Better morning today, despite a last-minute search for the glasses of the child who came to play yesterday which may or may not have been left at our house. Also the traffic was kind.

Better evening yesterday, too. I always find the time between 5.30 pm and 7.00 pm really difficult trying to juggle cooking, baths and homework. Made a couple of modifications to the routine recently. The first is that I no longer sit with Robyn while she does her reading. She usually brings home four books; including one from the marvellous Oxford ReadingTree, which we both enjoy, and one from the mind-numbingly boring (in both our opinions) Gay Way reading scheme, one other book from class, and a library book. Sitting through the tedium of the Gay Way books was not helping my evening along, and Robyn doesn't really need my help. Also she gets through the homework much more efficiently on her own (less opportunities for distraction, I suppose). After she's read the books, I sometimes ask her to tell me about them and pick out a few sentences for her to read to me if there are any difficult words she might not have read correctly. Her school library book she likes to read to herself lying down on her bed.

The other change I have made to the arsenic hour is to avoid the long boring battle of getting her out of the bath and in front of her homework. After a reasonable amount of time in the bath (varies depending on how busy an afternoon we've had and how late it is) I tell her she's got ten minutes to get out, get dry, put on her pyjamas and get out her homework. And if she doesn't make it in ten minutes (there's an egg timer so she can see how she's doing), then I (and my signature) won't be available for homework at all. This avoids me nagging and yelling and going up and down to the bathroom and bedroom over and over again. And ten minutes is a reasonable amount of time. Only one night of this so far. We'll see how it goes. I guess the crunch will come the first time she doesn't make it.

One other funny thing about the Gay Way series: I don't remember my grade one readers very clearly at all, but one agonising read has stuck in my memory for 30 years. In my mother's memory too. It was an awful book about a mother bird and some baby birds, in which at least half the words on each page are 'twitter'.

For example:

The baby birds said,

Twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter.
Twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter.
Come back, mama bird.
Twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter.
Twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter.

I couldn't believe it when one of the Gay Way books Robyn brought home last week was the very same book. Robyn took great delight in this of course, and made sure I didn't miss a single twitter.

So I may be a Bad Mother for not watching the reading, and I may be a Mean Mother for having a homework cut-off time, but hopefully I'll be a Happier Mother at the End of the Day.