G is for Groceries

January 13, 2009

I was up way too late last night cleaning house, but at least all the holiday stuff is put away and one of the cabinets in the kitchen does not look like a schizophrenic lives here. Of course that means that today I am feeling that there’s not enough coffee in the house to make me feel awake and Rocket Boy is full of his usual energy.

Since I’m not working I’m fully embracing the role of stay at home wife and home school teaching mom. That means all the childcare and all the housework fall to me. Hypersteve and I need to work out a new division of labor. Since he’s the only earner, he’s working a little extra these days and doing less of house stuff. The housework shouldn’t be only my job, but I need to be shouldering more of it we just have to sort out which more of it I do, what he still does, and what we outsource so I don’t stay up till 1 am cleaning, leaving me ill equipped to handle a day of full energy Rocket Boy.

Even so the day is moving nicely. We started out with choose & do – mousetrap, the game went quickly this time, thank goodness. Then on to science – we used the Museum of Natural History’s ology site to do all sorts of science activities – mainly paleontology. Rocket Boy did really well with a logic game sorting out the sedimentary rock layers and the fossils found within it. Next we did some activities with graphs and charts.

That took us through most of our morning. I have desperately needed to get some grocery shopping done, so I will integrate that into today’s lesson. To prep we played an alphabet game, going through alphabet cards and putting them in the right order. He was bursting with energy so in between each letter of the alphabet I had him run a sprint from one side of the house to the other (about 120’ each time). That calmed him a bit. Then we tried to make a list of the items that we could find in the store. Writing is a struggle for him. After a few words his attention really begins to wane. I have to be fully on him and helping with every single letter. What should have been a few minutes of writing turned into a much longer struggle. Finally we were off to Fairway, a set of alphabet cards in hand. Each time we added an item he had to identify its first letter, then tell me where in the alphabet to find that letter. If he did both correctly he won the card.

It was the longest grocery shopping trip ever.