Tutoring

It used to be nice.

I pride myself that I teach nicely by making things easy to understand. I dont just parrot stuff on their books, I make it digestable and a bit fun.

We start at around 530pm, I give Kenzo an hour, after school, to play with Liam. The problem with it is when we start the tutoring when I have volume of  chores on queue.  Starting at 530pm I also have to cook dinner, prep and eat, clean the kitchen tables, wash dishes and cookwares, feed the dog, stow toys, prep them to sleep etc.. I also want to end the day as early as possible because I want to rest too. At around 8pm I wanna be lying down because I have been going up and down, left to right since 5am.

Imagine all the stuff cramped in a bottleneck of around 6pm, add the tantrums of Ken when he get wrong answers, also Liam being scared to be left alone he will also wanna join us in the study room but sadly this makes Ken less focused. Juggling Liam’s needs, Ken frustrations, pressure of school work and the chores to be done is enough to make anyone… crazy.

Where no one is happy anymore.

There are days (always on weekends) where our house turned into  a war zone and surely neighbors are starting to notice. it  is mostly fights, arguments, shouting, cussing.. that fill our weekend mornings ,when we are all awake, active, busy, fatigued…

A typical saturday morning, for example, will start  very early for me as I am the one who will cook, the stress will start when the kids realized the breakfast is not something they want. This  will get me stressed out, Ken will whine, mom will ask him to stop and threaten Ken with a cancellation of a toy to be bought or some kind of a promised treat, Kenzo will resist and will escalate to tantrums, mom will ask him to stop, Kenzo will not, mom cannot handle Kenzo will curse at him and will ask me to help her and I will step in by physically and verbally stopping him. By this time I still have a ton of cleaning and chores to do and the noise makes me blow my top.

Or when the kids are playing and they are with their mom, very often Liam will cry for help (he milks chances like this to get back at Kenzo), mom will rescue the underdog, Ken will resist and the whole routine will escalate similar to a terrorist attack.

But it does not happen only on weekends. We also have “weekdays specials”. Typical flash points are mostly mess and some fighting of the two. Those are moments when I just finished cleaning and they are starting to mess it again. It is frustrating especially I have tons of work to do like tutoring, cooking dinner, cleaning the kitchen, washing dishes, prep them for sleep etc. and adding the redoing what I just cleaned is just too much to tuck in quietly and control myself.

I am tired, frustrated. I work from 515am up to 8pm with only about an hour rest in the morn and 2 hours in the afternoon, that is still a 12 hour daily work. If I have to do some chores in the morning while Liam is at school that can be 14hr work, if I buy meals and no schoolwork to do  it will be about 11hr work. I am tired and I still have to deal with the tantrums, whining, seemingly endless mess, fighting, and other personal difficulties that I am dealing with. It is a tough gig for me and it is wearing me down,