Advice for melodramatic gifted 7 yo boy who makes everyday tasks into a battle

My husband and I both work at home and we have two kids (3 and 7). My 7 yo is homeschooled (though does extracurriculars up to 4 days a week). Fall/winter is tough bc they are always picking up illnesses from neighbors or friends so we’ve been sick a lot lately which I’m sure isn’t helping everybody’s mood. This post is about how my son’s resistant and dramatic behavior is making everything feel like an exhausting battle.

He is gifted and funny and most of the time a really good kid. But he will act like you are trying to murder him if you ask him to do anything like clean up toys, put on his socks or brush his teeth. He will say his legs hurt, he is weak, he is dying, we are killing him, his heart hurts, his brain hurts, do not look at him, etc. whenever we are trying to get him to do something and especially getting him to brush his teeth.

I know he is perfectly capable of doing these things. Sometimes he does them perfectly. But about 90% of the time he is throwing himself on the floor, groaning and moaning, telling us that he is literally dying and his legs are broken and we can’t look at him, etc. we have tried counting, giving him extra time, and also using a point system where he loses privileges like tv time. The other thing is my 3 yo daughter copies him, so she has begun saying the same phrases and mimicking his behavior. His behavior also extends to homeschool but not as much, but sometimes doing somwthing as simple as writing one word in a workbook will send him into one of these dramatic episodes and it will make a 10 minute session last 40 minutes or more.

I don’t think it’s an attention issue because he will happily spend 2 hours reading books or building legos.

Sometimes we lose our patience and get angry with him because this is driving us crazy. Help.

Anything else we haven’t thought of to curb this behavior? Unfortunately because we both work and we do extracurriculars, we have a schedule and need to be places, and don’t have the time/patience I might have if I didn’t need to.

Edit: schedule for clarity. He snd his sister spend 3/hrs on m/w/f with my mom at her 1 acre rural property and then my mil comes to our house for 3 hrs on t/thurs to help out, he has martial arts at most on m-Thurs for an hour, swimming in the summer, has lots of friends his age in the neighborhood who are over almost every day, passes for zoo and museum we use regularly. He does school quickly bc he only needs to be shown something once, we blow through textbooks fast so we have tried slowing down to allow more experiments and building projects.

Also note: I wouldn’t characterize these as “meltdowns” bc he doesn’t cry or get upset, it’s more like he is whining and complaining and being super stubborn and oppositional.