Summertime

and the living is definitely easy. I love not having to get them up, dressed, fed and out the door each morning and they love it as well. I love having lazy, snuggle-in kinds of days. I know I won't love it as much when I have to go back to full-time work next week, but it's golden right now.

The girls have made so much progress this year with their schoolwork that I am reticent to just let it all go for a few months. Especially Dixie, as her social life seems to interfere a good bit with her academic one and the first two months in each new classroom are spent establishing a good pecking order.

So each day, we sit at the table for 90 minutes and have school. We read, we write, we spell, we do math. They love it, and have even started telling random children in parks, "We're homeschooled now."

With Charlie, I keep having this feeling that time is slipping away. He is making developmental progress more rapidly, but you remember from algebra the train that left the station two hours later going ten m.p.h. more slowly--the longer it runs, the further behind it gets.

We've been doing a lot of reading with Charlie and a lot of talking about the books he reads. Tonight, he "read" The Big Barn (Margaret Wise Brown) to me by naming every single animal in it as he flipped page-by-page. Halfway through, though, boredom kicked in and each page suddenly had a lot of horses. Horse, horse, horse, horse, horse--forget the picture.

Today, for the first time, Charlie requested a book by it's title.

He's really focused on names right now. He wants to know what everything's name is. He asks, about everything, "What is his name? What is his color? What is his head? What is his feet?"

This works with animals and bugs, but was pretty awkward with the African-American boy at the playground.

I've also been playing quite a lot of board games. For me, actually, they are bored games, but the kids are happy. I always play the game once with just Charlie and me, going by whatever set of rules exist in his head. Then round two is when Charlie plays elsewhere and I play with the girls.

His favorite part of the game Sorry is finding the label on the side with a baby head with the little red circle/slash NO sign over it and saying, "NO babies play this game. This game is not for babies."

He then tells us that he is big and gets bigger so he can go to Kindergarten.

He's noticing the NO sign in a lot of places and will now inform us that there is NO SMOKING in the grocery store. He also screams out THAT IS A STOP SIGN anytime one is in his view. I'm thinking of darkening his windows in PennyVann--all that shouting is startling.

I'm also getting caught up and cleaned out while trying to enjoy every one of my ten lazy days before I start my next scoring project.