Homeschooling: First Day

We didn't get very much done today.

I meant to start the morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, with lessons at the ready, but when we got home from visiting my folks I had to give haircuts to every one of my male family members, and by the time we finished that and the baths and the bedtime routine (which is always difficult after a change in routine) there wasn't enough left of me to even watch TV with FH. I just went to bed. I didn't sleep well until the wee hours of the morning, so I ended up sleeping in. I normally get in some computer time in the mornings, but that was complicated by our computer needing several million reboots, only to discover that for some odd reason all the print jobs are vanishing, even though the printers themselves are all working. So I couldn't print anything out-- no shipping labels, no invoices, no worksheets. Figuring that out got me to about 10 am. In between things we did Planet of the Day (at Sonshine's request) and Dictionary Exploration.

I have a new all-in-one that I hadn't bothered installing because tonight FH is wiping the hard drive and reinstalling Windows, so I hunted down a USB printer cable and hooked the thing directly up to the computer, not through the network. I managed to get it to print out a test page, but all other print jobs went directly to nowhere without getting anywhere near the printer. So I hauled the new printer and USB cable up two flights of stairs to Princess' computer, hooked it up, installed it up there, and managed to print out the kids' math drills, only to discover that they came out with random numbers and characters instead of the usual ones. I suspect this is because we hadn't bought a subscription to that site where I got the worksheets, but I was out of time to test out any hypotheses, and I had to get around to, you know, actually schooling the kids. By this time it was about 11 am.

We got Knuckles down for a nap and sat down for math time. I was going to teach Sonshine first and then teach Princess while Sonshine did his work, but Sonshine wouldn't do any math. Instead he started rollling around on the floor moaning that his left wrist hurt too much to hold the paper, leaving him incapable of doing math. Sonshine injured his wrist horsing around on the stairs about 5 days ago, and it was bad enough that we suspected it might be broken, but decided to wait and observe it. He had injured it while in a frenzy, and thought there was a chance he was exaggerating the pain because of the frenzy he was in. Within a few hours he said it still ached, but it didn't seem to be hurting badly enough to keep him from eating large quantities of food, running around the house tormenting his siblings, or cutting out paper toys, so we figured he'd probably just sprained it and it'd feel better in a week. With him acting like that, though, I was worried enough to make him a doctor appointment for the afternoon.

After lunch we did History and then I had to take a break. All through History, Sonshine kept questioning me about when we would be talking about Sputnik. Evidently he was under the impression that homeschooling was going to entail non-stop astronomy. He was mightily disappointed. I was also very tired, and not just of being questioned about Sputnik and the precise length of the Revolutionary War. I had to eat something too, since I'd spent lunch time trying to get caught up on the computer stuff I'd not done in the morning.

Right before Bagel got home from preschool, Knuckles threw up all over the stairs, the living room, and the kitchen, in the home's main traffic area. So I had to clean all that up. As soon as Bagel got home and I finished cleaning, we had to turn around and leave for Sonshine's doctor appointment. So Bagel hadn't had a diaper change, and neither little boy had had a nap (except for Knuckles who had his brief morning rest).

At the doctor's, Sonshine got his X-rays and we discovered that he has a hairline fracture in his radius. So the doctor sent us to the orthopedist for further evaluation, to see if it needed to be re-set to a better position. Fortunately it didn't, and Sonshine got a brace instead of a cast, and doctor's orders to do just what his Mom has been telling him to do for ages: quit horsing around on the stairs. He has to go back in two weeks, sooner if he falls on the wrist. I'm guessing that means he'll be seeing the orthopedist in about three days. All bets are welcome on that; I should start a pool for how long it'll take Sonshine to fall on the wrist and have to go back to the orthopedist. Prize is a one pound bag of "contraband" milk- or peanut-containing candy.

By the time we got back from the orthopedist's, we'd been 2 1/2 hours in doctor's offices with two napless, snackless little boys who were just about ready to explode, with Bagel ready to explode from the diaper end as well. I got them changed up and herded them into their beds for naps that they of course resisted. And now I'm cooking dinner. It's just pasta, nothing really nice.

So that was our first day of homeschool.