The Week That Was

I have decided not to complain on this blog anymore. In that vein, let me tell you of some of the exciting new challenges this week has brought. There is no end to to the dishwasher situation, which means that I have been without a working dishwasher for four months now. My crock pot cracked, but the crack was in a cool spiral pattern, so that was kind of interesting. My printer broke mysteriously, which makes my kids happy. And on Friday my car got a flat tire after the kids' sports class. The timing is only interesting because a friend's kid noticed the flat as I was turning to go to Costco to go buy a new crock pot. Instead I got a new tire, but at least we had lunch as planned.

Anyway, I swear I'm not complaining. Earlier in the week I did, but now it's just an interested chuckle. We'll survive without a dishwasher and possibly without a crock pot. The printer is important because of school, but we're off next week so that can wait. The tire was important and was fixed promptly and since the old tire was pretty new I got a discount on the new one. (Clear as mud?)

As far as school goes, we did some. All of the kids did their required number of days of math, reading, grammar, writing, Latin (for those who have it), and history. We were a little more hit and miss with spelling and science. But if we did everything perfectly I wouldn't have anything to blog about.

There were no real huge leaps this week. Most of what we're doing is plodding along until the next interesting thing comes up. So we're fine. Harry is flat out obsessed by Algebra and I've caught him multiple times this week trying to get the older neighborhood kids to teach him some. I had Sam read the Story of the World chapter to Annika this week, which was cute. And it was good for me to hear just how far he's come with speech therapy.

Being without a printer makes it much more difficult (really, almost impossible) to entertain my 3yo long enough to do anything of note with the other kids. She depends on the letters and other things I print out while we do school. So I've had to be a lot more creative. And that's good for all of us. She did things like cut out the toys she wants for Christmas and glue them to paper for her Santa list, empty an entire box of needles into the brown upstairs carpet, and cut even more papers out to give to me. Most of them say "Emma." So I'm keeping them all. Maybe I'll glue them to a piece of paper for a Christmas list. I need more Emmas in my life.

So, that's about it. Normal chaos around here. I hope this doesn't bore anyone. I'll try to put up a list of books we're reading on the sidebars in case anyone is interested.

Oh, we do have a birthday on Monday, so we had a birthday party today. Sam is soon to be 9. I don't have any pictures of Sam on my phone, so here's Perry the Platypus instead. You can call him Agent P.