I just had a conference with Christopher's teacher, and then one with Julia's teacher. This was a total of 45 minutes hearing and being shown evidence of how smart, hard working, well behaved, sweet, nice, good and funny my children are.

Awesome! They must have some good parents.

Fairly subtle, but mostly good. Ultimately, Emmett isn't motivated by good grades and test scores at all. He can sort of blithely do all his stuff and be Very Good and that's about all the attention he wants to give it.

This was me as a kid. Mom still has a play I wrote freshman year, on the bus, that got really high marks and praise and a big fat A+. She always bitches about what I could have written if I'd actually, you know, spent time on it.

Fairly subtle, but mostly good. Ultimately, Emmett isn't motivated by good grades and test scores at all. He can sort of blithely do all his stuff and be Very Good and that's about all the attention he wants to give it. He's not a perfectionist - in fact he's sort of the opposite. Careless and indifferent and sliding by on innate smarts and charm.

That was me. In fact, in many ways, that is still me.

Emmett is me! My mom would sympathize, Hec.

Careless and indifferent and sliding by on innate smarts and charm.

The kid's either going to be content in a McDonald's somewhere or ridiculously happy and successful.

I was definitely and underachiever in grade school, high school and (to a lesser extent) college. I was thinking about this the other day - I was wondering if some people just have less motivation than others. Like, for everything.

I've been known to work hard at certain hobbies, but I've also been known to just suddenly lose interest and drop them.

Is laziness just a lack of motivation?

~ma for your grandmother and mother, Kristin.

Amber Benson appears to be making a movie about keeping cabana boys: [link]

I am intrigued.

Guess who went and confronted ExBoss for lack of response to her request for two months severance??

Oooh! How'd it go Aimee? And I'm really proud of you for doing it.

Thanks, DJ! It went well. He apologized for not getting back to me re: the email and fax and said he'd contact me later today.

Turns out, they never told Irene that they fired me. They just let her assume that I quit. They told her, when she asked what was going on, "Her grandmother died and she no longer works here."

WTF?

As is the case in many other instances, Emmett's behavior falls about midway between School Age Me and School Age EM. For the most part, Emmett has gotten a very healthy balance from the mix. He's much better academically than this Mom, and much more socially adept than I was.

But I really was a good student who simply loved to learn about things. I did like getting good grades, but was never unduly upset to get Bs. I slacked off on a fair amount of stuff, but could turn it up when I needed and bring a strong focus to my work. Emmett has better homework habits than I did, though.