Just like that - the weekend is here. It has been one of those weeks where it felt like swimming in flood waters - the pull of the current moving me in directions I didn't necessarily go, the water was murky and there were all sorts of submerged objects along the way.

I made it to shore. And now I'm catching my breath in preparation for a full-scale assault on my neglected house chores tomorrow morning.

My son apparently smacked a fellow student during lunch the other day. He was sitting with two other boys, and they were horsing around, and my son got his feelings hurt during some minor teasing. He rolled with it for a few minutes, and then apparently had his fill, and when he couldn't make the kids stop giggling, he whacked the kid next to him in the back of the head.

Lunch ended, and he made his way back to the classroom, and during silent seat work time, the other kid (not the kid he smacked) told the teacher what had happened. My son, hearing this, burst into noisy tears and ran from the classroom. I guess the teacher finally sent another student to fetch my sobbing son from the bathroom after 10 minutes, and he came back to the class with raw eyes and a runny nose, tears still leaking from the corners of his eyes. I picked him up and got to talk to both my son and the teacher at the same time, and learned he would have a detention the next day at recess. He cried some more, and I took him home, fed him a snack, and waited for my husband to get home.

We don't do double jeopardy punishment in this house, unless the crime is truly heinous. Yet the second my husband walked in, my poor kid collapsed in noisy tears and tried to hide. You would think that we torture the kid. Anyway, after we pulled the story out of him of what had happened, and got him to stop crying, he was wilting. We fed him dinner and sent him to bed. He was wrung out.

To the credit of his teacher and classmates, no one made fun of my son for crying in class. But I suspect that he's not going to continue to be met with understanding and a good measure of slack when he cries for much longer. He's just a softy, and while the teacher saw true remorse for inappropriate behavior, I saw embarrassment for getting caught and called out on it.

Part of me wants to hold him close and protect him from everything, and another part wants to force him to toughen up a bit. But he's got these little bony shoulders and giant blue eyes and he just can't deal sometimes - it breaks my heart and wins me over every single time.

Maybe I'm the one who needs to be slapped.