-motivated children) and maybe helped them find a pencil.

This is so out of character for me, as I am usually the one to sign up/lead everything and end up over my head. I always have a PTA assignment or I'm room mom, or I volunteer in the class every week - and I always try to go on every field trip too. This year I went on one! I spent almost zilch time in the classroom, never showed my face at PTA. I did sign up to do art mom again, but no one ever called me to coordinate it, and I just let it go. I didn't even send anything in for teacher appreciation week. Then again, I didn't even bother to check to see when teacher appreciation week was. I am awful.

So what is my problem? And do I care to fix it?

First, yeah, I do care. I will try to do better next year.

Granted, I have been a lot busier this school year than ever before - mostly with work. The last couple of months I've worked 50-60 hours a week. No time for field trips or volunteering in there! My church calling is also really time consuming sometimes.

Then I think I just get overwhelmed with the sheer amount of (pardon my vulgarity) crap that comes home. I don't have time to look at it all. So rather than really sorting through things I just kind of chuck it all lately. Unless it needs a signature. Then I try to read it.

I got off on the wrong foot with Pippy's teacher, when she asked for us to write an assessment about our child with their strengths and weaknesses, which I did (see, I did do SOMETHING!) and she turned around after having known my kid for a couple of weeks and told me my assessment was wrong and that she thought my child was "depressed". That was just the wrong thing to say to me. Pippy is by no means depressed - and having dealt with depression and living with a social worker, I think I would know. It just kind of turned me off to her for the rest of the year and since then I've just tried to get by without strangling the woman...who also seems to be absent about twice a week.

Lou has had a fabulous teacher and a student teacher too...so I guess I justified myself there by saying they could handle it without my help and volunteering spirit (justification speaking...).

Sis, of course being in middle school is kind of different. She pretty much takes care of herself and I write the checks and send in treats for the bake sales. Ha.

Reading logs? I hate them. Hate them. It takes all the joy out of reading, in my opinion. Sometimes my kids fill theirs out anyway, sometimes they don't. I really don't care to be honest. I know my kids read. They have 30 minutes every night set aside for reading. I'd love to just have them read for that 30 minutes instead of reading for 25 and then spending 5 minutes looking for a pencil to write down what they just read and how many pages it has and blah blah blah. I know it's important for kids to read, and some people do need to write it down to make sure it gets done, but I just don't.

Speaking of which - my final thought. I just finished the book "Freakonomics" which is actually very interesting. According to that book, none of this really matters anyway. Taking your kids to museums, teaching them to read at age 3, reading to them every day - none of that is correlated at all with test scores or success in life. What really matters is socioeconomic status, intelligence of the parents, how many books are in the home (whether anyone reads them or not!), birth weight of the child, and how old the mother was when she had the child. Who knew? So all those things already have been determined for my children, and overall they got the good end of things as far as all those categories go. And we do have a TON of books in our house.

And they read them. They just might not write it on their reading log.