A the hopelessness of it all...

Okay I'm failing in the supermommy department. I'm literally run frazzled. Dominic has missed doing his homework something like 3 times this month. As he reads at a first-grade level that is certainly not his fault. I'm working on letting this go as

1) I'm a working-mom of two who still finds time to maintain a household (however poorly) and volunteer at various activities in support of her children.
2) I started a brand-new (demanding) job less than a month ago and I'm still getting up to speed on an area of the world that I would have been hard-pressed to accurately identify on a map 6 weeks ago.
3) I get almost NO help from my husband who gets home from school past 8 pm four our of five nights a week, regularly disappears for hours at a time on the weekend and gets really grumpy (and thus completely useless) if I encourage him to help me do something family-oriented during non-school hours as he "has to study."
4) Am still recovering from the minor back-injury I sustained 6-weeks ago in an automobile accident.

So ya.... letting things go.

We got a notice home from school that school photos would be taken on the 13th and the 14th of October. Un-hunh. Thanks for narrowing it down. Kamryn came home with a note saying hers would be the 14th. Nothing from Sam (although I expect we're not getting everything we should be getting). There was no school the 12th for the Thanksgiving Day holiday. Sam said nothing about photos. On the 13th after work I rushed home, grabbed the kiddos and rushed to the mall to get Sam a much needed haircut so he would look good for his picture. At the END of his haircut he says to me "oh, we had pictures taken today."

"Wonderful!" I thought, "he wasn't even wearing decent clothes (well they were decent as he wears a uniform but I would have put him in the nicer elements like a button-down shirt had I known). " But we're letting things go remember ...

Yesterday they bring their photos home. Kamryn's for the first time in years are wonderful. Nice smile; nothing goofy. Great! We'll take 6 dozen! And then there are Sam's. His hair looked fine despite being too long. As luck would have it the golf shirt he was wearing looked just fine. In generally a neat well turned out appearance. So far so good, eh? Not so much. His face? He has the most hideous grimace that you can imagine. He is PERFECTLY capable of smiling nicely for a photo; however, why smile nicely for a photo and please your parents when instead you can make all your friends laugh by grimacing wildly. Sigh. I guess it's back to plan B and taking him to the mall after Christmas to get his school photo re-taken. Why would I ever worry about his hair and clothes?