I’ll have a scoop of frustration and a scoop of delight, with sprinkles please.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

I’ll have a scoop of frustration and a scoop of delight, with sprinkles please.

No, there was no ice cream had today. Today started out slow. Instead of starting at 9 on the dot, we straggled since we were planning to drive Hypersteve at his studio. We were just about to leave, and just about to leave again and again that I didn’t want to get anything started, just to have to stop mid-activity. Well by the time we dropped him off it was quarter after 10. We needed to return some books so I decided to make it a library morning, and do most of our lessons there. We had a play date scheduled for 2, closer to his studio than our house, and it’s usually so much easier to extract Rocket Boy from somewhere other than home. We went to the library near the studio, but they don’t open till 1 on Thursdays. Meh. I decided to head over towards our play date neighborhood about 15 minutes further, and go to the library there. My trusty GPS that kindly lists all the libraries was full of fail. I drove past the place where there should have been one, but no such luck.

Figuring I had no library luck, we decided to go back to the neighborhood with the studio to Barnes & Noble. I’ve been wanting to pick something up that was more social studies related anyway since we seem to have so little of that material in our house. Easy, right? Not so much. Apparently there is nowhere to park in Park Slope at noon. No street parking, no meter parking, after 20 minutes I just gave up. We headed towards home to go to the trusty library branch that is halfway between Park Slope and our house, and where parking is not a huge problem. Got there quickly, parked right in front, and was thrilled to see that the gate was open. Except they weren’t actually going to open for another hour, the staff was inside doing all the things that a library staff does before the hordes descend.

That’s over 2 hours in the car not accomplishing anything. We were both super cranky. On the bright side, I finally listed to the book on CD we’ve had in our car for ages: The Magic Tree house Wild West Adventure. The reader was a bit cloying, but I came to enjoy it and Rocket Boy seemed to love it.

Luckily there is a friendly café on the next corner, were we proceeded to sit, eat, and do lessons until it was time to leave for the play date. The kids meal, a grilled cheese on good multigrain bread, OJ, and a huge fruit salad that I happily shared, was only $4.00. We worked on basic phonics. He is still having trouble remembering the short U, but other than that he’s getting a good grip on all the sounds made by individual letters, digraphs, and blends. Time flew and we went to the play date.

This is a new person we met on a homeschoolers listserv. The mom was looking for a babysitter/play date for her son, Rocket Boy needs more regular kid relationships, and I’m happy to have grocery money. The kids got along famously, the mom and I got along famously. I was thrilled that there’s a boy out there with similar energy to Rocket Boy and a mom out there who isn’t freaked out by the roughhousing that boys do. I’d go in to more detail, but I am sleepy and drained and happy by how our day ended up, despite the morning’s horribly frustration.