A Tale of Summertime Woe

If you have a school-age child, you may be spending part of your summer getting your kid to do workbooks in preparation for the coming year. Or, if your school-age child is like mine, you may be spending your summer in a circle of useless, endless negotiation about the aforementioned workbooks. You may be hearing a lot about what summer is supposed to be, and how you're "ruining my life" and how they "really hadn't put work in the plan for today." Sound familiar? If not, I envy you. Oh, how I envy you.

Until today, that is. This morning, MasterP (pretty much) voluntarily did his work without (too much) complaining. I was as surprised as you! He even asked me to take pictures so that we could remember this day. There were some conversational gems...

Working on sight-recognition words (the text was a little smudged so he missed one or two that he normally would get):
"Not quite. It's 'could'."
"Oh yeah. 'Could.' That's a classic."

The conversation after he finished:
"Mom? Mom, would you say this was the best I ever did workbooks, an average time or worse than usual?"
"Hmmm. Well, it was pretty good."
"Mom. I really need to know your full answer here."

What do you suppose he has up his sleeve? A survey?

I pushed my luck, though. I offered him a bribe -- I mean incentive -- to complete additional pages each day. He ran (and I can hear the lovely strains of Lego xBox now). I knew I was going too far.