Homework Time

I had parent-teacher conferences last week for the girls, and one of my take-aways was the need to give Polly more experience at home with focusing on tasks, practicing sight-words, basically becoming a more disciplined student. She's got a ways to go in developing those executive functioning skills, and evidently letting her draw elaborate storyboards for princess adventures and roller-skate around the house isn't facilitating them. I have to admit that I haven't taken her homework too seriously before now. SOmetimes Dave would do it with her, sometimes I would, sometimes we'd do it in the afternoon right after school, sometimes we'd do it in the morning before school. So Dave and I decided that it's time for some structure. The plan is that I will feed the kids dinner around 5 pm, when they're hungry and whiny and clingy anyway, and then when Dave gets home around 6, I'll sit down and do homework with her, and Dave will play with Joshey and Cici and get them ready for bed. We tried it out on Monday, and I learned a few things.

• Dinner isn't any easier when I'm the only one waiting tables. It's not tremendously easy anyway, with Cici and Joshey as the World's Messiest Eaters, not to mention the World's Pickiest Eaters (Cici, anyway). I feel the need to be training my kids in proper table manners (we have a little song for it: "Sit on bottom, use your forks! Chew your food and don't be rude!"), so by the end of dinner, I'm feeling grumpy and stressed. Then I need to clean up the table in order to do homework on it--reference the world's greatest mess above. Dave usually walks in around this time, and the only thing I have for him is stress and grumpiness. 
• Now that I'm thinking about Polly's homework in terms of a practicing ground for improving her performance at school, I'm more heavy-handed about how she does it. I want her to be sitting still, focusing, doing her best work, not being silly. Every lapse of attention, every resistance to my feedback or help translates in my mind to the reason she's not getting into a good groove at school. Which means that she's feeling a lot of emotional pressure from me, because I'm feeling a lot of emotional pressure about trying to help her succeed in the classroom. 
• Which all adds up to: argh. My instinct is that I'm not approaching this the right way. It's okay for family life to have intense times, times that kids need to learn to do things simply because they need to be done. But there also needs to be time to just enjoy each other's company, time to not have the emphasis be on constant training and correcting. At least, I think there should be. And I wonder if I'm crowding out the enjoyment by the stress I'm feeling and conveying to my children about their behavior. Shouldn't dinner be about reconnecting with everyone, processing our days together? Not about "Cici, sit down! Joshey, do NOT throw your water! Yes, Polly, you're the neatest one." 

Well, I have more thoughts, but it's now the end of the evening, and I'm tired. More on this later, I'm sure.