Since school started ...

We make a conscious effort not to over-schedule our family. As a dual-working-parent family, we try to manage our time so that we can comfortably get where we need to be without rushing ... we plan as many things as we can for weekends versus weeknights, and we have two hard-and-fast rules:

1. No one is allowed to start playing a sport or participating in a regular activity until age 5.

2. No one can play more than one sport per season.

In general, this works well for us, but since this school year started, we've struggled just getting used to having three sets of homework to do on top of karate for Nathaniel and Nick two nights a week.

Then in August and the first couple of weeks in September, we added (breaking rule #2 for the first time in history) swim lessons for a few weeks for the three boys. But we felt like swim lessons were critical for Jake, and as long as we were going to be there with Jake, we took advantage of them for the two stronger swimmers, too.

After all, it was only a few weeks, right?

FAMOUS LAST WORDS.

It wasn't the end of the world, by any means, so I don't mean to be melodramatic. But last night, for instance, we didn't get home until 7:30, and it was after 9:00 before a quick supper was eaten and all the homework was done. No downtime, no snuggles, and -- let's be honest -- tempers were short.

It DID help that we had a little helper ... a sister who hates to be left out and invents her own homework so she can be part of the "party" at the breakfast table:

While Nick was busy enumerating all the reasons that he was unable to even START his homework, Jake read four books to me. One of them was a Curious George number, during which he asked, "Mommy, Curious George is a monkey. Why doesn't he have a tail?"

I had no answer for that. But I feel that it's a ripe topic for some kind of Curious George mythology study. I had a bunch of terrible, terrible thoughts that probably stem from reading far too many Patricia Cornwell novels, but let's hope there's some innocent reason. Like the illustrator just forgot to give him one.

Every time she drew him.