Theatrical Thursday

(Now I've given up on both funky songs and funky books. On to tongue twisters - I dare you to say it ten times fast, lol.)

Oh, such a long day today. Greyson started crying at about 1:30 am. He didn't even want milk or anything. He cried every couple hours all night long but mostly calmed down pretty quickly with a rub on the back and a snuggle from me. But it was just enough to totally disturb my sleep. Cassia also came into my bed somewhere around 3:30 or 4:00am. Bad dreams. She didn't really bother me much except that I had to worry about Greyson's thrashing resulting in her getting smacked in the face. She doesn't take kindly to that in the middle of the night. ;)

We finally got the day started with ballet. I was pretty much half asleep throughout the lesson and Cameron was totally bored. We got a tip about a bigger waiting room upstairs that I thought was reserved for dancers only, but it turns out that parents can use it too. Next week I'm going to have Cameron bring his schoolwork and we'll hang out in there instead. I wish I had a guaranteed "sit and play" toy for Greyson. He will, at times, sit for like an hour playing with something that interests him but you never know what that will be or when he will be in the mood to sit. Usually he just roams and destroys. Actually, my purse is a given attention grabber, but that's off limits since he permanently lost my keys (it's been almost three months and we still can't find them!). Anyway, the thought is that hopefully the novelty of being in a new room will interest him enough to keep him from screeching the entire time... especially since this waiting room is right next door to the studio where Cassia dances.

After class, we stopped at the grocery store and then came home and had lunch and then finally got around to starting school about 1:00. I was just dead tired by then. We were doing this game for Phonics and Cameron and Cassia were just having the best time with it. It was one of those ones where a bunch of sentences are split in half and then you shuffle the cards to make silly sentence combinations. There were 13 sentences. They played four times! My child who completely balks at the sight of a five sentence paragraph read 52 sentences for this game. I could not stay awake, lol. I kept putting my head back on the couch and dozing only to be awoken a millisecond later with, "Mommy... MOMMY! What's this word again?" Sheesh! Why can't he be interested when I'm awake?! LOL.

Next was Grammar but I chose to skip it. ;) I was too tired to flip through the book and decide which lessons we were skipping and which were worthwhile. So then we did Science and started the new MPH Science 4A books. We read about matter and mass and did some experiments/activities with different sized and balls of the same material and same sized balls of different materials. The activity book called for a polystyrene ball, a rubber ball, and an iron ball all of the same size. Yeah, let me just get that iron ball out of the closet, lol. I guess it's a Singapore thing. ;) We went for a ping pong ball, a golf ball, and a rubber dog ball instead. So far, it looks like the book will remain doable. The concepts are getting much more advanced - I'm noticing that Cassia's having a lot harder time following along - but I think I can still modify it enough to be workable. I mean, I'm just looking for a nice, kid-friendly overview to all of science. I'm not concerned about whether or not the children will be able to pass the Singapore Ministry of Education's science examination at the end of our studies. ;)

I had some library books on matter and mass that I had wanted to read, but our science period came to an abrupt end when Greyson woke up from his nap. We had to quickly move all our stuff from the coffee table to the dining room table before he started ripping it all to shreds. It was at that point that I noticed Cameron's copywork sitting on the dining room table and remembered that he hadn't done that yet. So he did that while I folded some laundry. He finished before I did and I heard him running around playing with Cassia and chanting "But the child that is born on restful Sunday is happy and cheerful, and loves to play." I never told him what his copywork said. I'm thinking that it was a very wise decision to use the memory work for copywork.

At this point he reminded me that he hadn't done Spelling Time yet today either! So he did that while I folded some more laundry and he got another 100% on their test. Woo Hoo! All that practice is really helping. Finally we got to Math and started the section on multiplication. We were both getting pretty burned out by that point so thankfully it went very quickly. Time to relax a bit, so he went off to play some video games and I went to...

...take a nap? HA! Wishful thinking.

Cassia was insistent that we do her schoolwork today too. She only asks to do it once every week or two, but it had to be today when I was so dead tired and just had a major case of the blahs. So we did a lesson in OPGTR. Many times that will be enough for her and she will happily go off reciting her vowel and consonant rhymes. Today however she insisted that we also do her ETC primer and she did about a dozen pages in that - all needing some sort of assistance from me - before she finally decided that we could "save the rest for tomorrow." I have to admit though, I was really impressed with her work today. She got all the first letter sounds right on stuff that we haven't worked on in ages. She also did a fabulous job on actually writing the letters which she usually will just skip altogether.

Dinner (French onion soup and cheese ravioli) gave me a little energy back so we ended the day with a rousing Pokemon battle. Back to back duels and I won them both, bwahahahaha! It really is a fun game. We're all obsessed. At bedtime tonight, Cassia said that blankets were the evolved form of sheets, lol. (You won't recognize the cleverness and humor of that unless you, yourself, are a Pokefan.) DH ordered us a bunch of specialty cards off ebay and they shipped today. We will all be obsessively stalking the mailbox over the next few days, I am sure. I need my Dark-Metal energy cards! If only adding energy to this tired old body were so easy. *sigh*

Good night, my friends. I am going to call on my old friend, Yoga, to try and get some energy and vitality back. I'm trying my hardest to get back into the habit. One day down, a lifetime to go.