Today was not a  good day.  In fact, today was a foggy kind of day, interspersed with random screams of “don’t stand on the table!” and “he ate what?!”  I spent most of my day on the sofa and the rest of it dragging myself around.  No homeschooling happened today.  Nope.  Zilch, nada, not a bit.

That’s ok.  That’s why we school year-round and at weird times, so that we can roll with the bad days and still get our learning on.  It irritates me – that I can fall apart at a moment’s notice – but it’s my new normal.  Sucky kind of normal if you ask me.

 

 

Fog mode

I’m sure I’m meandering around in this post.  I’m still in foggy mode, with a headache wrapped around my skull, an aching hip, a digestive system in revolt (salad? you gave us SALAD?  You shall pay for this….) and a literal claw hand thanks to my sad, stiff joints.   Ho ho ho, happy holidays to you too, guys.

Sorry.  Anyways, about the title – my kids still learned stuff today.  Despite my absolute failure as a homeschooling parent, they learned.

 

Learning happened anyway

I surfaced from the fog at one point to find them playing school, with my oldest exasperated because my youngest wouldn’t do his fill-in-the-blank number line on the chalkboard.  My daughter proclaimed that it was time for her art lesson and took over the chalkboard instead.

 

Later, as I walked into the landmine that the living room had become, I realized that there were multiple “shops” set up to sell lemonade and tend to stuffed animals.  Each shopkeeper was playing the role of customer to the other shops, and they had a thriving system of barter going.  I briefly thought about handing them the bag of play money but decided the mess had enough layers as it was.

 

On one of my trips back from the cave of the porcelain god, I found them all seated around the dining room table, each doing their own puzzle or learning game.  The Engineer was working on rhyming words, the Princess was engineering an earthquake-proof house, and the Destroyer was spelling out the word “cat” with Boggle Jr.

 

Not a complete disaster 

By the end of the day, most of the mess had been cleaned up.  The Nerf bullets, stray Legos, and paper clippings were put away.  With the minor exception of “Not Me” getting into the Lego advent calendar and stealing Santa, we had no major disciplinary issues.  A minor miracle!

 

Everyone is in bed, sleeping soundly.  Hopefully it will stay that way, after the night the Destroyer had last night. We made it through another day, and wouldn’t you know?  Learning happened despite my bad day.  Without my guidance.

 

Gives me hope, that.  Especially since tomorrow might be a repeat of today.