A Homeschooling Monday in the Life of Levi (14), Luke (11), Leif (9), and Lola (5) [And Heidi, Too]
Mondays are our Classical Conversations community day.
[I spend a good portion of Sundays prepping for Mondays. I go to the grocery store. Make sure the kids have their papers and whatnot for school. Do laundry. Set out (and iron if need be) clothes for Lola and myself. Try to have the house relatively clean and neat (though this is a losing battle). Have Leif and Lola bathe. Try to get the kids to bed at a decent hour (also a losing battle). After the kids are in bed, I prep for my Essentials class, write out a task list for Levi, and set out lunch bags and snacks and such for Monday morning. I usually fall in bed around midnight or after.]
6:00 I hit the snooze button. Repeatedly. I am not a morning person. My preferred wake-up time is 9 am. Even 10 am would be nice...
6:20 I grudgingly roll out of bed and head to the shower. After getting myself half ready, I read my Bible and devotion book for a few minutes and pray for strength for the day. Russ leaves at some point. (He’s usually gone before I get out of bed, but his schedule is off this week.)
7:00 I wake the boys and go to check my email. Internet isn’t working on my computer. Luke pops out of bed, gets dressed, empties the dishwasher, and cooks some bacon. I pack Lola’s snack bag and begin packing lunch. I repeatedly go in the boys’ room to wake Levi and Leif.
7:30 Levi finally drags himself to the shower.
7:45 I drag Leif out of bed. I make eggs for Leif and myself and egg on toast for Levi. Luke toasts a bagel and eats it with cream cheese.
7:50 Lola wakes up and I give her Greek yogurt.
8:00 The push to the finish line begins. I stagger down the stretch, carrying Levi, Leif, and Lola. “Brush your teeth. Get dressed. Pack your snacks/lunch. Brush your teeth. Comb your hair. Get dressed. Gather your things. BRUSH YOUR TEETH. Where is your snack bag? Lola, stop playing with your toys and get dressed.” Leif sits like a stone in the living room. He refuses to get dressed because his jeans aren’t comfortable. I finish getting myself ready. I put a ponytail in Lola’s hair while Luke loads all our stuff in the truck and starts the engine so it will warm up. “Get your shoes on!” Lola won’t let me help her so I leave her to do it herself. She throws her shoes across the room. Levi is still getting ready and I’m starting to twitch. He asks, “Mom, do you think it would be unethical to augment a human with cybernetics?” (Clearly his mind is not on teeth brushing.) I’m supposed to take a frozen pie to a friend (for a swim team fundraiser), so I get a cooler with ice ready. And then I can’t find the pie. We leave the house a disaster.
8:50 We’re all in the truck by the skin of our teeth. The truck makes a weird beeping noise when I put it in reverse, and I wonder what’s going on. Luke says in exasperation, “We’re going to be late if you contemplate the baffling enigma indefinitely!” (I’m pretty sure he means “Forget it and get moving!” but I’m glad the vocabulary from Essentials is sticking.)
8:51 Lola realizes that she left her presentation (her toy for show-and-tell) at home and starts wailing. I tell her that’s the consequence of not getting ready with a good attitude. Levi hooks up his music to the truck speakers so we listen to “Fear Not This Night” from Guild Wars at top volume.
8:53 We’re at my mom’s house to drop off Levi with his bin of school work. [He’s doing some of the Classical Conversations Challenge B work at home and with his friend. Russ usually works from home on Mondays so Levi can stay with him, but this week he has to be in his office all week for training.] I chat with my mom and dad for a few minutes. Luke counts each minute and calls for me to stop talking.
9:01 We leave for our day at Classical Conversations. Lola is still screaming and she proceeds to scream the whole way there.
9:13 Lola has now been screaming for more than 20 minutes. Luke unloads the truck and the boys go to class. Lola refuses to pull herself together. We finally walk in (late) while she’s still throwing a fit, but she refuses to go to her class (for the first time ever). She sits in the back of Luke’s class and looks at her book. Luke’s class is learning about Ghiberti and working on an art project. The moment I’m distracted watching Luke, she disappears. I find her, she still won’t go to class, so I take her back to Luke’s. We go back and forth between classes for most of the morning, and she never finds her groove. She does manage to "massage" her face with sandpaper from their art project, and then has a painful red rash around her mouth for the rest of the day. I peek in on Leif’s class a couple times. The classes learn their new memory work in timeline, history, Latin, English grammar, math, science, and geography. They learn about core samples with a science activity. Each of the students give presentations and eat snacks. Then they review past memory work.
12:00 It’s finally lunch time. I spend most of the time talking. (And dealing with Lola. And losing Lola.) I’m late setting up my class. I’m late taking Lola to afternoon play camp in the gym.
1:00 My Essentials class begins barely on time. Game on. Luke and Leif are in my class. We cover complex, imperative, S-Vt-IO-DO sentences and then active and passive voice verb structures. We take a quick break and then come back to read IEW papers and cover the multiple-source, fused-outline research assignment with a new style tool (luckily it’s the www.asia.wub subordinating conjunctions that we covered during grammar). Leif is completely checked out half way through the afternoon and reads a book in the back of class while humming. (I’m trying to figure out appropriate expectations for him as we’re adjusting to a Tourette Syndrome diagnosis along with other comorbid diagnoses such as ADHD.) We end the afternoon with a rousing math game of Battleship Board Slam.
3:15 Class is over and I’m exhausted. I try to keep a fairly high-energy class, and my voice is shot. Clean up begins, but I have great helpers. Luke gathers up most of our class stuff and loads the truck. I pick up Lola from play camp. It seems she had a rough afternoon, as well. I see an early bedtime in our near future.
3:40 We finally leave CC.
3:55 We pick up Levi and I chat with my parents for a moment. Levi shows me the new Doctor Who shirt he got on a shopping trip with Bambi.
4:05 I stop next door at my sister’s and drop off a bin of girl clothes and pick up mini muffin tins.
4:15 We’re home. Hallelujah. We unload the truck. I discover I left the kitchen window open (from the bacon fumes). Oops. The house is still a disaster. I change into my pjs and grab a cold beverage. The kids have lost screen time, so they head outside for an epic Nerf battle. I pre-heat the oven for frozen pizza and discover I bought thin crispy crust instead of the thick crust that we like. I lie down in bed until the pizza is done.
5:00 Internet still not working on my computer, but I figure I can type up a log of our day. I hear a strange noise and can’t figure out what is making it.
5:05 I discover what the curious noise is: Luke is on the roof.
5:15 The kids come in for pizza.
5:45 Luke finds the pie I couldn’t find this morning—buried in the chest freezer. He begs to bake something. I relent and give him a recipe for glazed lemon muffins.
6:25 Russ arrives home. He brings me chocolate and fixes my internet. I heat up some food for him. I finish blogging.
7:00 Luke is finishing "cleaning" up the kitchen from his baking mess. It's read-aloud time and then an early bedtime for everyone. Maybe I'll get some reading in tonight. Or maybe I'll just go to sleep. Yeah, that sounds good.