Dichotomous Day

Wow, it has been a day of extremes. First off, Mr. Annoying Baby went back to his usual sleep patterns *yawn* so that put me in a tad more emotional place than usual right off the bat. Also, somebody turned Cassia's volume up to 11 today and forgot to turn it back down. So she's waking me up at 7:00 this morning with her high frequency, high volume, fake baby voice, "Hiiiii Gweyson!!!! Does baby want to be tickle-wickled??" and he doesn't, so he's screaming and she's not taking no for an answer. (Did I mention that I had been up until midnight reading and then Grey woke up at 3:30am and then every hour or two after that?) Ugh. So I finally shoo them off hoping to get at least a few more minutes of shut eye. Five minutes later, I hear the phone going berserk because Greyson has both learned how to drag the dining room chairs around the house and how to push the pager button on the phone. I get up to deal with that only to hear more screaming from the bedroom. This time it's Cameron screaming because Cassia crawled into bed with him after I kicked her out. So I start yelling at her to get out of his bed and also for leaving Greyson on his own in the other room (not that him being with a 4-yr old is much better, but the big kids can usually help him to avoid major disaster).

I then give up hope for finding a better start to the morning and just go make coffee. I finally convince everyone to do something calm (and quiet) like watching a really cool version of The Nutcracker that we had gotten from the library. We all ended up really enjoying that. Cameron and Cassia were doing ballet all over the living room, including lifts, lol. They were too cute. Cameron has really taken a liking to ballet but every time I suggest that he try out lessons, he says that he only does ballet at home. Silly boy. We all had a really good time with that and when it was over I went to go hop in the shower while they watched the behind the scenes stuff. I get out of the shower to the sound of very large things going boom Boom BOOM. Very large, 3-1/2 to 4-ft tall things weighing between 40 and 55 lbs. Laughing, blondish things. All I know is that all the cushions were off the couch, the ottoman was in the middle of the room, and I heard Cassia excitedly exclaim, "I just did a BACK flip!!" Can I go back to bed yet? And now I'll fast forward through the part where no one would pick up the huge pile of Pokemon cards that had been strewn on the dining room table since last night, how I took them away forEVER (maybe), and the what-seemed-to-be hours of crying that ensued after that. Oh. My. God. Seriously... kill me now.

And then I put Greyson in bed for a nap and that cut down on the general chaos, considerably. And then we did schoolwork which went fabulously! First Cameron finished off the SWO workbook lesson of the week and then went on to do two sections on Spelling Time. Meanwhile, Cassia and I went and lay on my bed while she learned another verse of The Consonant Rhyme: letter G. It was so cute. At one point, when she had gotten all the short vowel sounds right, she said, "I am so good at this." LOL. Cameron joined us halfway through that and was enjoying remembering that he also had that poem memorized. Then we moved on to his Phonics lesson and learned a little chant to remember all the different r-changed vowels. There was lots of laughing and fun. In Phonics!! Next was Grammar and we reviewed the Thirty Days Has September poem, learned about "idea" nouns, did some copywork, and then underlined all the nouns in those sentences. Math was next with a quick little workbook exercise on simple multiplication (aka counting equal groups of things and rewriting it as a multiplication problem). And then we finally finished things off in my bed again, reading our history encyclopedia entries on ancient civilizations along the Indus River. I couldn't have asked for a better school day.

Greyson woke up and they all played for a little while. I don't even remember what they were doing, but I don't remember it annoying me much, lol. Oh no, I remember now! Cameron decided that he wanted to play his violin so he played while Cassia danced in the background and DH watched via webcam. Too cute. So since everyone was in a good mood we headed off to the library to return our movies and pick up some Ancient Indian folk tales. They were fabulously behaved in the library. The big kids spent most of their time playing Eye Spy on the library computer and Greyson kept going back and forth between the bathrooms (he's so thrilled that he's strong enough to push open the doors now) and the kid's library catalog computer. He'd just pull up a chair, type a bit on the keyboard (without even banging it!), grab the pencil, try to stick it in the mouse, and then run to the bathroom when I would take it away. LOL. Nut-job kid. ;) The librarian kept eyeing him, especially when I was looking up books on another computer, leaving him "alone." At one point she walked over to him on the pretense that he was about to fall (he wasn't even close) saying "whose baby is this" and then when I spoke up before she even finished her sentence because I hadn't actually taken my eyes off of him she walked away giving me That Look. I refused to feel guilty though because, like I said, I hadn't really taken my eyes off of him and he was behaving like an angel. I proved that by trying to carry him around instead and he just screamed and screamed. So I let him go back to his computer where he was happy as a clam. She stopped giving me That Look after that, lol.

Then we continued our perfect little outing by going to the grocery store. Wait, did I say perfect? Perfectly horrific!! Again... Oh. My. God. Kill me now. Not listening at all. Volume on 11. Spinning in circles all over the place. Cassia smashing her face into a display, probably giving herself a black eye, mere seconds after I told her for the thirtieth time to turn around and walk frontwards before she hurt herself or somebody else. Greyson just randomly reaching out of the cart and pulling things off the shelves onto the floor - thankfully nothing breakable. Greyson also reaching into the basket of the cart and opening every box and trying his very best to break all the eggs. I'm sure there was smoke coming out of my ears by the time we left. The worst part is that this horrible behavior had me so distracted that I wasn't really paying attention to prices and I was buying food for our 4-H project tomorrow. So now, the project which I promised would only have a $2 - $3 material fee is going to have a $5 - $6 one, or I'm going to lose a bunch of money. Grrrr.

So I came straight home to a nice pot of caffeine-free mint tea and my blog to vent while the wild monkeys run around in the backyard. And I feel much better now. Thank you for the free therapy.