Ugh, okay, my entire post basically boils down to "parenting is hard" which may be true, but I should probably shut up about it. Complaining isn't helping.

Thanks for letting me vent. I guess I needed to vent.

I am sorry in retrospect for how mean I was to my mother the few times she attempted to help me with homework. She is not so good at reading directions, though, and she wasn't there when the teacher explained it, so it was hard. I did accept (and she was really good at) helping me with things that had to be memorized, like State Capitols. She made up little sentence to help me remember like "They serve FRANKFURTers at the KENTUCKY derby." And she was good at quizzing me in many different ways. But I don't think students have to memorize as much now.

when I need to find a gentle way to nudge her to finish up her math or her English even though she's tired and she's been doing homework for hours.

If gentle isn't working, can you work in a bit more stern? Or will that just end up messy?

As a single childless person, I am partying all the time. If we define "party" as "anything you can do on a sofa (except sex)".

Our dog is obsessed with licking the floor. And when I had told him for the 100th time that day to stop licking the damn floor, I said to Tim, "Oh my god, I can't even handle a dog with a mild behavioral tic; can you imagine how I would deal with a toddler who throws a tantrum because the corn touched the potatoes?"

"That's why we don't have kids," he said. "Because I don't want to visit you in jail on Sundays."

I have decided that I'll do my best to work only one way on the shuttle, probably in the AM. On my way home, I will watch something, listen to a podcast, or read a book. I won't want to get home every night feeling exhausted, cranky, and futless.

I got an ancestry genetic test and have just spit in the tube. I just realized that I can't mail it from New York state- I am not sure if they check and throw them out or not! Is anyone willing to send me their address so I can mail it to you and you could pop it in the mail from your state? It is a tiny postage paid box.

My utter frustration with a cat who just wanted to love me for hours on end told me I had no business being in charge of a child who was purposely pushing my buttons, as they do.

ION, work schadenfreude. I'm a Level 2 tech. Recent, a bunch of other L2s got moved to other positions, leaving me and one other L2. When there aren't cases that need an L2 to work on, we work on regular cases. Oddly, the L2 cases are starting to get backed up, because we're working on other cases--sometimes older L2 cases. And the next tier up messages me to take an L2 case, and I say "I'm already on a call" or "I'm working on that older case where the customer is pissed at the delay." A couple of the next tier people know full well it's because they moved people up without having new ones ready to take the load.

But I'm certainly gaining karma points for digging into the load without more than a smirk to carefully chosen people.

Do kids seem to have WAY MORE homework than we did when we were young?

Yeah, Emmett had much more homework and at a much earlier age than I did.

I barely had any homework until I was in HS.

If gentle isn't working, can you work in a bit more stern? Or will that just end up messy?

Stern works as most parents know, but it extracts a high cost on all sides. Kids get angry, and anger interferes with learning, so homework may get done but the lesson probably won't. Stern wears away at the child's self-esteem, and that's also bad. And for me, stern eats away at my soul and my happiness and my sense of self-worth and I am sick and tired of the fact that the price of their schoolwork is my soul.

It is ridiculously impossible to tell the USPS or Amazon that a delivery address is correct. To send an e-mail form to USPS about a tracked package requires the address of the sender, and nothing on Amazon tells the address something was sent from. Also, the damn tracking number should tell them all that. I finally put in a random Amazon address and then got a message that USPS is not accepting e-mails at this time. I left a message with my local PO. We'll see.

My poor best friend inherited her brother's children, who are busily ruining their lives. She occasionally moans, "There's a reason I didn't have children."