Inspired by
Phat Mommy, this is my own Day in the Life.
6:15 Hear Ava crying over a wet bed. Get up, change her sheets, give her a washcloth for her legs and some clean clothes. Go back to bed.
7:30 Get up for real as Will is leaving for work. Make everyone get dressed and make their beds.
7:45 Make breakfast: fried eggs, toast, hot chocolate. Clean up the kitchen.
8:15 Shuffle kids into the bathroom to brush teeth and wash off the hot chocolate. Change Ava's chocolaty shirt. Start a load of laundry.
8:20 Remind everyone it's a school day and we need to meet at the table in 5 minutes.
8:30 Remind everyone again and give them another five minutes.
8:45 Finally started math. Juliet is ordering numbers 1-15 and Charlie is working with place value. Ava is looking for ways to make me lose my mind. I require that we spend a solid hour on math, even if I have to add some math drills to do a whole hour. Realize I forgot to do calendar time with the girls. Oh well.
9:45 Charlie starts his spelling work. He works independantly while I do phonics work with Juliet. Ava has been too whiny to participate. I decide I'll work with her later and set out some toys for her to play with.
9:54 Call out for Ava. No answer. Find her naked in my room, trying to make her Dr. Suess cd play in an unplugged cd player. Get her some clothes and send her out of the room.
10:15 Charlie starts memory work in his room. He is learning the Preamble to the Constitution. Juliet works on writing sentences. I realize I've lost Juliet's memory work tape and I have to make another one. Not now.
10:25 Ava is crying for me to play Connect Four with her. I tell her it's still school time and I need to be doing school. She starts a temper tantrum. I put her in her room. I type up Charlie's grammar test.
10:35 Juliet listens to the Latin cd.
10:40 Juliet makes herself a pumpkin mask. Charlie starts Latin. Ava comes out of the room and tries to make herself her own mask. All of the glues are dried up so I hunt down some glue from my scrapbooking junk. Passing a mirror, I realize I've had dried hot chocolate on the bridge of my nose all morning.
10:45 Return to the living room. Discover Charlie using a yard stick to do some sort of dual light saber fighting. Ava is climbing the school supply shelf in search of "really sharp scissors for her mask." I send Charlie to my room with his grammar test to finish. I give Ava some not-sharp scissors and set her back at her seat.
11:20 Charlie finishes his test. Morning work is over. I start another load of laundry and heat up the oven for lunch. Chicken nuggets for them and some sort of leftover chili-sandwich concoction for me. Charlie puts Peter Pan into the dvd player. I sit down at the computer for my 2 hour sabbatical from school.
11:25 Peter Pan is too scratched up to play. We stick in The Fantastic Four cartoon. Juliet starts a tantrum because the "elastic guy isn't funny." She goes to her room. Comes back to eat lunch.
12:20 Kids are sent to the room for "room time". This is one hour when they are supposed to play on their beds, read, or listen to a book on tape. I have about 5 minutes before Ava shows up in my room asking if it's time to get up yet. I'm starting All the King's Men. I fall asleep.
1:30 Ava emerges from the room with a bleeding lip. While dealing with them, I let Charlie know we're starting school again at 2:00. I then call our neighbor and invite her son over to play with Charlie after school.
1:45 The lip stopped bleeding. The girls listen to the Dr. Suess cd in the hall. I don't know why they're in the hall. I do not know at all.
2:00 Oops....I was supposed to pay the rent yesterday. I need to go do that right away before his friend gets here at 3. And I need a Dr. Pepper.
2:16 Haven't left yet. WHERE ARE ALL OUR SOCKS????? For the love of all that is holy, WHERE ARE OUR SOCKS?
2:48 Squeeze some history in as fast as we can. Our history book is talking about the Eastern Roman Empire today. No lie. Juliet is crying because the glitter glue is dried out and she can't decorate her castle drawing. Charlie is mad because he can't abbreviate 'Constantinople'. Turkish delight, on a moonlit night.
3:30 Neighbor-boy arrives. Juliet promptly shows him her new bathing suit. I send them outside while I play Connect Four with Ava.
4:00 I stick in a Kipper dvd for Ava and preheat the oven for dinner. Make a mental note that Charlie hasn't read to me today so we need to cover that tomorrow.
So the rest of my day will consist of more domestic bliss and more of me sitting at the computer avoiding domestic bliss. Reading this post reminds me of the whole
Mommy War discussion that raged last spring. Some women are questioning why so many educated and otherwise competitive women are choosing to spend their days hoping to avoid pee puddles on the bathroom floor rather than contributing to the workforce.
I don't know. I don't have an answer. I will say that staying home is harder than working with adults. At least for me. But it's
my work and
my family that I'm working for. Not someone else's. But this life is not, I repeat
not for everyone. And I have my days when it's not for me, either. But today wasn't one of those days. Today was a'ight.
I've got to go scrub some potaters now. And come back to my page this evening. I'll have surprise for you.
http://here-in-idaho.blogspot.com/
