Day five...

After going to bed before 10pm last night and waking up this morning at 8am, I felt like a new person! I definitely had overdone it the last couple of weeks and my late nights caught up with me... sigh. Once again, humbled by my age and need for more regular sleep, we started our little day.

For the last four months our Fridays have been spent hosting a little co-op at our home. We typically spent the mornings picking up and setting up the 30 chairs upstairs for choir, then I would finish my preparations for the art and handicrafts class I taught, and the kids would rush about to finish their homework for the book club one of my friends led. The last few weeks we haven't had that, so this morning everyone seemed to meander about aimlessly.

I was half tempted to do school today... and maybe we ought to have, but I was feeling grumpy and wanted to get out of the house. I decided to run some errands, then come home and have lunch and spend the afternoon listening to a new audio book and working on handicrafts. The errands went well, lunch was easy, Micah actually napped and the rest of us gathered in the living room.

Hannah was knitting a bear for one of my friends having a baby next week, Grace started crocheting a little cat, Faith was reluctant to work on anything she knew how to do because what she really wanted to do was whittle like Noah and Caleb. Since the girls have quite a few handicraft skills (crocheting, knitting, embroidery, hand sewing) and the boys don't, I made a decision to not let the girls whittle, at least for awhile. This hasn't been the most popular of decisions from the girls' point of view, but I feel for the boys not having many masculine "quiet activities" and have decided to save this one for them. Of course there is wood working, but that can be a tad loud for read aloud times, not to mention, power tools need supervision and probably aren't the best fit for a 9yo and 5yo. Once it was accepted that I was not budging, and that everyone needed to do something they could do without my help (because I actually wanted to crochet too), we had an enjoyable time listening to the unabridged Winnie the Pooh and working.

Laundry was finished and put away. Dishes were loaded and unloaded throughout the day. The hallway bathroom was cleaned due to the discovery of a mysterious yellow liquid on the floor. We ate dinner and then welcomed a surprise visit from friends looking to buy a house in our neighborhood (and just around the corner). The adults had lattes, the kids all played and later asked to put in a documentary about birds and volcanoes. They are looking at a home that has the same floorplan as our home, so we gave a tour and answered questions about construction.

We finished up the night with a little cleaning up (messes discovered during the tour), vitamins, family worship and discussions of plans for tomorrow morning's birding trip. Overall, we had a nice week, though I feel a burden to be better prepared for next week. This week we stayed on our "ideal" schedule one day. Maybe next week we will have two "normal" days. Ha! We'll see...