I'm pretty sure I've written on how my lovely daughter frustrates me to no end. She pushes buttons, she argues, she ignores, she pushes and argues some more.  I love her and want to shake her silly at the same time.
For the last month she has known that she has a science project to do, the last two or more weeks she has known what she was going to do.  The project was do yesterday, guess when she did it?  Monday, yep, she waited till the day before it was due to even start on it.  She's almost 14 and in the 8th grade, I was thinking I could explain the instructions and let her go at it so that I may do some chores and homework myself.  Nope, she wanted to whine and fuss unless I sat by her practically holding her hand through the whole project.  It wasn't an exceptionally difficult project she picked out. It was on the Stroop effect. All she had to do was time her brothers and I while we read,  record the times and calculate averages.  The biggest part of the project should of been doing the research on the Stroop effect and writing her abstract.  Well she spent all day to do the testing, then 10 minutes maybe on the abstract.  Then she had to decorate her board, which she spent a good amount of time on because that's the only part she wanted to do.
    So I take her to school Tuesday, thinking that the project is done and no longer a worry. Nope, she comes home yesterday afternoon saying that her abstract has to be either 9 paragraphs or 9 pages she doesn't remember.  I said that was a pretty big difference and usually an abstract is rather short. She doesn't ask to get on the computer so I finish what I'm doing and think nothing of it at the time. Hubby comes home and she has the gall to say that I won't LET her do her abstract. Huh? Come again?  I had been finishing up a chapter in my A & P book and you didn't say "Hey mom I need to do this" you said "I didn't write enough." I had thought it was through because she didn't mention any extensions. So I get up( I was so proud of myself, I'm getting much better at controlling my temper with her) and let her at the computer. She sits for 30 minutes before letting me know, when I come in to check on her, that she can't get the openoffice writer to open.  So I tell her to use Works and I'll figure the other out later.  She later says she doesn't know how to write an abstract, I explain again (because I told her this the other day as well) that all she needs to write is a brief introduction and briefly explain what she did in her experiment. She then, finally, reads the instructions the teacher gave everyone and finds out she has to write a research paper as well. It is now 6pm and bedtime is at 8pm. I give her a look and say good luck with that and have to walk off before I raise my voice. There is no way to write a research paper, start to finish, in two hours.  At least not one that would give you a decent grade.
    I ask her later if she has learned anything from this experience. She says not really. I told her "I was hoping you would of said that you learned that when you have a big assignment to get started on it right way."  She just shrugged her shoulders and went to bed.  Gotta love these teenage years.