It All Comes Together

July 27th, 2008

about every other month week, i have a homeschooling freak out.  what am i doing?!  i need all the newest-coolest-most-expensive curriculum.  and then i talk to seasoned friends, i pray for peace and wisdom, and He hits me with inspiration.  i’m so thankful for those times.  yesterday was one of them.

years ago i taught a homeschooling art class.  i did crafts with the little ones; art history and intro to “real” media with the older ones.  in prepping for the class, i went online and looked up art history.  made a list of the “greats” and found google images to print off of their most famous works.  i then glued them to card stock and contact papered them.  in my folder i made a timeline and divided the artists accordingly.

so, yesterday i decided my kiddos needed exposure to the real stuff.  i pulled out my van gogh card, let them hold it and look at it, talked about where he painted some of his most famous paintings, looked at the brush strokes, talked about oil paintings, and then i went to my trusty map and drew out an eiffel tower, secretly stuck it to paris, and then looked up the eiffel tower site online (awesome kid games, by the way).   we read madeline and looked for the eiffel tower in the pictures.  discussed their names and talked with terrible awesome french accents.  madeline led to a discussion of what scars were and what an appendix was.  we talked about surgery and all things medical.  we talked about why the other little girls were sad and wanted to have their own surgeries.  we talked about being thankful and not wanting what others have or appear to have.

and we had a great school day.  and i felt good about what i’m doing again.

You Know It's Going To Be A Bad Day...

(The background story:  All these random items will fall neatly into place, just hang in there.  We got paid last Friday.  I haven’t cooked a dinner since I can remember.  We keep a wooden bar in the back sliding door to prevent criminals from lifting the door off it’s track.  We already have a window that was cracked [by the monkeys around here - how else?])

When…

It’s Monday.

The baby smears chocolate poptart on Daddy’s work shirt.

Your day starts out with a fight with your honey.

You scream at your kids.  And I don’t mean a little yellin’, I mean all out screamin’ like an idiot.

It’s Monday and your honey got paid on Friday.  Your honey comes in from work saying that he had gone to the gas station and the debit card is declined.

…and you determine at this point to try to make the evening better…

So you tell the kids that just as soon as you get dinner started (actually cooking dinner for the first time since you can remember) you’ll go swimming (again) with them, your honey says he’ll come join you.

You turn the spaghetti sauce on low, leave the potatoes in the oven to bake, and go out to turn the day around.

While swimming, your middlest says he can’t get in the house.

You realize the bar you keep in the sliding door has slid back down.  Locking you out.

The front and side doors - dead bolted.

All the windows – carefully locked.

The extra key kept for such times?  Sitting on the back counter inside the house to be put back outside after the last time we locked ourselves out.

That cool waterproof phone to call the locksmith (which would’ve been useless since the debit card was declined)?  On the base inside the house.

The keys to the van to go to the in-laws for suggestions?  Inside the house.

So after wandering around the house barefoot, wet, and clueless for approximately 45 minutes with the children saying things like, “My baked potatoes are gonna burn!”  “What happens if the spaghetti catches on fire?”  “Are we gonna get to spend the night outside?”  “Can we camp out tonight?”  “Are we gonna die out here?”

We decide that the best solution, the best now, is to go on and fully break that already cracked window in the bedroom.  With a heavy heart I slammed it with a gardening tool, reached inside, unlocked the window, and became the hero to excited exclamations such as, “You did it!!”

Realizing then that the window was directly above our bed.  The bed that I would be drifting off to sleep in approximately 3 hours was covered in shards of glass. 

Dinner was salvaged.  The children were fed, bathed, and put to bed.  Our bed was vacuumed out, sheets changed, and the window blocked with a sheet of wood and ironically, the wooden bar that started the whole thing.

And with the daylight of the next day came a new perspective.  The wood in the window makes it nice and dark for snoozing.  Our elderly neighbors bought a new computer and wanted my honey to help them with it – and insisted on giving us $50 cash.  The window was already gonna have to be replaced.  The sheets were in desperate need of washing.  At least the non-secured window is in our room now – just makes me feel better that it’s no longer the kids’ room. 

And we know that our feeble attempts at keeping the house secure are effective.  At least for non-criminal types like ourselves.