A Week of Surprises

And the biggest one so far has been Grant.

My little boybarian, the one who frequently destroys things by the simple expedient of picking them up, the one who finds more trouble to get into than a sackful of chimps, this wonderful, difficult, awesome boy of mine absolutely thrived this week.

He wanted to do activities, he asked for paper to practice writing his name. He proudly taped his work to the living room wall. For the last year he has driven me right out of my tree with his inadvertant naughtiness and all he needed was a semi-bastardized pseudo-homeschooling program. Who knew?

I have to admit, my children have fought less with each other this week; Abby Kate has even shown signs of latent maturity by helping her brother with his work. I, who am so structured myself, totally missed this crucial principle: kids do well with structure.

One of the best things about the week was actually the scheduled cleaning activities. Over the course of the week we mopped, cleaned the bathrooms, put away laundry, dusted and tidied the living room...for the first week it went much better than I'd expected. Abby Kate totally took initiative and put her own laundry away after watching me explain to Grant how to sort his clean stuff in stacks and put in his drawers. That made me immensely proud. Some stuff was longer and more drawn out than if I'd done it myself and certainly their least favorite activity was tidying the living room, but when do they ever do that except under protest? The house still looks like 3 messy kids live in it, but it's progress.

We learned a lot of cool stuff about the ocean this week, worked on patterns and addition and odd/even numbers, practiced following directions, made models of jellyfish, made a jello aquarium with sharks in it, watched the coolest video of an octopus fighting a shark and generally expanded our understanding of the natural world. Kinda neat.

I have total respect for people who do this all the time. And I am profoundly grateful that I live in a community with excellent public schools.