"Doctor, It Hurts When I Do This."

"So stop doing that."

Ever catch yourself dreading a task? Gritting your teeth as you enter the ring once more, just knowing that it's going to be horrid?

And then it IS horrid, and you grumble and complain your way through it, finishing it with no real sense of relief since you know it's going to be exactly the same the next day. And the next. And the next. Until...forever.

Homework is not very popular around these parts. The Girl has really become responsible this past year, and usually only takes a bit of reminding to get going. (Helps that she "has" to do English reading every day. She snickers a bit at that - just like her English Lit major mother - and can't quite believe her luck that she's getting credit for doing something she would be doing anyway.)

The Boy has to be dragged kicking and screaming to the table for his dreaded printing worksheets, but once there, he usually blasts through them both pretty swiftly and bounces back to his Wii game before the TV's gone into sleep mode.

They're both so independent that I don't usually do a whole lot of helping with actual problems. No sirree, my work is of the prep variety.

My job?

Finding the pencils.

GAH! We go through so many pencils in this house. Every time I find one underneath the couch or hiding in a bookshelf, I let out a gasp of joy. We never seem to have enough, despite me putting them on Christmas lists for stocking stuffers and buying a fancy electric pencil sharpener so that we can use all of those non-mechanical ones.

Most days we have to the Laura and Mary Ingalls thing, where we've got one pencil to share between the poor, poor children and they have to take turns doing their homework.

We do this every. single. day. I hate it, but what are you going to do?

How about this:

See that?! It's a box of 50 pencils. Five-zero. Do you know how long it will take us to go through that box? I figure we've got at least a solid month totally free of "moo-oooom - do you know where there's a pencil???"

Sad thing is that it never occurred to me to just buy in bulk and be done with all that aggravation, until I was perusing the Target stationery aisle. I saw the box, and it was as though the heavens opened up and an angel choir sang as a beam of light shone down on it as it levitated up towards my shaking, waiting hands.

Until I saw this box, we did the daily search simply because we've always done it that way. Kinda makes me wonder what else I'm doing that could be solved simply by opening myself up to another possibility. Hmmm...