A Day in the Life

8:20 am Come downstairs to get my coffee before school begins.  Jeff is reading Harry Potter to the boys. My whole body aches because of our new vigorous exercise campaign.  I must look weak because Zach says, “Can we build our new Lego kits today instead of doing Bible study?  I just can’t sit here anymore and listen to boring reading stuff.”

8:30-9:15 Jeff works with Ezra on his cool, new Lego pirate set.  I drink more coffee while watching Zach build a castle with his cool, new Lego knights set.  I finally get to use the project trays I bought last summer in anticipation of all of the multi-day craft projects we would be working on throughout the year.  Better late than never.

9:15-11:00 The boys go the pool to swim with Jeff while I workout and finish unpacking from our trip to Virginia.

11-11:15 Snack time.  Zach wants crackers.  I make him have crackers with peanut butter and an apple.  I tell him about making snacks that have a good mix of whole grains, fat, protein, and fiber. He sticks his finger in the pb jar, and for twelve seconds I give up all hope that he will ever have the impulse control necessary to resist heroin.

11:15 Ezra is still eating his apple.  (His brother hasn’t figured out that if you eat more slowly then you can miss more school.)  Zach and I go upstairs to the “schoolroom.”  I still haven’t decided what we are going to do for the day.  I pull out a 2nd grade skills workbook and pick a worksheet where he has to write one sentence describing the main idea in a picture and four sentences describing details of the picture.  I say, “What are the three things we are working on with sentences?”  He replies, “Capitalization, periods and spacing.”  He forgets to capitalize the first word of two sentences and capitalizes three words that don’t need to be. He does this every time.  No matter how many reminders or checklists I give him, he continues to leave off periods and screw up the capitalization.  I don’t understand.

11:30 Ezra comes up and we do our language lesson for the day.  We review the months of the year, and I introduce the definition of pronouns. Ezra asks, “What does ‘in place of’ mean?” I hate when I have to define the definitions.  We learn about I, me, my, & mine.  Zach writes a sentence for each word and Ezra copies each word several times.

11:40 I try to set Zach up on a computer program for reading comprehension.  Instead I uninstall it, swear a couple of times, and head back upstairs.

11:45 Zach and I set up the January calendar.  Ezra is still copying words. (Like I said, he could teach labor unions a thing or two about work slowdowns.)  Ezra is very excited that we have changed the year on the calendar.  He adds four ones cubes to our Days in School chart, two for this week and two for days we worked in Virginia.  We are at Day 67, and I realize that we won’t even be close to the 180 required days by the end of June.

12:00 The boys work together to solve the following Guess My Number:

1. The number is above 200 and below 250.
2. The tens digit is the number of hours between 8:00 am and 12:00pm.
3. The ones digit completes the following number sentence:            26 -___= 21.

12:10 Ezra and I work with the same set of flashcards for the hundredth time.  He just can’t seem to add 2 to 7 and consistently get 9 without thinking about it.  It’s so weird, because if he is allowed to think about a math problem, he is at least as good as Zach.  I think it’s related to how long it took him to learn how to read, but I can’t put my finger on it.  It seems like some kind of dysgraphia, but I don’t really know anything about these things.  If I’m not losing my temper when he gets the same card wrong over and over, it’s kind of cute to watch him slap his forward and shake his head when he says “8” for “8+1.”  Zach works on his own set of cards and takes them down to Kathiana for review.

12:30 Another day of homeschool complete.  No science. No history.  No nature study.  No Bible study.  No reading.  But a good day.  Peaceful, even joyful at times.  And there is at least a chance that if you ask the boys what a pronoun is, they would tell you.

And as I reminded myself around 11:30, if the boys are on a long runway, so am I.