Bad mommy

There are times in my life when I realize that I should have handled things differently. The following is one of them.
J has "benchmark" testing this week and his math teacher sent home a packet of problems for him (as well as all his other classmates) to work on for practice. There were 23 word problems, with multiple choice answers. Easy, right? It would have been except instead of just being able to answer the problem, he needed to do a "window pane" which showed the facts of the problem, the main idea, the method, and the solution as to how the problem was solved. It is meant to teach the children how to break down a problem so that they can understand it. Fine, fine, but it is a pain in the ass and takes forever although I do not say this out loud. J does, and complains about it. He never wants to do all the steps since he can figure out the answer without doing all the work. So this weekend, he sat at my kitchen table for 3 hours on Saturday and 6 hours on Sunday doing next to nothing on this packet. By Sunday, my patience had gone out the window, and I started to raise my voice a bit about how he just needed to follow instructions and get the work done. At about this time he started complaining about a headache. My response? "Of course your head hurts, you've been staring at the same paper for hours. Now just do your work." Eventually it got to the point where nothing else was being done, he was beat, I was beat and I told him to just go outside and play, that he would face the consequences from his teacher and that if he failed 3rd grade, it would be because he wasn't doing his work (I know, a little extreme, but that is one of the reasons for the title of this post).
So after J comes in and gets ready for bed, he tells me again that his head still hurts. I reply it is "probably because you were stressed out over your homework", that "I'll email your teacher to let her know how long you worked on it and would she go over some of it today before the big test." He shrugs his shoulders and goes off to brush his teeth. Then he comes back and asks if I can take his temperature, since he thinks he might have a fever. I feel his head, cool to touch, and say "sure" to pacify him. Any guesses as to whether or not he had a fever (clue: title of post)?

100.9 F

So a low fever, but a fever nevertheless.

The award for worst mom of the week goes to....me