Heartwarming Letters May Not Be Our Forte

Today was busy but good.

We zipped through our school work and headed off to the homeschool co-op right after lunch. I made one wrong turn, and we were late, of course, but not dreadfully late. This month’s activity was to bring in supplies for holiday care packages for soldiers in Iraq, and to write letters to the soldiers. T.’s letter was pretty straightforward, but K.’s, which she dictated, may possibly bring more apprehension than joy to the poor soldier who receives it. We had discussed some of the hardships that soldiers might have to face, and K. imagined many perils which I had never considered. Her letter began, sweetly enough, with “I hope you come home safely,” becoming slightly more graphic with, “with no tears in your skin.” She then proposed several sentiments which I vetoed, such as, “I hope you don’t get stung by bees while you are riding on a horse,” “I hope you don’t get eaten by worms, ‘cause some worms have teeth,” and “I hope you don’t get goosebumps, because goosebumps live in nests, and nests can fall out of trees.” We settled on an innocuous middle sentence, and ended with, “I hope you have fun in the war.” At the meeting, the children pasted the letters onto pieces of construction paper and decorated them with markers and stickers. T.’s decorations, mostly of aliens in tanks, will certainly provide some variety from the more common Christmas trees and snowmen, and K., perhaps slightly confused about the instructions, decorated her letter with random printed letters (and very nice letters they were, too!). I had fun with the kids, but still haven’t “clicked” with any moms.

We all went off to the dance studio in Elkin in the evening for ballet and karate. Ballet was great – K. didn’t come out of the class looking for me once – but karate was cancelled due to an absent instructor. T. was terribly disappointed, though we plan to go to the make-up class on Saturday, but then had a marvelous time playing with another little boy, whose mother had apparently also not gotten the message about the cancelled class and had dropped him off. We are hoping that this boy may be a regular in his new class, and that, maybe, he will have found a friend!

Finally, but very excitingly, we have progress on the upstairs shower! Dan pounded out the old metal walls, but the floor of the old shower has been a problem. The drain pipe running up through the bottom did not want to let go and had to be sawed through, and the shower base was so tremendously heavy that it wasn’t possible to bring it downstairs. It wouldn’t have fit through the window, even if we could have heaved it so high, but it was possible to push it back into the unfinished attic area behind our bathroom. I happened to be standing at my lovely new sink while the guys were manhandling the old base into place on the beams, and I quit doing the dishes abruptly when shouts and thuds made me think that the shower base was about to crash from the second floor to the basement, taking me and the kitchen sink out on the way. Happily, this didn’t happen, and I would include a photo of the old shower base sitting under the beams in its new home except that our shenanigans disturbed a huge nest of wasps which have been living behind the wall, and we had to staple layers of plastic tarp across the front of the shower to keep them at bay. I will try to update tomorrow on how (or if) we manage to proceed with work on the shower while being menaced by the swarm.