The Simple Life at Home

Argghhhh! My kids are driving me absolutely crazy! We haven't been "doing school" since we finished our annual testing in mid-May and now I have cut off their lifeline to the outside world (tv) and, horrors of horrors!, am restricting their access to other electronics to two hours a day. You know, this is the kind of thing that lands parents in jail, I hear.

But the end result of all this is that my kids are bored silly and fighting constantly. I was going to put off resuming schoolwork until we come back from Tennessee, but I just can't stand it any more. So starting tomorrow I think we'll do school 3 days a week and 2 days a week take off to do fun stuff. This week we'll be taking advantage of the free summer movies and see Nanny McPhee and on Thursday I think we're going to the zoo. We haven't been there in ages.

Plus we just received Emily's new math curriculum on Friday and I can't wait to get her using it. Pretty sad when that's a highlight of my life, huh, people? But can you believe Emily is going to be doing Pre-Algebra? It's just hard for me to fathom. I mean, just yesterday we were counting beans on the counter for math. Sigh...Well, at least she won't have to repeat Algebra 1 three times like one of her parents who shall remain nameless. I mean, the other parent is an engineer for goodness sake! In fact, at this very moment I have triangles and squares masking taped all over my living room floor so that Daddy could teach the kids about area and Pythagoraen theory. Um, have I mentioned that Daniel is just going into 5th grade and is still working on memorizing his times tables? But he's gonna have geometry and algebra down pat! Which reminds me of the time when Daniel was a baby and hubby came home with a poster for me to put up above his changing table for Daniel to look at. People, it was the Periodic Table of the Elements! No lie! He's not a big believer in the whole step-by-step concept, can you tell?

But I digress. Tomorrow we leave the land of free time and get back to more structure in our lives. I probably won't have them do all the subjects, as I do want to continue our morning walks and afternoon swimming, plus I have some "life skills" stuff I want to work on for this summer. Maybe we'll talk about that tomorrow.