Harriet Makes Me Laugh

Today Harriet curled up on one side of me while Eli snuggled on the other.  Eli was reading to me for school and Harriet wanted some attention.  She grabbed my arm and said, "Where did this come from?" in a perplexed voice.  Then she giggled and said, "Oh, from a human!"  The girl makes me laugh.

Today started out a little rocky.  I went downstairs and found more chaos than I can tolerate.  This is not an unusual experience but some days it is harder to remain calm than others.  I tried to talk to Kayli on the phone when she called but eventually I was too mad at the kids and had to hang up.  Sorry about that, Kate.  After a *short* moment of hysteria when I found brown sugar on Miriam's pillow and realized she'd opened her second bag of brown sugar in the past week, I pulled myself together.

Miriam practiced her piano (it always settles my nerves to have the most important part of the day checked off my list) and then she proceeded to vacuum the entire downstairs, edges and stairs included.

Cowen and Eli, meanwhile, scrubbed the walls up and down the stairwell because they had gone into the store room and made a mess.  I was not pleased.  Emeline finished all her school work while the other children scrubbed and vacuumed, and Harriet and Oskar played happily outside.

By noon, the downstairs was completely reformed into habitable living quarters and the stairwell looked fantastic (comparatively speaking).  My mood much improved, I allowed Emeline, Cowen, Eli, and Patsy to head to the hills for some aggressive rock hunting.  I even allowed a rock pick to be taken.  Be still my heart.

Miriam worked on school and managed to take an hour to complete her language arts (grr), but was so friendly about it that I didn't mind so much.  She got everything done she was supposed to and even took the littles and Mr. Wilson on a walk.  Awesome.  Less awesome is the big bruise on Oskar's head from an unfortunate stroller accident involving a certain three-year-old who always wants to help.  Since she was just trying to help, she will remain nameless.

There were leftovers for dinner so I didn't have to cook (yay!) and instead I helped Cowen with his capitalization practice while finishing baby girl's stocking.  It took me a gazillion hours, but it is entirely finished except for writing her name at the top.  And the elves rejoiced!  During that time, Emeline had a friend over, so that made her happy.

When Timothy got home he tried to cajole me into writing Badgerina's name on the stocking to make absolutely certain he gets the name he wants.  Since I'm only 90% convinced, I told him the name stays off until it is written on the birth certificate.  (We're currently thinking her name will be Annabel Mildred but like I said, the name is not set in stone.  Timothy would really, really, really like it to be set in stone.)

Now Timothy is at the store getting some milk because I have been without my van for another long week and haven't been able to take care of little errands like that.  Timothy has been taking the van to work because Gus needed a new fuel pump.  Argh.  Hopefully this will be the end of the vehicle hospitalizations until after another tax refund.  Does everyone else look forward to tax season as much as we do??  Our vehicles are definitely hanging in there on a prayer.

Timothy is also purchasing prizes.  Emeline won first prize in our weekly xtramath.org competition.  She improved her last week's score by 12 points--a house record.  Miriam came in at second place with a 10 point improvement.  Cowen was a bit disappointed that third place doesn't get a prize because he was third with an 8 point improvement (usually high enough to win first place).

Timothy is also getting prizes for the boys.  Cowen finished reading Ivanhoe so he gets a Reading Reward and Eli passed off his phonics Level Two (a big deal because he had to pass off 27 books).

Funnily enough, on the list I wrote out for Timothy the last item said, "Chocolate for the wifey."  Hmm.  Who could have added that??

While the day did not start out perfectly (Miriam, sorry about the screaming banshee interlude), it ended up being quite lovely.