Our Oh So Fabulous Day

Pin It Homeschool, day 1. Otherwise known as the day everything went wrong.

Everybody is excited about the first day of school, right? Well, I guess that's everybody except the people that live in my house!

The plan consists of getting the girls out of bed at 8:00. This will eventually become 7:30, but we're planning to ease into it. (You'll notice I didn't mention waking the boy. He wakes at dawn, remember?)

So this morning, I got up with a panic and realized that I had promised some work done that I hadn't even begun yet. It seemed obvious that getting their schoolwork started while trying to get my work done was a bad idea. So, wrinkle #1, I let the girls sleep while I finished my work. They didn't get up until after 9:00. Not a horrible thing in the grand scheme of things, but it did kind of start us off on the wrong foot.

By the time they were fully awake and fed, it was about 9:30. Woohoo, only a little later than planned, so we're still good.

Enter wrinkle #2. We can't find Madelyn's math book. Gabbi gets going on her math and I'm tearing up the house trying to find Mad's book. Finally found it and realized that she was ready for a new math lesson. No problem, I know where her DVD is. I pull it out with that feeling ... you know the feeling ... the "this DVD case feels a little lighter than it should" feeling. Yep, no DVD.

You may have noticed that I can be just a leeeetle high strung, so I'm starting to get stressed by this point.

I looked at the lesson and figured we could wing it pretty well and decided that rather than searching for something else, we'd just run with it. She knows how to do it all, so it's no problem to skip the teaching for this lesson. So she gets to work.

You can read below about all of the interruptions there. Finally she brings it to me and I realize she has done every single problem wrong. She knows very well how to do this, she was just so distracted!

I was really starting to LOSE IT by this point. We just stopped with that page and went to the next one. Everyone is trying to breathe in, breathe out, calm down. I sat with her and she did her work without any problem at all.

Wrinkle #3 - now Brendan is absolutely climbing the walls. He'd already been outside, played with trains, played with play doh, jumped on all of the furniture, played with stickers ... he's pulling out the loudest, most obnoxious toys and is making everyone insane.

Now it's lunch time, and thankfully everyone was happy with our lunch choice - chicken parmesan sandwiches.

Time to go to the next classes. Wrinkle #4 - we realized that putting Gabbi on the DVD player in my computer and Madelyn on the DVD player in the family room wasn't working so well. We need to come up with a solution other than using my laptop as a dvd player, as these dvds and my computer aren't exactly in love with each other. So now, I'm trying to figure out how to shuffle the kids around so that each gets a dvd player without anyone getting a ton of free time because nobody wants school going on all day long.

I finally gave in and put Brendan in my room with Noggin. Hey, it's like preschool on TV, right? Wrinkle #5 - I hear him making a weird coughing sound that I have heard exactly one other time in my life - when he swallowed a whole peppermint and was trying to throw it back up. BRENDAN, WHAT DID YOU SWALLOW??? He swallowed a penny, or some coin; they're all pennies to him. He was trying his best to get it to come back up and I called the doctor's office. They said it will either come back up or I get to do some poop gazing. Lovely. Thankfully, Brendan came in a few minutes later and said it didn't hurt anymore, so I guess it made its way out of the esophagus.

Really, by this time, my nerves were just shot. Three of the four of us had cried during the day (oh - one of my goals with our schooling is for nobody to cry. Great to completely obliterate that goal on DAY 1!)

Thankfully, also by this time, the girls were finishing up their schoolwork.

But wait ... there's more.

We decided that we deserved Sonic Happy Hour. On the way the two little ones were fighting and hitting each other, so they did not get to participate in Happy Hour. Here we go with tears again. So Gabbi and I get our drinks and Brendan fell asleep. No problem, the car seat sends out magic sleep vibes all the time. It usually ends when we get into the driveway.

Not today. He slept as we walked in. He slept in the chair. He slept on the couch. We finally woke him up and he walked to my bed and went back to sleep. He slept until 7:00.

Good news and bad news about that.

The girls and I got to talk about our school day - what I expected from them, what they needed from me, some forgiveness was sought from a mommy who lost her temper. We had a nice time and we're all okay with continuing our homeschooling. I have a better idea as to what our schedule needs to look like, and I believe we're going to make some changes with Madelyn's math that will benefit all of us. That's the good news.

The bad news? It's 10:30 and Brendan is WIDE AWAKE. I think I may need to put him in my bed to see if I can get him to sleep.

More good news though -- we have a plan for tomorrow. We are all thankful that His mercies are new every morning, and He is faithful to us. Today is done and over, and everyone is happy about that. There is no need to dwell on the failures of today. I realized I could plead to be released from homeschooling, or I could accept that I'm not released from that at this time, and be content with what I have. I'm choosing to be content.