After just four days at school, Raine and Skye tell me their shoulders are half-broken. Heavy backpacks are an eternal problem for schoolkids here. For years now, I’ve made the girls carry two bags, a backpack and a tote bag, to split the load because I don’t want them to grow up looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame! Not that the school will entertain any disability appeal for turning our kids into hunchbacks!

It doesn’t help that the school hours have been extended till 2:30 or four pm on some days (it starts at 7:30am). That’s way too many hours squished up in stuffy classrooms or out in the blazing sun in ninety plus degree weather.

When I pick the girls up from school, they look like zombies ! They’re hungry and tired, hair disheveled and totally unmotivated to do anything for the rest of the day. When I see their sad faces, I really feel for them. It’s a shame school is such a burden now instead of the fun it used to be.

Here’s an interesting question. Do longer hours make smarter kids, or resentful ones?

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First day of school and Skye comes home with this little story.

Her class was given a list of questions to answer and each person was then asked to read out their answers in turn.

One of the questions was, Are you happy with the test results you got last semester?

Everyone’s answer was No! Everyone’s except Skye’s, that is.

“I answered Yes”, she told me in her matter-of-fact tone. “It’s over and done with and I’m happy. And if I hadn’t done well, there’s still this year and I’m going to do better.”

Soon it’ll be back to getting up early, taxi runs and school lunches! But first, I need a new oven. Problem is by the time I got done going to various electronics stores to compare prices, the oven I wanted was sold out.

Can you believe that? Now I have to wait for the new stock to arrive which might be when the cows come home. Great!

I hear some kids can’t wait to get back to school. Haha, those kids are definitely not mine !

Mine are quite happy to stay home. If only school were less of a regurgitation, kids might actually find it interesting.

I only got the girls their shoes and books a few days ago. I really dragged my feet this time. I’m not the type that would buy my kids their school books super-early and make them start on next year’s work. Give them a break, it’s the holidays !

I hope this weekend will go slow. I’m still in slacker mode and it’s going take me a few days to snap out of it!

These are bookish weeks in the Hip household. Raine is done with her finals, thank goodness, but Skye isn’t… yet!

Fast asleep with book in hand and music blasting in both ears is apparently the new way to score good grades, so my teens tell me .

Okay, so maybe I’m a little outdated in this respect. In my day, we used to glue our eyeballs to our books and fry our brains to a crisp.

Not so these days and I should know. I’ve spent every few minutes this weekend waking Skye from her sweet slumber with books and listening to her lament about how she can’t wait till her finals are over! Frankly neither can I. I don’t think I’m cut out to be an alarm clock .

If I were like half the moms out there, I’d be snatching the books from my kids to burn the midnight oil myself. But no, I trust my kids to know I will not tolerate poor grades when they know they’re capable of doing better. But if they’ve done their best and still don’t do as well as expected, I’m okay with that.

I never offer rewards for good grades. I think that’s the surest way of creating devious and materialistic monsters, a fact many parents are happily ignorant of as they run the rat race making more money and more money for houses, vacations, rv insurance and to feed their children’s ever-growing materialistic frenzies.

As for my kids, I offer to take them out for dinner to celebrate if they do good at school. That way, we can grow fat together and that’s one big sacrifice on my part !

I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot this week. I got around to the bank (finally), got my groceries done early, mentally planned my lunch menus for next week (more or less), dissed the marketing kid from OneCard who doesn’t know the first thing about customer service, bwahaha.

Feels good, yeah, that I got quite a bit done though I missed gym again yesterday. No big deal, that’s what happens when the kids are home and my first reflex is to reach out and slam down the snooze button, then drift blissfully back to la-la-land.

But this morning, I had to drop Skye off at school. Her project paper is due today and knowing Skye, she’ll be restless till she turns it in. I’m worried, of course, compounded by the fact that even Raine’s teacher was telling the class she doesn’t want to die! OMG, coming from a teacher, this is terrible!

There’s been a second round of confirmed HiNi cases at her school and short of going in there to disinfect the classrooms myself, I guess I’ll just have to hope the multi-vitamins do their job. Judging by what I saw when I dropped Skye off, there aren’t many kids in school today. Glad some parents are finally wising up and keeping their healthy kids home.

I’m not a believer in tons of homework. With some of the kids I tutored, their moms would call and ask why I haven’t given them much homework. The whole point of homework is to reinforce learning, or at least that’s what it is to me.

But it seems to me many parents want their kids to be laden with tons of homework because that’s the thing that makes them feel like their kids are learning something and that they, the parents, are getting their money’s worth from the tutor.

Homework should be meaningful and given with the objective of reinforcing what the child has learnt. Homework for homework’s sake is a no-no with me. What’s your view on homework?

Raine and I had a really great brainstorming session last night. Like me, both my girls love to write. I’m glad some of their teachers notice this. Yesterday Raine was asked to submit an article to the school magazine. All afternoon while in the car, she and I were tossing ideas at each other.

Should I write about Twilight, Mom? Everyone’s so crazy about it at school but I think it’s way overrated . Or should I do a book review? How about fashion trends? I sure have a lot to say about, oh, never mind, forget I said that *giggle*.

Come dinner time, she’d finally decided she was going to write about Twilight and we discussed the angle. She showed me the piece later and asked me to proofread it.

Going through a piece together is always a great time for us to bond and discuss the finer points of writing.

I see great potential in my children’s writing. They write very well and I love cheering them on. I was never a cheerleader at school but I swear I’m getting pretty good at it now . Raine was so excited about her piece last night I could almost sense the feverish tingling from across the room. Rah!

Woot, glad the long weekend is here… finally! Aren’t four-day weeks just the greatest ? On top of that, I’ve had Steev home with me and we’ve been drinking ourselves silly. Yep, he’s just rediscovered his love for green tea while the rest of us, except for Raine, discovered we heart Cameronian tea.

The weather’s been so frickin’ hot even after those pretentious spats of rain which doesn’t even help at all. In the afternoons, we hide in the bedroom with both the air-conditioning and fan going full blast, and sip cooling drinks to ward off the heatiness.

The girls are having some crazy homework to finish this week. One day, Raine’s homework was to copy 5 pages off her book into an exercise book ! Absolute rubbish, I say! What’s the point? What’s she learning from this? Luckily Steev, the kind older brother, volunteered to do her homework blind copying for her while she was busy with the other homework. I normally don’t allow this but in this case I’m justified to say okay.

The past few days, I’ve been a lame duck nursing a pulled muscle on my right side from carrying a bag of rice from my car into my kitchen. The pain twitched on all day and I could only drive short distances. At night, it got so intense I could barely sleep ! Anyhow, I’m better today and I’m just so glad the weekend is here. I can’t wait to get out of the house !