Monday - Day in the Life

This week I'm blogging as part of my moment in the 'spotlight' on the iVillage Unschooling Board I help moderate. I'm doing a very "Day in the Life" style of blogging, since that's the sort of thing new homeschoolers are often hungry for at this time of year. I figured I'm doing all that writing, I might as well get double credit for it. So I'm going to copy and paste it in here.

Monday

Erin was up early as usual and had looked after the puppy. She was reading a science magazine when I got up. I checked my e-mail and made coffee, and before I knew it Fiona had woken up. She and I went out and played with the puppy, refilled the dogfood container, watered and fed the chickens and collected the eggs.


When we got back in, Noah was awake. He and Erin spent some time playing Age of Empires II - the Titans together. I started making cinnamon buns.


At 9:15 am I awoke Sophie and made sure everyone was out of their pyjamas and fed. I rolled up the cinnamon buns.


At 9:45 am I packed the van and we headed off to our 10:00 GRUBS meeting. GRUBS is our gardening/environmental club. There were four other families there, with a total of 9 other kids. We beachcombed and found another piece of driftwood suitable for a couple of fenceposts. The kids foraged for blackberries and we all snacked. Everyone weeded and tended their individual plot. Together we pulled all the gone-to-seed lettuce and spinach out of two of the communal beds, mixed a bunch of manure in, and every child planted a couple of short rows of fall crop (cool-crop lettuce, spinach, arugula, radishes). We made plans for our fall harvest festival and talked about plans for upcoming meetings. The club broke up at about 12:15.

We came home and had lunch, followed by cinnamon buns. I did some drywall mudding in the dining room while the kids amused themselves on the computer and with the board game Blokus. They also went outside for some bike-riding and swinging and climbing on the rope. They played with the puppy.

Sophie did her violin practising with my help. Noah did his piano practising and refused my help but did a fantastic job with some challenging new repertoire. He got very annoyed when I commented on his hard work, but recovered enough to carry on. Erin went off to her room to read and write.

I made supper. I had thought I was on the schedule for work in the evening, but when I called to confirm, it turned out someone else was taking the clinic, so I had a unexpected free evening.

We did the dishes together. Erin went off to practice violin and piano. Noah did his viola practising. I did more drywall mudding. Sophie went to her room to read for a while.

As it got close to bedtime I pulled out our current readaloud "the Star of Kazan" by Eva Ibbottson and began reading. Erin, who has already read the book, listened to a chapter and then went off to her room. Once there she writes in her journal, and then reads aloud very privately to herself for about half an hour. While she's reading aloud she won't allow Sophie into their shared bedroom.

So I finished reading three chapters of "Star of Kazan" and Noah and Sophie headed off to bed. Noah put on a mythology story CD and crawled into bed, but Sophie turned up in the living room again because Erin wasn't done her reading aloud and had banished her. Sophie is always tired, mildly annoyed, but very accommodating when Erin does this. I've recognized that this unfair treatment by Erin bothers Chuck and me more than it bothers Sophie. So I tried to do something more constructive than just getting angry at Erin on Sophie's behalf, and invited Sophie to come up to the master bedroom and lie down with me and Fiona (who had long since fallen asleep on my shoulder). We had a lovely talk about this and that for about 20 minutes.

Erin had finished reading, so Sophie was allowed into her own bed to go to sleep.