Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Let me tell you about my day.

I drove downtown for a rehearsal, drove back to Newtopia, whoops, I mean, went directly to school for conferences, then took my son to his cello lesson, then picked him up, then got my daughter ready for dancing school, then got my son ready for dancing school, then left them pasta to zap because I had to drive to the high school for my first meeting there ... yes, my baby boy is growing up, and guess what?

He has an IEP, so I had my first special education meeting, and how frabjous is that? All you IEP parents out there--you can imagine how fun that was, right?

Then I get home after 9:00 p.m. to discover that my daughter has basically plagiarized her latest book report. As in, she typed the entire thing in verbatim, having changed four words and two punctuation marks.

But I can hear her literally skipping around upstairs because she got so many compliments on her dress at dancing school tonight.

And I can't bear to pull her off her happy cloud of best-dressedness.

And I want a glass of wine and a new episode of Grey's Anatomy, STAT.

So as soon as I hit "publish post" I'm off to send an email to my daughter's teachers to let them know that the child has no idea what constitutes plagiarism, and even though I do, this is a public school, and since our property taxes just went up another $3,000, I consider them very well paid--certainly paid well enough to take on the task of being bad cop in this particular situation.

So Newtopian middle school teachers? As far as I'm concerned, you can be the Mr. Blackwell of book reports. I'm done.