Endless night

Tonight was one of those nights where everything just seems hard. My son has been sailing through his homework this week, zipping through problems and completing pages without protest, but tonight he dawdled and whined his way through his work, stretching it out endlessly and needing constant prompting. My daughter has been working in an organized way on a project that's due on Monday, but tonight she suddenly decided she needed to finish it right now, to get it over with. As this would involve the writing of 10 paragraphs, with much effort from the girl and from the mom who must guide her through them, I said it was ridiculous to try and finish so quickly and we'd darn well take the whole weekend since we had it. I guess I said it loudly enough to rattle my son, who responds to stress like a tuning fork. That escalated his behavior, which escalated my stress so that when my husband nonchalantly suggested that our daughter do half her paragraphs tonight to get them out of the way, I snapped at him loudly enough to again panic tuning-fork boy, who started getting hysterical about his sister's assignment and completely abandoning his own. And all this was before my husband tried to help our daughter with her math homework, with increasingly loud exclamations each time she proved clueless. Oh, it was a long night. My son was more wired up at bedtime than I've seen him in a long while, my daughter more long-suffering. And I just wanted to curl up on my bed and cry; even moms need stress release, though not in front of easily rattled boys if they know what's good for them. But I sat down to write this blog entry instead, glad that it doesn't require 10 paragraphs. Tomorrow will be better. No homework for my son on Fridays, anyway.