Last Day Off for Awhile!

Yesterday was a holiday and it was really hard to get back to "normal" today.  Everyone has been a little grouchy and a little sensitive and not exactly thrilled about sitting still for anything.  Oh, and did I mention that we do our schoolwork in a basement?  Not exactly a happy place all the time.  Some days I don't even notice that we're in the basement, but on a day like today, it was a little confining!  I tried to get everyone through their basic work (math, handwriting, etc) one at a time while giving everyone else time to just play and have fun.  That went fine as long as Baxter wasn't trying to climb the stairs.  However, when it came time to focus on Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies...not-so-much.  Baxter screamed through all of Ford's Bob books, so I fed him and got him down for a nap.  I thought that meant we'd have a pleasant little time reading stories and filling out charts with characters, setting, etc.  Let's just say it's really hard to sit still for three stories.  I've been thinking that next week I will try to alternate days of stories and after today, I see that it is absolutely necessary.  I want to read a story one day and do an activity with it the next, so next week we'll try something like Rachel's stories on M/W and Ford's on T/TH and let them do their activities the other days.  It was like pulling teeth today to get Rachel to think of three reasons why a horse is her favorite animal (Ruby gave her 15 things she could write down, but she didn't like any of them.)  I think when Rachel's grumpy that's when we have our hardest days.  Ford can get out of a funk by playing trains for a little while.  Ruby can change into happiness if she can change outfits or draw pictures in her "Pre-K" book.  Nothing makes Rachel happy.  She just needs to be left alone and that's hard to do in a basement!  So once we zoomed through everything to a place where I felt like we could leave the baement for a little while, we went for a walk.  It was great until Rachel didn't like the game Ford and Ruby were playing (seriously, they were just naming the colors on everyone's clothes and Rachel had a meltdown when they said the colors whe was wearing!!).  So, she and I had to have a little heart to heart about arguing (her new favorite past time) and then things were better.  We had lunch, they played outside, we read two chapters in Magic Bone and now everyone is resting.  We tried all weekend to go without any sort of nap in the hopes of making bed time better, which it did, but after the morning we had, I felt that everyone needed to grab some books and lay down before we all lost our minds!!  They will be up shortly and we'll try to get in the last bit of Science (underground habitats) before heading out to violin this afternoon.  Thank goodness dinner is in the crock pot already!!!