Lose the battle, or win the war?

Wednesday afternoons have long been a bane to me. I can homeschool, at best, for about 2 hours before I begin teaching piano lessons at 12:45.

But I do not allow my children to just play all afternoon, oh no. I give them SEATWORK to do. Nothing arduous; a spelling lesson (copy words or fill in the blanks), a vocabulary lesson (ditto), reading chapters of their current book--stuff they can do with little to no parental guidance. They get it completed before dinner and Wednesday night prayer meeting.

Well, that's the idea, anyway. In reality, they go to the library with Dad, then come home and goof off the remainder of the afternoon while I teach piano lessons, ignoring their existence and trying not to reveal my growing frustration with their lack of compliance with The Rules.

Today, I vowed, it would be different. At noon I announced: "I have a pizza waiting in the refrigerator. If you complete your seatwork by 6 pm, you may have pizza for dinner. If you do not, you will have oatmeal." Then I went ahead with my stress-free, piano-teaching day!

You can guess which two children are currently working on seatwork, panicked, regretting the time spent goofing off today. The pizza aroma is permeating the house, and there's a pot of boiling water on the stove just waiting for oats to go in...

Wonder how this scenario will play out? Me too. I'll update later.
(edit)
UPDATE: D., enraged, refused to eat dinner. S. wasn't having it either. So they accompanied us to Wednesday night church anyway, hungry.

By the time we returned home, the children cheerfully and gratefully ate a fresh pot of hot oatmeal. With raisins and brown sugar.

We had pizza for lunch on Thursday. Getting schoolwork done was not a problem.