Sometimes I find it hard to believe in the value of rest. I mean, on Mondays, we can predict how many letters M will have forgotten since we reviewed them on Friday, and B’s flute sounds best on Friday morning when he’s been practicing all week (don’t tell his teacher he takes weekends off). But if ever a day was an apologetic for rest, it was today.
I did look over my planning notebook on Monday, so I’d already made the hard decisions as to which activities we would skip to “catch up,” to where I’d meant us to be by now, not calculating the week and a half that we took off around Christmas and New Years (Note to self, just schedule the time off next year, don’t be silly. You know you won’t be pulling out the grammar texts after Christmas.) And I prepped the guys to get up earlier for breakfast. They were on time, I was a half hour late.
We read our chapter of the Story of the World, and all the rest of the little activities that we do together but often skip when I’m late out of the shower. I realized that I had most of the makings of a sauce for rice, and that that would be a dandy morning snack with tea since we’d just read about ancient China. Then I looked at the end of the chapter with the ancient picto-grams, and remembered the ink stick and stone set I’d bought B in China three years ago. I pulled that out and let them all take a turn painting with it. M and K of course enjoyed grinding the ink the most.
We got most of M’s regular work in, and spent our 45 min in the park playing in what was left of the snow. After nap and lunch, M and K gleefully made more finger paintings than I could find room to dry in the kitchen.
I think the latest cool discovery was how to motivate B to come to breakfast. Beyond the idea that if he beats me to the kitchen I won’t make him eat oatmeal: if he gets his breakfast and chores done, he can read in bed until 8:30 and I won’t bother him.