First of all, no I did not draw this, nor did anyone I know. I just liked it because it is an image of a student and I had a couple extra students for part of the week this week.

A serendipitous occurrence on Monday. Instead of leaving Eli and Anna-Jessie home with Kepler, I took them with me to PEP. Wow, was it ever nice to get five solid hours of work done on Monday, rather than expecting them to work on their own and feel like I’m not really getting off to a very good start. So, new schedule starting this week — they will go along to PEP as well. Kepler will stay here with my sister.

I had two of my friend’s children here from Saturday night to Wednesday afternoon and since they are homeschooled, I just added them right into the mix. I enjoyed having them here and teaching them along with my own kids.

A highlight of the week was Tuesday afternoon when I took the four of them, plus Kepler, plus Joel, over to the park to do the parcourse, take a walk and play on the playground. These children have known each other since birth since their mothers have been best friends for many years. I loved watching them walk down the path, the two boys with their heads together talking, and the two girls side by side smiling and laughing. At the end of the walk and the parcourse the playground waited for us and this was Kepler’s favorite part. Kep got brave enough to slide headfirst down the tube slide and then he did it over and over, yelling gleefully as he slid down.

It was a beautiful day with the leaves turning and a little feeling of fall in the air.

STILL love the curriculum and what we are doing this year. I have realized though that my goal of completing the 900 hours of instruction as the state requires may not work out to 27 more weeks. 27 more weeks takes me to the end of May, which is when I would like to finish for the year. I’m not averaging 25 hours per week yet, so that’s something to work on. But we sure are learning a lot.

These rules came in handy this morning (although I was tempted not to follow #2), the morn upon which I was going to stride purposefully forth homeschooling every spare moment. Alas AND alack, helpful son #1 let me know we had a flood in the basement. It didn’t occur to me to use the flood as an object lesson for my students — properties of water and whatnot. All I could think was “ohboyohboyohboy what am I going to do?” Greg was, this morning, still in Alabama, and alas and alack again, my decluttering efforts in the basement are in SERIOUS need of attention so I had to move stuff and pick up dripping things and shove stuff out of the way and ponder why in the world the drain wasn’t draining and wonder how I was going to get this water cleaned up.

Chortling now, I’m remembering that I had the idea that I was going to CLEAN UP the water, and make a serious dent in the decluttering today and maybe even homeschool a bit on the side. Delusional.

It’s raining, first of all, and after the initial jolt of adrenalin keeping me floating above the ground as I bantered with the children and cooked them a hot breakfast, my natural nesting instincts kicked in and I needed a nap really bad.

I vacuumed up a bunch of water — 4 seconds at a time because it would fill up my vacuum basin in that amount of time, but had to run because one of my children had to go to the DOCTOR (always so inconvenient! jk joel) and by the time I got home, ate some lunch, and had the all-important nap, I discovered the water had gone away all by itself. Maybe the drain just wanted some privacy. Alas and alack for the third time, some of the water had SEEPED under Valerie’s wall into her carpet and padding. Oh joy.

You know, it’s amazing how exactly much stuff one child can place in a room. So, after about 50 trips across the room, I got the desk moved and all of its accompanying detritus. Pulled up the carpet, looked at the soaking wet padding, slowly stood up, backed out of the room, and came to do a blog post.

As for educating the little sponges this week, stay tuned for the next post where I tell you all of my adventures.