By Patricia Gallagher Newberry
Enquirer contributor

Like a major league ball club come August, we have hit a mid-season slump at the halfway point of the school year.

Gone is that first-day up-and-at-'em attitude. Absent is that hey-this-is-fun resolve. Positive thinking is MIA, along with important notes from teachers, sporadic homework assignments and the occasional mitten or lunchbag.

Mornings - these cold, dark winter mornings - run like a bad and endless movie reel.

Alarms sound and no one rises. Parents prod and no one budges. Finally, overhead lights blazing, children spill out of their beds and into their clothes and down to the breakfast table.

Then, like the day before and the day before, they begin their litany of complaints about too-small socks, too-snarly hair, stale cereal, boring lunches and siblings who always start the fight first.

Come 3 o'clock, the cycle begins again, the list of daily woes now focused on worksheets, projects and reading assignments that leave far too little time for playdates, Seinfeld reruns or computer time.

Even I - playing the roles of soother of bad moods, smoother of frayed nerves and can-do, upbeat Mommy-Do-All - wilt under the Groundhog Day monotony of this script.

I ignore the pile of book order forms and permission slips for days. I fail to record one, solitary title - not one! - in the Literary Club notebooks. I allow minor infractions of the school uniform policy to pass, too weary to make a equally-weary child change at the last minute.

Great Fish controversy

And, bad, bad mommy, I unwittingly trigger the Great Fish Meltdown. Rewind the tape.

The scene: Dinnertime, last week. The 5-year-old daughter tells the harried mother she needs a fish. Tomorrow. For a kindergarten project.

Mother: What kind of fish?

Daughter: A big one.

Mother: What for?

Daughter: For school.

Mother: Do you have a note?

Daughter: WE'RE JUST SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER IT!

Many tears, accusations and hours later, the mother learns the fish project, and its deadline, were indeed described in a note she never got around to reading.

What we all really need, aside from a long vacation in a tropical clime, is a little mid-year inspiration, a little break in the hum-drum habits.

I'm thinking of changing the morning lineup by blasting Motown instead of alarm clocks and serving ice cream sundaes for breakfast.

In the afternoon, I thought maybe we could all wear our swimsuits through the homework hour.

For new energy in the classroom, I'm considering tucking little notes of encouragement in their lunchbags and coat pockets. Messages like "Recess is next!," "Lunch is soon!" and "Almost done!" are sure to keep 'em going.

Either that, or I could just start shelling out hard, cold cash for kids who get going in the morning with minimal complaint and take care of their school work in workmanlike fashion.

But all that sounds like way too much work, infected as we are with this tired-of-school malaise.

Don't do anything

I think I'd rather just hold on to my belief that one day, in the coming four months, my constant reminders to be kind and cooperative, to keep moving in the morning and to stay on task in the afternoon will somehow adhere to a brain cell or two.

When you hit the bottom of a slump, after all, there's nowhere to go but up.

E-mail patti@marriedwchildren .com.