And So it Begins

Abang was given homework yesterday. Yesirree, my not-quite-4-year old son very excitedly told me, when I went to fetch him from kindergarten yesterday, that he "got homework".

"Mummy!" he called to me while putting his shoes on, "I got homework today, Mummy!" I just smiled from outside his kindergarten gate because I knew he didn't realise what he was in for. I guess he felt like a big boy, being given this lovely thing called 'homework' just like his older cousins and other schoolmates.

(How dare they exclude him from homework? It's always other people getting all the fun!)

When we got home, he hurriedly came inside and opened his bag and took out his school book and proudly showed me the 2 pages stamped "HOMEWORK". One page was writing out lower-case "k"; I counted them, it was 9 rows by 6 columns making it 54 lower-case "k"s that he had to write out. The other page was colouring the corresponding kangaroo.

When I explained to him what he was supposed to do, his tone changed immediately from excited to total disappointment.

"Mummy do for me," he tried to tai-chi. But Mummy is the master of deflecting the tai-chi that's been tai-chi'ed to her!

"Ha? Mummy do for you? That's your homework," I told him flat out.

"No, I don't want. Mummy do la," and he tried to shove the pencil in my hand.

"Hey, no way. It's your homework, you have to do it. When Mummy has homework for Mummy's boss, I can't ask Daddy to do it, right? I have to do it myself. So you have to do your homework yourself," I replied. Mummy knows how to tai-chi too.

He reluctantly took the pencil and wrote 1 lower-case "k".

"Dah." And he put the pencil down and went running off.

After that, it took me a total of 3 hours for him to do half the page. (He hadn't even started on the kangaroo yet.) Mummy's Bag of Bribery products was almost depleted. After 1 row, he got a little jelly treat. After the next 2 rows, he got back-to-back screening of Adik's new Little Einsteins DVD. After the 4th row, it was break time and he got to do some sand art with Mummy. I finally, finally, managed to get him to do another half a row (making it half the page) before I promised him that we were done until Daddy got home.

He very reluctantly did those 3 more "k"s. You could see the relief on his face! And all that took 3 hours, at the end of which his "k"s had started to look worse and worse. So it's probably better that we stopped then.

The next morning, Daddy managed to get him to do a row and a half and that was it. I decided not to push it, considering this is the first time ever getting homework. I figured that sitting and doing three-quarters of a page was a very good effort on his part.

Today I asked him if he showed his teacher his homework. He said yes.

"What did she say?" I was curious.

"She said good," he replied, "but next time kangaroo must be brown only." You see, he had voluntarily coloured the kangaroo without any pushing or nagging from me. So I really didn't want to press my luck by stopping him from colouring the stomach blue, its face pink, its body brown and the feet left uncoloured.

And so the homework stress begins ... for Abang too!