7:30: I hear the kids moving around, pulling out their sketch books and digging for something to eat, and I wake up too. The Daddy has long since gone to work. The littlest comes and climbs in bed with me, and brings a story: Three Samauri Cats. The other two jump (literally) onto my bed, and I read the story from the bottom of a pile of people.
8:00: I remind the kids that they've got about an hour to get ready for school, and go get my yoga mat. There are two Librivox stories going in two different rooms. I can hear them both, but I try to tune them out, and check in on a friend that just had a baby. I sit on my yoga mat and organize a couple of things the new mom needs. And answer some questions. And peek at social media.
8:40: I'm still sitting on my mat, but I haven't actually done any yoga, yet. I glance at the clock, realize how close we are to school time, and get to work on the yoga.
8:50: I mention to the child sitting next to me, chatting and drawing, that school starts in 10 minutes, and they decide to get a shower. "Hurry please." I send another one to get dressed. And attempt chaturanga, but and up doing it with floor support. Next time, maybe.
9:00: Our official start time. The shower is still running and all three notebooks are missing. I don't have any likely leftovers for my breakfast, so I build a quick salad, and ask Peanut to look for the notebooks. She isn't a great searcher, yet, so after a minute I ask Hero to help her, and call up the stairs for Dragon. He brings a remote control quad-copter to the table and flies it over my head; I take it away, and remind him that it's school time.
9:20: We finally start Morning Basket. Prayer, scripture boxes, then poems. While we do that, the kids copy Latin into their notebooks, which have now been located. Everybody is scattered and what usually takes about twenty minutes takes nearly 45 minutes. We practice our Japanese phrases we've been learning, bring out the Series work we'd been doing before Christmas. There are protests that I can't possibly expect them to remember... but with a little help, they do remember, and do pretty well. We use a kiwi, and practicing saying that you shouldn't eat it. (The kids don't like this sentence.) Then I have them tell me to put it on the cutting board, to pick up the knife, and to cut the kiwi. And finally... I tell them they should eat the kiwi. Which they are happy about! It's always amazing to me how much more effective these lessons are with real food and real knives, rather than play food. However, it's now well past 10, which is the target for finishing up, we skip our Latin drill. I think that this is the first time we've done that since we started doing Morning Basket like this at the first of the year, but the Japanese was going really well, and needed the time. We sing our hymn, There is Sunshine in my Soul Today, and Morning Basket is successfully finished at --
10:30: The oldest grabs his math, saying that he plans to do it first, because leaving it to the end of the day has caused him problems in the past. I laugh and say that's a good idea; the younger kids follow his example. Sneak off for a couple minutes with my blog and start this post, then look at the Nature Study post I put up on By Study and Faith the other day, and realize someone has left a kind comment; that's so nice when people say that a post is helpful! I just love that.
11:10: One child is practicing piano. One is reading Magic Treehouse (I need to tell him to save it for after school, but haven't, yet.) and one is just finishing up math. I want a shower, but it's several minutes before I can get it: I get Peanut started on her bed and hair, and set Dragon up with his Mango Japanese lesson. Hero is practicing piano, and I stop to attempt a duet with him, and then coach him on what needs to happen so that it goes better. After that, he dives into Across Five Aprils, my husband calls and we chat a couple minutes while he drives between one job site and the next, and then I escape into the shower, finally.
12:00: The younger kids are helping themselves to crasins, and it's making a mess. I give instructions on how to fix it, and what kind of quantities are reasonable... and walk away before my head explodes. This shouldn't be quite this frustrating.
12:10: I glance at the menu: chili and cornbread. Yum. Only, I should have started it earlier, and I forgot to get any hamburger for it on grocery day. Oops. I wonder if I can find a recipe for quick meatless chili? The first one has weird stuff... carrots, celery, and mushrooms... eww... But the second recipe is more likely. I send Hero to look for red beans... this could be a problem, too. I hate it when I mess up grocery shopping. But we've got the stuff for white chicken chili, so that will work. I get to work cleaning the kitchen: I worked on it last night, but, as usual, it's still messy. Cornbread first, then the dishes, then the chili. That should get things done about at the same time. The kids are making trail mix. Crasins and butterscotch chips and sunflower seeds.... interesting. I pass when they offer to share.
12:35: The cornbread is in the oven; there's piano practice going on, and a Latin review sheet in progress. I send a couple of texts, and notice that there's one from my husband, which is a treat. I start working on the chili, and even (mostly) follow the recipe. While it's cooking, I have Hero print out the essay that he's been writing, now that he's done reading Oliver Twist. It's the first time he's done this, and it's been a bit more of a process than I expected, but he's finished the first draft. I grab my red pen, and explain to him that it's about to bleed all over his paper, and I'm going to mark all the places that need refinement: now that he's got his ideas on the page, we need to work on getting them into a more refined state. This is called editing. He should neither be surprised, nor feel bad, as I scribble all over his work. This takes close to half hour: I explain about homophones, run-on sentences, and commas in a series, and remind him that he needs to pay attention to what his spell checker is telling him. ("But I did!" "Do it more!" -- and then some laughter.) He tells me that homophones are evil; I remember feeling the same way, and tell him so. I show him a paragraph that needs to be moved, and how his conclusion can be strengthened. It's fascinating to watch how writing the paper, which is contrasting Mr. Bumble's Christian service with Miss Rose's Christian service -- and I'm seeing him identify what it is that makes the one genuine and the other fake. I love watching his thoughts come into focus, and his understanding deepen. We finish up just as the cornbread's timer goes off: perfect.
