Freedom!

Ah, it's so nice to have the freedom of a loose schedule. It's a very light week with practically nothing on the calendar at all so when I emerged from the shower this morning to find Greyson at the coffee table surrounded by a pair of scissors and four peeled and slightly mashed bananas and two other children sitting right next to him, brainlessly staring at the television as if they had no concept of what was going on around them (though one did have a banana in his mouth), I had no problem shutting off the tv, throwing a minor fit, and demanding that no one was doing anything until the entire house was sparkling and everyone started taking a little bit of responsibility for their actions and the world around them. Phew! So, the sheets got changed, the toys got picked up, and the entire house got straightened in record time. I think I made an impression. ;)

A spontaneous gymnastics competition broke out in the living room after that. Greyson started it by laying over the coffee table and doing a half-headstand. That prompted the other two to try doing their own head or handstands around the room, which led to cartwheels, which led to Greyson doing his first solo forward rolls, which led to Cameron doing his first perfect forward roll with an elevator up (aka standing up right after the roll without putting his hands down or crossing his legs). They were having fun and they were exercising so I announced that school would begin in 15 minutes. Unfortunately, things deteriorated into some strange and loud game of dogpile/horsey and I had to call things to a halt before someone got really hurt. It always amazes me how quickly things go from fun to insane.

School had actually started earlier in the morning. For some reason Cameron didn't wake up until after 9:00 and Cassia, eager to finish the last few pages in her math book, wanted to do her math before he woke up. She finished up a page on identifying one quarter versus one of four different sized pieces of a shape and then she moved on to the last section which was an introduction to adding using a number line. The new book picked up right at that point and she did another page or two there before Cameron woke up. He, inspired by the math in the air, decided to play some Timez Attack and worked on his 4 and 5 times tables. That was all before the shower and the banana incident.

Once the chaos had again subsided, Cameron did a three-page lesson in phonics on more common prefixes like un, en, uni, bi, and tri. He read exceptionally well. Stellar, in fact. But it did take a long time and Greyson was being Greyson and landed himself in both a time out and a nap during that lesson. Things were much easier then, lol. Next was grammar where we reviewed linking verbs and identified the ones that had occurred in the story of the Camel's Nose. It ended with a pretty fun game where we cut up the sentences from said story into subject, linking verb, and description parts and rearranged them to make funny sentences. My favorite was, "My nose is not big enough for the two of us." LOL.

Both kids quickly reminded me that they had already done math and so we then moved on to history. We read about the ancient peoples of the Americas, specifically the Nazca and their mysterious drawings

and the Olmec and their giant heads.

We looked at the locations of both on our wall (floor, lol) map and on Google Earth and then looked at more pictures on Wikipedia. It felt like a good little explore on the subject. I was happy and they were reasonably interested.

It was a good day, yet again, and despite the bananas we ended up with all our work done and a clean house. We even went and picked up a big box full of local, sustainably farmed meat from our new meat CSA. We got lots of steaks and chops in beef, pork, and lamb varieties. We may have only gotten 2 each of the steaks and chops but they are HUGE (at least a pound each) and should easily feed our little family, especially since Cassia won't touch a piece of meat unless it is covered in sugar, lol. Now I just need to be a good girl and plan out some menus so that I actually remember to defrost and use this local, natural goodness over the next month and don't keep running to the store for something to make at the last minute.