When did it get so hard?

What I really want to know is when did a night of doing nothing become a night of cooking and cleaning up an entire meal, mowing the lawn, putting away scads of laundry, paying a couple of bills and cleaning a bathroom? When did I start seeing this as "not too much?" What did I DO with my time back in my twenties, when it was just the two of us, living in a barely two bedroom apartment with no lawn to speak of that we didn't even have the responsibility for?

All I want to do is finish the book that I have been trying to finish for the last two plus weeks, but of course those two plus weeks included parent teacher conference week at work, then vacation which we spent exploring and learning some more, in our nation's capitol.

Now were back, to work, and the routine, but the routine is also off kilter due to hours and hours of state testing that is going on in my classroom this week. And when, while we speaking of change and increase of responsibility here, did that get so out of control? I can think back to the days of 3rd grade PET testing, a one day cloze test, which was fairly innocuous, and which, quite frankly, allowed me some time to get some work done in my classroom. Now, our testing is more and more and more...about 9 hours when all is said and done this week with ELA...and I get less and less done.

Why?

Well, because I am policing the room like never before, cracking the whip on some, soothing the furrowed brow of others. It is a lesson in human sanity and tenacity and nothing else. I have been so proud of my fourth graders, for rising to the occasion, and truly doing their best. I don't know that I would have had the stamina they have had. They need to have even more for Book 3 tomorrow, the third and final task, and if you ask me, the hardest. I don't know why we ask it of them. I don't know what asking of them really does to their young minds, but yet, I, no we, labor on...and on...and on...and for what?

When did it get so hard?