Home schooling day from Hell

It must have been the sugar from Halloween. Or maybe the kids are coming down with something.

Whatever it was, Thursday was the home schooling day from Hell. Madison was beside herself with angst over everything. I made what seems to have been a mistake, letting her read for an hour and a half (finishing up Maida's Little House) first thing in the morning. Skipping from that right to breakfast, then to math, was a disaster. The worst always happens when I decide that enough is enough, I'm not going to LET her continue in the subject that's causing her grief that day, then we have a 20-minute tantrum because I'm not letting her do math. Good grief.

Even Handwriting Without Tears turned on the waterworks.

The only thing that didn't cause tears today was, oddly, her SRA cards that we use for reading/logic. I often get outright rebellion over those, though they're quite easy for her.

The worst thing for Madison is that I told her that if she got finished with her work by noon, she could bake bread in the afternoon after we got back from the gym, as long as there were no more tantrums. She finished the SRA work in record time. Then, so help me, as we *pull into the driveway* from gym/errands, the child has a squawking fit over something I can't even remember, and she lost bread baking. Good grief.

It may also be that we had a nice long weekend with David last weekend, and she's experiencing the loss of his being back in Rochester.

Proof that even those of us who have brilliant children who get on great rolls sometimes, have days of total failure. :-)

Well, maybe not total failure. We're studying American Indians during the month of November, and I'm reading from a nice series of kids books I got from the Southwest Indian Foundation almost a decade ago. The kids love to be read to during lunch, and today we did myths from the Navajos and the Eskimos. They sure love legends. There's even an Atlas parallel figure in the Eskimo legend we read, so it was a nice connection to the Greeks.