I've been "behind" on memory keeping lately. I love looking back and seeing what our days used to look like but these days our days are so full and busy that I have little time and energy left to document it. I didn't plan to do this this morning and I did not do extra activities just to make things seem "busier". This is just me waking up exhausted after an exhausting day and deciding that I really need to try to document a "day in the life" at the moment so that when I look back, I'll remember what our days were like.
Woke up to two little boys crawling into bed discussing their dreams from the night before. Ethan went to play Pokemon Quest on the Ipad and Landon put Glitter Force on the TV. I wavered on my "get by without caffeine" goal and made coffee and heated up some breakfast that "past Liesl" thankfully made and froze for a day when I didn't have it all together.
I got dressed and spent an hour exercising and then fixed the boys their breakfast. They prefer to drink chocolate milk when they wake up and then eat a real breakfast and hour later.
I put Story of the World on as an Audio CD while the boys finished eating. They were so taken with what they were learning that they begged for another chapter and then another and started playing with thinking putty while we listened to stories of ancient Egyptians, ancient military dictators, Ziggarauts, and the code of Hammurabi. We also listened to the story of Abraham, the tribes of Judah, the story of Joseph, and the famine in Egypt. I cut them off at three chapters and then we looked at the maps and pictures from our activity guide.
Next Ethan did a keyboarding lesson while I did a day of "Zin Zin a Violin" from Landon's curriculum guide. Then it was off to the Orthodontist for a last minute appointment where they worked us in to check out Ethan's palate expander and a concern we had.
After the appointment, we came back and had 40 minutes to eat lunch and work on practicing writing the letter "S" for Landon using the "wet, dry, try" method on our small chalkboard and Ethan finished his keyboarding lesson from earlier. Then it was off to Lego Club for two hours!
Lego Club was fun and the boys immediately separated and went to different tables and started making friends and building. Ethan found an older kid that was happy to mentor him/give him ideas on how to make his giant crab riding an airplane into reality and Landon built a Police Station with a basement as well as Ionic columns and a flying car. Landon got so into his creation that he ended up running around and playing on the floor with his flying car and a little boy he befriended.
After Lego Club, Landon asked for ANOTHER day of school so I agreed. Sometimes he gets behind because he'll devise his own plan for his school day so I'll take any interest and run with it. Yesterday he ditched curriculum to do "ancient city math". Ancient City Math was a game he devised where he built a house with Jenga blocks, counted up the blocks, gave a long back story about the family that lived there, the time period in which they lived and what they did in that time. Then he devised a series of natural disasters for each house/time period and would count how many logs fell/the damage caused by the disaster. I'd write it down on scratch paper as a math problem and he'd mentally solve it. Pretty quickly I might add. During curriculum he acts like 1-10 math facts are hard but mentally hes doing math in the double digits. It looks like hes ready to move on to first grade math.
After Landon finished he wandered off to go read his books. His choice- I didn't direct him. He's been pretty obsessed with books on history lately. His favorites are "A Street Through Time" "See Inside Ancient Rome/Egypt, Houses Long Ago, Famous Cities, and Famous Palaces" He also likes a different series of See Inside Books that goes over Ancient Egyptian Towns, Greek Towns and Roman Towns and Castles. And Last but not least, he loves his Rome and Castle Cross Sections books. He is learning SO much all on his own.
While I finished up teaching Landon, Ethan worked on a drawing/writing journal where he wrote about his flying crab lego creation, then we worked on a geometry lesson from his math book. After Math, Landon starting building Ziggarauts out of Duplos which was a bit distracting to Ethan so he joined in on the fun! I sorted laundry while I waited for attention to come back to school.
Landon moved on to work on Mazes from his mazes around the world book. Ethan wanted to join in on the action with his book and they decided to "race". I want to go on record as saying that I thought this was a BAD IDEA because I do not want the boys to compete with each other. They did, and Landon won. Ethan got flustered and made an error that he might not have made otherwise and Landon won by quite a wide margin and Ethan was pretty upset. We stopped and talked it through and worked on character building issues. Ethan demanded a rematch and Landon laughingly declined. Landon's afraid to lose his victory. We took a break to work on chores (boys help with laundry and unloading dishes) and then they raced around the living room bouncing on their hippity hops.
