Last Week in Brief (or at least as brief as I could make it)

Today has been nice.  A definite improvement over the weekdays that preceded it.  But we'll get to that in a minute.  I stayed in bed this morning and read more of The Tender Bar, while the kids watched idiot t.v.  Eventually my back ached too much to lie on anymore & I went down and made Eggs Benedict for myself, Travis, and Ed.  Katie wanted chocolate chip pancakes.  Then some laundry and puttered around until Travis looked up Percy Jackson & the Olympians and announced that there was a showing at 1:30.  So we all quickly brushed our teeth and dashed out.  Turned out the movie was 1:45, so we had lots of time to watch the ads.  And the movie was fun.  Quite a lot different from the book, we thought, and not in ways that improved it, and they sexed it up way too much, but it was campy and entertaining, and the scene in the garden center was well done.

And now, why was I not impressed by last week?  Mostly I blame Travis's orthodontist.  And math.  Both of my kids are currently having math "issues."  Katie is learning her multiplication tables, and that is just a painful thing here, even with fun programs on the computer.  Travis knows his multiplication tables, but finds doing problems neatly and carefully, so that the columns line up, etc., just too dull.  It is apparently much more amusing to do the same problems over again and again, while the morning's math turns into the afternoon's math and his mother's hair turns grayer each time she checks his work.  So math explains Monday and Tuesday.
 Then on Wednesday, Travis went to the orthodontist in the morning, and the orthodontist did some horrific thing to the braces and insisted that he had to start wearing his retainer more during the day.  The poor kid came home in agony, which just got worse as the day went on, and his brain couldn't work because of his terrible suffering.

Also on Wednesday, the gas and oil men came.  We've been nursing our supplies along, keeping the thermostat at 60 during the day (colder at night, of course), but even so the tanks were nearly empty.  The oil man came while Ed and Travis were at the orthodontist, and as soon as he left I hurried to crank up the heat, per Ed's instructions.  Only there was no heat.  A tankful of oil and the furnace wouldn't come on.  When Ed got home he knew right away what was wrong, of course, and bled the air out of the lines -- we had accidentally drained the tank completely -- and got things working again.  He is so clever.

Wednesday afternoon we went to Walmart.  Ed took the kids and went to pick out the toiletries, look at toys (Katie has a birthday coming up), and buy some earthworms.  The last was for Katie's science, and yes, I know that theoretically we could just dig up earthworms.  But it is so unspeakably cold outside that digging in the hard ground, through snow, looking for worms is just unappealing, and I figured we could get some nice big ones at Walmart for cheap.  And we probably could have except that the earthworms were Very Large, and they hissed at Katie and scared the bejeebers out of her.  I can't explain.  I was over in the grocery section at the time, and it wasn't until we were headed home that I found out that Ed had not gotten the worms, which were on his part of the list.  So we will be digging for worms after all, and Katie did not start on earthworms this week.

At 6:00 I took the kids to Baptist church next door for Awanas, which is a Bible study sort of thing they do involving doughnuts.  I was skeptical the first time they went, week before last, but Travis and Katie say it is great, and the Baptists next door, though eccentric on some issues of doctrine (meaning I don't agree with them), are very nice people.  The kids dashed into the building and I was turning to leave when one of the teachers called me over to talk to me.  Seems that last week Katie had accidentally been put in the wrong class, and would it be okay if they switched her to the younger children's class.  I knew Katie had been really pleased to be in the same class with Travis, but I don't like to make waves and I figured Katie would speak up if she was unhappy, so I said I thought that would probably be fine.  It wasn't.  Ed picked the kids up, and Katie came home miserable.  She was in the baby class, and she hadn't had the chance to recite the verses she'd memorized, and she could do anything the older group was doing, and Why had I said "yes?"  I felt awful.  And she hadn't spoken up because she didn't want to hurt the teacher's feelings by saying she didn't want to be in her class.  Fortunately, Ed saved the day.  He went back, even though I was sure all the teachers would have left, and Katie's teacher (the one I had talked to and who had the "baby" class) was still there.  He explained things (diplomatically, we think), and Mrs. _____ agreed that Katie could go back in with Travis's group.  So now Katie just has to learn her verses really well and practice finding passages in the Bible (meaning I am now shopping for a non-King James for her) and reading them aloud, and all is well.

Thursday was uneventful except that Travis's teeth were bothering him more than ever so he had a hard time focusing on academics and an even harder time keeping his retainer in.

And Friday morning he woke up sick.  Really sick, which hasn't happened for a while.  He didn't want anything, not even to come downstairs and watch t.v.  So he missed bookgroup and the opportunity to recite the cinquain poem about cows he had written, plus two others, and the lesson on limericks.  And two of the other bookgroup families went afterwards to see Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which Travis would have loved to do with the group.  Which brings us back to today, when, happily, he seems fully recovered and he got to see the movie with his family, anyway.  And it was cute.