Good intentions and real life

David is away this week so I'm the parent on-duty.  Yesterday started out a little rough (there was lots of yelling on both sides as we made our way through school) but we had friends over in the afternoon and everyone seemed to recover their good attitudes.  The boys were great hosts and even happily helped clean up once our friends had headed home.  We actually had the house all cleaned up before bed and squeezed in a game of Tsuro.  Mr. 1 had gotten up at 5:30am and the last boy was finally in bed at 9:15pm.  It was a long day and I really wanted to start today on the right foot so I headed to bed even though it was quiet and I had a good book to read.

This morning I was up early again with Mr. 1 but with a clean diaper and a song he was back in bed and I actually had time for a long hot shower and a quiet cup of coffee.  The boys began drifting out at 7am - beginning as always with Mr. 8 who somehow claims to wake up between 6:59 and 7:01 every day.  I'm pretty sure I heard him on the stairs first at 6:45 but he stayed downstairs and quiet until 7am which is just what I had asked.  From then until 8am when Mr. 3 headed off to school, it was crazy getting everyone dressed and ready for their day, Mr. 3's lunch made, breakfast.  When I came back in from walking Mr. 3 out to the car, the house seemed relatively under control.  The older boys are trying to solve the puzzle in The Eleventh Hour by Graham Base (they loved Enigma and The Legend of the Golden Snail as well - anything with a code or a puzzle) and eventually I had to confiscate the book or we wouldn't have gotten anything else done.  We started school and all was well until we started reading aloud and I realized Mr. 1 was a bit smelly.  Okay, more than a bit.

I let the boys continue building a train track for Mr. 1 and tried to change him off to the side but he was not pleased about being taken away from the trains and our quick change created a mess that took 45 minutes, a bath, new clothes, and scrubbing the carpet to completely clean-up.  So plans changed and we didn't manage to finish our reading.  Or get to our science experiment as somehow the Dinoscope has disappeared (they were using it with the Raspberry Pi and thought they remembered just where they had left it but it is now completely missing which derailed science after we'd finally gotten back to school).

So nothing goes as planned but we manage to get in what we can.  Math, a little history, some writing, a short discussion on light and interference.  Mr. 8 and Mr. 10 both have been history projects in the works - Mr. 10 is drawing the troop movements during six of the battles of the Civil War and he has great plans to make a video using models to explain the battles and Mr. 8 is drawing a map of the country during the Civil War with the sites of important events.  So we'll try to get some work done on those today.  As well as catching up with our Journey North project.  There are other things on the schedule but with a one year old you get done what you can and I'm trying to be okay with that.