Landon is the wild card these days that can delay a school day/distract his brother. He started building a model kit of Stonehenge because he saw a Stonehenge maze in his book. We've done this model before so he pulled it out and rebuilt it. Landon had questions about some of the narrow openings in the model and how it didn't make sense so I had to google some pictures to show him the true scale and that it wasn't really narrow like it appeared. Ethan interjected facts that he had read about Stonehenge (he had more details than Mama!) and that led to the boys excitedly hatching plans to build a model of Stonehenge out of mud. Then they went outside to water plants and build their creation but didn't finish because of our over 100 degree heat.
The desire for screen time and the necessity of finishing school first brought Ethan's attention back to school so we started working on his Language Arts lesson on the book "Sarah Plain and Tall". During Ethan's reading time Landon decided to do the noisiest build he could find with our Snap Circuits set. It wasn't on purpose but it drove Ethan crazy anyway and we had to pull out the noise cancelling headphones to get through his reading.
Last lesson was social studies but when I pulled it out and saw that it was a two day long lesson I decided to put it up and start it tomorrow. I called the school day "finished" and looked at the clock and it was already 5 pm! The boys earned their screen time and I rested up for 30 minutes before getting dinner ready for Taekwando. Luckily for me, out of the three days a week that they have class, Wednesdays are the night that Garrett takes them to Taekwando! While he took the boys, I loaded the dishwasher, hand washed dishes and made a marinade for tomorrows Chicken Fajitas. Then I put away some more laundry, paid a bill, and then collapsed on my bed to watch Anne with an E on Netflix.
The boys came home excited because Ethan earned THREE stripes on his stripe test and is now eligible to belt test for his orange belt next week. Landon earned his first stripe as a yellow belt and was excited as well. We decided to celebrate on the patio with ice cream. Afterwards, Ethan helped wiggle into our overgrown garden and harvest tomatoes from our sad looking tomato plants and then we let the boys stay up an extra 15 minutes to play since the heat was now finally bearable at 8:30 pm.
The boys were upset that they only had 15 minutes and didn't get to finish building their mud Stonehenge or cuneiform
mud tablets again. (they tried the mud tablets last week but rain ruined
them before they could "bake" in the sun). Ethan also started getting full of ideas of doing chores for money but since it was 9 pm we shut down those ideas.
Finally it was time for foot baths, clean pjs (soaking out chocolate ice cream stains from the PJs they were wearing) and a quick book reading from Garrett before bed! Garrett put the boys to bed while I added water to the chicken egg incubator that we have running in our closet and monitored the humidity and temperature levels. Late next week we will hopefully have some baby chickens hatching! (side lesson in our homeschool!)
And that's it! It was finally bedtime! Garrett and both felt over-tired and ready for bed. I had to mentally shake my unfinished to-do list and the things that we didn't accomplish so I could allow my tired brain to go to bed!
Tomorrow I have to work on Ethan's Korean Vocabulary words for his belt test and it is also an allergy shot day which means a 3 hour round trip to Dallas, Audio Books on Greek Mythology for the boys during the drive, books in the waiting room to help time pass and then a half school day when we get back. I should note that during our busiest days I feel like I never get a chance to sit down for very long and it can be 3 pm before I am finally able to get my own lunch. I feel familiar feelings from their toddler days of just not getting a chance to eat and take care of myself. Crazy that life can still be like that sometimes at their ages! Its not always that hard and plenty of days I'm able to sit down and eat lunch with them but not always. Just depends and partly depends on how "busy" Landon is. At one point he was making a giant map with construction paper he taped together on the floor and was drawing on. I had to be careful where I stepped! Ethan's been learning about maps and Landon has obviously been paying attention from wherever he is playing in the room.
Our days are crazy busy and full and going by way too fast. I have no idea how other parents manage to juggle it all.We have shot room twice a week, art on Tuesdays, Taekwando Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and also on Wednesdays we have HOA run activities, and we are participating in the summer reading club. Garrett tries to take the boys out for a long bike ride once a week and we try to go swimming once a week although lately its been less often. Garrett is training 3x a week for a 100 mile bike ride. Busy busy days.
At the end of the day I had over 7,000 steps or 3.5 miles all from mostly inside our house. This wasn't even a day where we had time to walk to the playground or take the boys for a walk/bike ride. This is what life looks like at this season and while its busy I want to savor it and remember it!
