It is so good to have unplanned days. You can pack them full of stuff you wouldn’t normally do.
We woke up late Saturday morning with no plan. No visitors, no commitments, no errands - just time. The kids came up to our bed to talk and wrestle.
What should we do today? Well let’s get out of the house. Get ready! – choose clothes, dress, get a snack breakfast, hands, face & teeth, find shoes and socks. Load into the car. We are off. Let’s turn on some music… perhaps a story – ah yes ‘Classical Kids’ CD ‘Tchaikovsky Goes to America’ to listen on the drive.
Where should we go? Why not drive the beautiful 12 mile stretch of FM149 to Montgomery. There is a small antique mall that has an old fashioned barber. The boys need haircuts!
Lily played with a kitten outside while the boys got manly haircuts together with a few gruff looking good ol’ boys and the stench of a fish tank in the process of being cleaned out. It seemed that the barber had fed his catfish dead minnows. The catfish didn’t eat the minnows and they decayed in the tank increasing the ammonia levels to a deadly level.
What’s next? Shop some more until hungry?
We purchased a few books in the antique store next door. I picked up some old fashioned magazines to cut up for collage, Mark got some Shakespearean & Dante prints for his office. He also picked up some old books – Tales of Arabian Nights ($5), Davy Crocket ($5), History of Ancient Greece ($3), and Julius Caesar's History of the Gallic Wars ($2 - since it was in Latin). All of these will be added to the curriculum at appropriate stage, including the Latin text.
(A forgettable lunch followed)
Where to next? Hmmm… Laura’s sleepy. Strawberries on Lily’s mind. Hey let’s go strawberry picking!!!
Mark dropped Laura and myself off at home. Mark took Matthew and Lily Kate to King’s Orchard. I did some collage work while Laura napped. They arrived home 3 hours later, with boxes of tasty, fresh berries and two huge bouquets of wildflowers. We arrange the flowers and cleaned and snacked on some strawberries.
Mom, can we do another project? Here I have a recipe for play dough. Highlights Magazine. Can we try it? Please Mom?’ Out with the peanut butter, honey and dry milk. Mix, mix, try, mix, spoon lick.
The kids made shapes and faces and snakes and snowmen out of the play dough, decorated with cereal and raisins and then ate as much as the made (isn’t that the point of edible play dough?). We had a dinner with chicken and cheese somewhere in there as we played. All to the music of Bach.
Let’s keep making stuff! Let’s bead!
Laura played on the floor while the big kids made more necklaces with Mom. We listened to Classical Kids ‘Bach comes to call’ on CD while beading.
'Mom I want a bath' , OK girls fill the tub. Dad watch. Splash, splash - Lily don't pour water on Laura....
After bedtime reading Lily went to sleep listening to ‘Hey Andrew, Teach Me Some Greek’ volume I. Matthew is another story. He was just getting started on his day. He is our night owl. He can get a full day’s worth of ‘school’ done on his own in an evening. He and dad read a few chapters of ‘The Three Musketeers’ and then he watched Spanish language video Muzzy... studying the book as he watched. He helped me sort our new beads into the bead storage trays and then helped me clear up the house before he took his truck set to his room to play. He is such a great helper and loves to do things together.
I was upstairs in my craft room for much of the night working on a collage series called ‘Symphony’. I am altering a deck of cards with paint, images, photos, stamps and other stuff. I have made about 30 of them since Thursday. Good stuff and fun to do.
It is amazing what we can pack in to a day with no plan.