1:15: Soup's on! I didn't get the dishes done earlier; after the kids made the trailmix, there's not quite enough bowls left: I have my soup in a mason jar. Which works, mostly. There's a certain amount of obligatory comments about how little one of the kids likes soup... but they go back for seconds, I notice. While we eat, we listen to about 20 minutes of Shakespeare's Henry VIII; Cardinal Wolsey is going down! We stop several times to explain things, and a couple of times to look things up (at their request: they want to know what the fate of the Cardinal was, without having to wait for the end of the story), and it goes really well. I love doing Shakespeare with Librivox! After that, they chant: "Narnia! Narnia! Narnia!" We're in chapter 2 of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.
2:00: "Put on your snow things on guys, and get outside!" We have fresh snow; something like 12 inches from yesterday. The kids get to work building a slide in the backyard; I go shovel out front. The snow is deeper than I'd anticipated, but not terrible: we shoveled twice while it was still snowing.
3:10: Turns out that the snowplow has been working hard: it's been flinging the heavy, wet snow up over the snowbank, and onto the sidewalk. Considering that the bank ranges from waist-high to shoulder-high, I wonder how fast the plow has been flying down my residential road! I put the packages I found on the porch inside, and then head back out to finish the job.
3:30: I tell the kids to finish up and come inside: an hour and a half of play in the cold is enough. They have packed down the snow we dumped off the back porch and are rolling down it, and not too anxious to come inside --until I ask them who has wet gloves. Oh. Everybody. And funny that, now that they notice, their hands are cold! I go in first, and they follow just a few minutes later. Given that shoveling took an hour and a half, rather than 20 minutes, I decide that the rest of the book work I'd planned will wait for tomorrow. I want to take a selfie with the snow bank as tall as my shoulder, but my phone's battery has had it, and quits.
3:45: The kids are back inside, and want their sketch books again: I bought an art class a couple of weeks ago, and there is a ton of sketching going on right now.
4:00: The daddy gets home. Lots of hugs and excitement. Chatting and pleasant family things. The younger kids want to stay home from church tonight, and promise to read upstairs after Daddy goes to bed until I get home to finish tucking them in. After a while he goes out to finish unburying the second car from the snow. I flip through a homeschool catalog, reading all the nice essays but deciding that I don't really need their curriculum, and then look at some responses to a question I'd posted on a UK genealogy forum.
5:30: Dragon is having a second go at the piano (violins managed to get skipped today), and wants me to come play a duet with him. He's not really ready, but after a little coaching makes it through one of the two songs he'd wanted to try. The Peanut has decided that she wants to learn to draw human faces, starting with eyebrows. I don't know if I can find an eyebrow tutorial for her, but I do find a video on how to draw a simple eye that I pull up on my phone, and she goes away happy, and comes back a few minutes later with a pretty credible eye. The big guy is drawing, too, still. I glance at the clock and realize that I'd better get busy and make dinner if we're going to be on time to church. This time after Daddy gets home goes by way too quickly!
6:30: Dinner's almost ready. Dragon is helping me, and he's experienced enough that he's actually helpful. Actually, today, I think that having his help made the critical difference to being on time. We scramble around, getting school off the table and dinner on. It's a group effort, and we just make it.
6:40: We're ready for prayer. And a little conversation. That's the best part about dinner, I think: time with my people.
6:53: Hero and I leave for church. Dragon and Peanut have persuaded their Dad to let them stay home, promising that when he heads to bed (his shift is crazy early), they'll stay upstairs and read. This is pretty routine for Dragon, but Peanut typically comes with me. Today she's persuaded her dad that she's big and responsible, and so she gets to stay home.
6:55: Hero and I are back at home grabbing some papers that got forgotten.
7:01: We make it! And we don't fall down on the ice in the parking lot. Yay for living close to the building! Hero heads off to do whatever the Young Men are doing tonight, and I open up the Family History Center. It's super quiet; nobody comes to play with me, so I actually spend just over an hour working on my own research, which is kind of cool. I and working through my Hope Chest names, and it seems like everybody is a mess of duplicates. I want to get the upgrade sometime soon so that I can have it pull out the people who have potential duplicates and get their data straightened out.
8:00: I start wandering around the building, looking for people to remind that the Center is open, and they can come play if they are bored. In the process, I catch one of the Young Women with a calendar in her hand, and remind her that if they'll invite me to their planning meetings, I'll set them up with appointments to learn more about research and finding names and everything. There's a leader standing there, and this conversation ends with more girls on the schedule for classes: yay!
8:45: Somehow, we're always nearly the last ones out of the building. Tonight is no exception; there's only 3 cars left. Weirdly, I'm in the mood to go to the grocery store, but I can't think of anything we'd need, so we just go home. The Daddy works early, so he's sleeping, and Peanut and Dragon are, as promised, upstairs reading. She looks like she's 3/4 asleep on the floor under her blanket, so I take her to read scriptures and tuck her in first. Then I go read scriptures to the boys and tell them goodnight, too.
10:15: I spend a few minutes looking at the assignments for the art class, and a few minutes looking at Facebook, then head downstairs to clean up the kitchen. While I do that, I listen to a Conference talk, For Him by Joy D Jones, while I work. I really like this talk, and start it over as soon as it's done, but I finish the dishes before she's done the second time. I'd like to sleep, so I turn her off and move on to shutting down things for bed.
11:15: After I finish writing down all the stuff we did all evening, I shut off my computer, do my martial arts drills and personal scripture study, and head to bed.
12:00: Sleepy time! I'd really like to learn to do this earlier...
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