Friday, October 21, 2011

stream of consciousness

I had a little bit of a blogging run and then I crashed. I was thinking about this last night along with a huge assortment of other things that were cluttering my mind.
Things like Jonathan has done essentially no school work this week because he got his wisdom teeth out on Tuesday. He is healing really well except for waking up in pain each morning because he's slept well all night and the evening's medication has long since worn off. No school all week for a 3rd grader? OK! (Jake actually has done school this week though) No school all week for a 10th grader? Not so OK. Especially since next week is as full of a week as one can imagine including 2 Dr appointments, a craft day, a book club, a youth group trip, and a trip to the Florida Theatre Convention. Two of these things don't involve Jonathan at all (the craft day and book club, if you were wondering), but still it's a lot for any family. This doesn't include theatre and more and more theatre, and soccer, and choir, and whatever else I'm forgetting right now. Ugh! It's exhausting! Starting tomorrow we also have a week filled with things we will miss because we still haven't perfected the art of being in two places at one time. There's a carwash for the theatre (to raise funds for said convention), but we are walking in a walk-a-thon that is raising money for the local St Vincent de Paul food pantry that feeds 700 hundred families a month in our area alone (and fed 900 families last month!!) Then the rest of the week will continue with having to miss one or more scheduled activity in lieu of another and that kind of thing totally stresses me out. I'm the kind of person that generally feels the need to say yes to anything that I don't absolutely have to say no to. Like if someone says can you come let my cat out at 3am and I know I have nothing else going on, then I feel like I have to say yes. I hate having to take my kids away from one activity (where I'm worried people will be annoyed because we left early) to get them to another activity (where I'm worried people will be annoyed because we're showing up late). The positive side of needing to be at two places at once though is that we really can't, so to that end there is less on the proverbial schedule then there otherwise would be. I like to look for the silver lining! We finished three books today! All three kids and I finished listening to Sign of the Beaver (I liked it even more than I expected), then Madi and I finished the third (of ten or eleven) of her core history books, and Indian Captive. We've gotten into this good routine of taking turns reading her history aloud while the other of us folds laundry or cleans the kitchen. Madi started out doing her history on her own, but I'm too big of an American History fan to not be a part of it, so this is working. Jonathan likes to sit in too. It's slightly harder to do Spanish or Biology while listening to History though so it sometimes poses a problem. Jake's History has been lining up with Madi's quite nicely, but it's looking like hers is going to start cruising ahead, she's past the Constitution now and he's still lingering in Colonial Days. His book has a section each week about an area of the country which tends to slow things down a little. Today's was about Chesapeake Bay which is really cool because we went on (in) the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel this summer on our way to Delaware. I really like how his curriculum brings in science and geography (and Bible and literature and more), it's a hit! Speaking of Jake, remember his song from Honk!? "I'm just different, I'm just different from the rest..." Well he really truly is. Today alone he was creating his Veggie Tales Silly Song Countdown posters completely color-coded and everything and not five minutes later he was playing Who Wants to be a Millionaire by himself (they dug out the old board game the other day) and he could genuinely answer a lot of the questions! Usually by the time a person knows an excessive amount of trivia, they have outgrown Veggie Tales have they not? He's also brought back some other old favorites this week and is in the middle of another Berenstain Bears kick. Jake turned nine on Wednesday and I didn't even post about it. All Jonathan got was his card on here too. What can I say, I'm in a little bit of a slump. Some years there are huge birthday blog posts, others not so much. There's always plenty of cake though, so don't worry about that!

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