What a snarly day

We had a miserable day yesterday. All of us snarling at each other, none of us feeling quite up to snuff health-wise. So I thought I'd start out with reading history. We're doing the Ancient Israelites, and I'd thought that we could do the section on Food and then maybe go to Wegmans and buy the kind of meal that the Ancient Israelites would have eaten (had they had a Wegmans). They listened edgily for a while, not really eating their breakfast, even when I reminded them that the Ancient Israelites would have killed for some Special K.

After trying for a little while and realizing this whole home-schooling deal wasn't working, I thought -- a shower! They need a shower. It would be a good conceptual break and we can get back to this from a fresh perspective. And they like to shower, particularly together; they make up whole little plays and things in this teeny-tiny shower stall that is in the master bath. (They like it because it has jets from the side as well as the top...a '50s-version of jets, that is, that spray too much water out of ugly pink tile, but it works, at least until the water gets cold.) Well, yesterday the teeny-tiny shower stall was too teeny-tiny for our collective mood and there was only fighting. Clean fighting, but fighting nonetheless. And after they got out, Madison worked herself up into a lather (har!) and had a naked whining fit for like 20 minutes, crouched over the floor heating vent in my bedroom the whole time to keep warm because my bedroom stays at a nice cozy 54 degrees what with all the circa-1920 windows and 15-degree weather outside. I have no idea what that was all about.

So, I gave up. Really. I told the girls that we were just going to listen to the CD we'd gotten the other day from the library, Because of Winn-Dixie (which is excellent and not only because it's read by Cherry Jones), and bake pumpkin pie, and forget about education.

Forget about education?!? You would think that a cheer would have lifted my now-insulated roof (more about that later). But no. They were appalled. "PLEASE, Mom!" they begged. "Please let's do school."

"Forget it," I said. "Don't worry about it. We'll just take a mental health day. Read. Listen to Winn-Dixie. Play Club Penguin. Whatever. I don't feel like educating you people, either."

They didn't much like it. They actually like the structure, the check marks on the list, the sense of minute-by-minute accomplishment. I said, "Pretend it's Saturday."

I got some work done that I needed to get done, but mostly I wasted time in the afternoon by trying to find Timber Rock Lake in Missouri. My Missouri client that sells peonies, daylilies, and irises, whom I spoke with yesterday morning for the first time in a while, has offered to let us use his log cabin on that lake for a few weekdays in May, and boy did I need a vacation yesterday.

Then they had Brownies last night, at which they decorated a couple of cakes for the Juliette Low Unbirthday Party which is Friday night, and all seemed well. David has a cold too, just like me, so we all went to bed with the girls last night. I slept from 9:30-7:15 and I feel like a new woman.

So I'd better get to the whole Education thing.