Time Wasted

Having my day go by without really having anything to show for it seems to be happening recently. The Magic Tree House incident was the most recent. Books A Million sponsored a summer reading program for the Magic Tree House series. They gave out little passport books and kids were encouraged to read all of the books this summer and receive a tote bag upon completion. Ethan was excited and up for the challenge. He had already read several of them and those would count towards it. We have spent hours finding the research books and even borrowed ones he had not read from his teacher Mr. Menard. Well, summer is quickly coming to an end and Ethan was not going to be able to possibly read them all. There are something like 88 books and he still had about 60 to go. So, being the wonderful mother I am I decided that I would get another passport book and answer all the quizzes online to get the little stamps for each book. I would then get the tote bag before they ran out of them and Ethan would continue to read them throughout the year and I would give him the prize when he finished it. I spent many hours answering questions. I then saved all of the pages with the little stamps on them so that I would not print each page separately. Derek brought his computer home and I again spent at least an hour cutting and pasting each stamp so that they would fit on two pages for me to print. Ethan then helped me cut all the silly little things out and we glued them into the passport book. Finally, the thing was finished and we took it with us yesterday to the story hour to claim his tote bag. We discussed in the car that we would not tell the lady that he had not read them all, since he was going to continue to read them. We even came up with a plan about one stamp that was missing (because the quiz was not online) so that we would not have to lie about not actually reading the book. This is turning into quite a long story, so I will conclude with the fact that the lady gave Ethan the book bag and did not even look at his passport to see what he read. The best part though is that she then tells us that you only had to read 10 of the books in order to get the tote bag! What, are you kidding me? That would have been nice to know before I had done all the work for ALL 88 of them! Ethan had read well over the 10 required before the summer even started. So, I let him have the tote bag and mourned over all of my wasted time. This is so something that would happen to me. Next time, forget being a nice Mom, who cares about a free tote bag! He better treasure that thing is all I have to say.