When Good Moms Have Bad Days

This week was tough. And those feelings were fairly evenly distributed throughout the many veins of activity that contribute our family pulse.

The kids were draggy about schoolwork, even the fun stuff.

An unusual excess of energy was never quite burned off, despite bouncing and crawling around on the floor like puppies. So the noise level and bickering that often ensued was very painful and exceedingly annoying to this mommy this week!

Much grumbling occurred in regard to chores and who might be neglecting them, including me.

I spent a rather embarrassing amount of time doing nothing but drinking coffee and watching my kids play with the chickens.

An unprecedented amount of spillage happened, with relatively few witnesses,  but many fingers pointed at the cat. But the things he spilled could easily have been set in places he has little or no access to by said finger pointers.

Because of the above, I have basically been washing towels over and over and over and over. This means I've fallen steadily behind in the laundry department again. And that which has been washed and dried (sometimes after being rewashed because it was forgotten about too long) is sitting on the couch and spilling onto the floor waiting to be folded. That which is folded is waiting ever so patiently in the laundry baskets to be put away. And the dance continues...

In the end, we did math. And watched science videos.

And prepared for Zak's public bible reading on Tuesday night for the Theocratic Ministry School at our local Kingdom Hall. (He did great. He still needs the stool to reach the microphone, and I love that despite him growing so much in the last few months, he still looks like a little boy on the stage. A lot bigger than when he started in the school five years ago, but still little.)

And we read a lot. It may not have been as hands on busy as usual around here, but it was book heavy. You can read about that more in this post.

One of the things we did thoroughly was history. We read about Sparta and Athens, the war between Greece and Persia, the Peloponnesian War. 

Then we looked up info and specs on the Parthenon and roughly sized out a column in our living room. 

Which then led to a discussion about the properties of marble and looking up different patterns and colors of marble (there is basically marble in every color, their favorites were the dark blue,  blood red, and purple examples we found!).  

That lead to a discussion and looking up pictures of Greek sculpture, which resulted in two basic reactions from my children. 

One, quiet uttering of the amazing life-likeness without any modern tools or lasers. 

And two, uncontrollable giggling every time a sculpture of naked people popped up. 

Which was a lot. 

Because the Greeks were a bit obsessed with naked people. Oy!

And then I sent the big kids off to make their own sculptures from humble clay. 

That was fun.

Another learning highlight of the week was getting the kids going again with music!

Over the summer I gave the kids their choice of any instrument that we had reasonable access to an instructor for. I will admit that I was secretly hoping they would both pick something that I have absolutely no idea how to teach like french horn and trombone, or drums and obo.

Nope.

Zak picked piano. Grace chose violin. And Kit was beyond excited when I pulled out our tiny purple violin and told her that she would get to learn to play it! So, now that I have other students again,  I especially have zero excuses to not buckle down and teach them too. Attempts in the past, while indeed plagued by a few arguments that I doubt would have occurred if their teacher were not also their mother, eventually petered out.  And it was my fault for not giving it as much weight as any other subject we do for school.

Yes. In short, I was lazy and irresponsible.

And you know what else? Sometimes I don't wash the dishes! Or mop! Or recycle every jar, can, or cereal box! Actually I don't do these things a lot. The dishes more than the others though.

Because, it's simply not humanly possible to do it all.

And I prefer to be human. And to read.

What did you let go of this week? Did you have any good human/bad day scenarios?

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