Kids Say the Darndest Things

OK you;ve all heard my meanderings about homeschooling DS, well here's one of the reasons I struggled with it so much!

Yesterday we got DS's curriculum in the mail, so today we started with the new stuff! Well, for the past couple of weeks, we were making do with what we had and a couple of cheap books purchased from Costco. Today we started the new curriculum and for his writing/penmanship assingment he had to practice making cursive "E e". He'd just done this a couple of weeks ago,and was not happy about having to redo it it, so he told me "Its a free world, we should only have to do what we want to do". This was his argument as to why he shouldn't have to do this particular writing assignment, along with the fact thta he already knew how to make these letters, adn he simply wanted to learn something new. So I explained to him that yes it is a free world, but there are things we still have to do whether we like them or not. We had a 10 minute discussion that, although he was free to do what he wnated there were still rules, limits and laws. As long as he stayed within those guidelines, then he was free to do what he wanted to. He said that those were "stupid..." I explained to him that they were there so that his freedom to do what he wanted did not intrude upon my freedom to do what I wanted, and that one of the rules was that he had to do his schoolwork as assigned!

This continued on for awhile, with him still refusing to do his writing, and finally I said, "OK using your logic, I'm free to only do what I want to do, and I want to nap and stitch and not cook dinner tonight, so there's not going to be any dinner." He then told me that I couldn't do that, and I explained to him that yes I could under his train of thought and logic. I'd talked to DH who was supportive of the dinner ban tonight as well, so I knew I was off the hook! Eventually he did his writing assignment, so I have to cook dinner again...drat I thought I'd managed to pull a night off!