A Day in the Life ~ April

The alarm was not a welcome sound this morning after a long night with a vomiting dog and a child having nightmares.  Alas, I got up at 6:30 anyway.  For a little while it was just me and my buddy, Boomer.  This is one food motivated dog.  With food in my hands, he won't leave my side.  LOL

Before long, Tom Sawyer arrived and immediately started building one of his Lego birthday sets.  He received several sets over the weekend.  I really need to look into organizing the Legos.  We are drowning in Legos!   This is a real passion for Tom Sawyer.  If anyone has suggestions on organizing Legos, I'd love to know them.

Since the girls were still asleep and Timothy was walking Boomer, I decided to finish painting the bookcase I got off of Freecycle last week.  It was a gross pink.  However, it is SEVEN feet tall and loaded with shelf space.  Did I mention that it is real wood?!  To add to the wonderfulness of this find, it was only a half mile away, and Tim and I were able to fit it into the van.  I like it much better as soft white, some paint my Mom had.  Totally FREE!

At 8:30 the last of the children woke up and I finished up the bookcase so I could concentrate on getting ready for our lessons.  The kids got themselves ready for the day and ate breakfast while watching Curious George and the Cosby Show.

At 9:00 am we started our lessons.  For the next two hours the kids rotated through Teaching Textbooks (math), our newest sensory box (occupational therapy), choice of reading with me or library book independent reading, independent chores (life skills), Follow the Directions workbooks (language arts and life skills) and writing a good paragraph from their mind maps (language arts).  I worked one-on-one with whatever child was currently doing writing or reading.  Our sensory bucket's theme for May is trains and magnets.  I dyed rock salt as black as I could get it to represent coal.  Then I added all of our magnets, some different types of metal (magnetic and non-magnetic), a Thomas the Tank crane that can pick up metal, and a harmonica.

We are really working on quality work around here.  Whether it be writing a paragraph or doing the dishes, the quality must meet my standards.  This means slowing down and expecting less quantity.  For Goldilocks there is the additional issue of learning how to use just enough of cleaning products.  She has a tendency to use a huge amount of cleaning supplies if she is unsupervised.  I will be doing a blog entry soon about living with FASD and RAD.  In some ways, this year has been filled with steps forward for her, and in other ways she seems to be spinning her wheels.

By 11:00 am everyone was ready for a break, including me.  The kids went back to the endless play of Legos that is going on around here.  I folded laundry, checked the blog, called a friend about a play we are seeing later in the week, and talked to my Mom.  At noon, we had lunch and did a 10 minute sweep.  We then dropped off Tim at college.  He goes to a Traumatic Brain Injury program at the community college three afternoons a week.  Since we were out on the road, we used our free birthday and half-birthday tokens at Chuck E Cheese.

It only took the kids about 20 minutes to spend all of their tokens and trade in their tickets for prizes.  We headed for the hardware store to buy some vegetable plants.  On our way, we talked about gambling and how Chuck E Cheese games were fun, but when you run out of tokens, you are done (life skills).  We got home at 2:15 pm and prepared the garden for planting.  We only planted three tomato plants, a cucumber plant, some herbs, and a bell pepper plant.  I hope to add onions for this rotation. After this crop is done, I will plant potatoes and zucchini.  Our raspberries are spreading like crazy.  I am so happy about that.  Some of the blueberry bushes look okay (not great), too (life skills).

We might build another raised bed for strawberries.  We will have to see if funds and time allow.
After working in the little garden, everyone wanted ice cream and popsicles.  While the kids ate, I read Guns What You Need to Know, which was suggested in our Little House on the Prairie unit study (life skills).  We then solved three more mysteries in our Art Fraud Detective book (art).  The kids are loving this book.  I thought it would take us the rest of the year to complete it.  However, I think we will be done with it this week.

It was now time to pick up Tim.  We picked him up and came home.  We took a few minutes to put the house to rights.  Then the kids had about 20 minutes of free time before Tom Sawyer was due at dance class.  They all played or watched the others play on the Wii.
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It is now 6:30 pm.  Tim is at fencing class and Tom Sawyer is home from dance (physical education,  theater, and social).  The girls are puttering in the gardens with Dad, and the day is winding down.  It is good.

Blessings, Dawn