9:00am My 7yr. old comes in and wakes me up. My husband is already in the shower. Then we hear the baby (she's 18 months old, but we still call her the baby) waking up over the monitor. Soon we hear my 3yr. old with her giggling. Next thing I know, my 10 yr. old has brought the baby to me.
9:30 I feed the younger three breakfast and nurse the baby while my husband puts last night's car building stuff away and gathers his things for work. He leaves. This is a leisure day for us. Usually we have to go to classes at our Parent Partnership on Tuesdays but today's classes were cancelled for a talent show.
10:00 We call the older kids down and start the "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" movie since we just finished reading the book last week. We've had vocabulary lessons (out of the Critical Thinking Novel Thinking book) and discussions about each chapter as we went along. Sometimes we even had a special treat to go along with it. It was a fun book to read together, especially through the holidays. I take a shower, get dressed, make my bed (I heard somewhere you'll be more productive if you make your bed), and eat breakfast.
11:45 The movie is over. I let them watch "Frosty the Snowman," requested by the 3yr. old while I make some phone calls, setting up interviews for my two oldest to do with people who lived during WWII.
12:00pm Lunch-most of them make it themselves. Nobody likes to eat the same thing.
12:30 My 10yr. old and I start putting coats of paint on his Pinewood Derby car. Then I sit he and my 7yr. old down to work on math (Singapore Primary Mathematics). After that they both do a few pages of Explode the Code.
1:00 My 11yr. old, who has read a chapter in his reading book and gotten himself second-lunch, sits down with me to do his math. I interrupt my 13yr. old from his current project, building a case for his raspberry pi from left over floor planks, and tell him to read a chapter of his assigned book for his WWII class at our Friday Co-op. I check on my 15yr. old. She is working on a part of her Hero portfolio, also for the WWII class.
1:30 I go outside to check on the little kids who have been playing out there and decide to weed the flower bed. I get all the dandelions, grass, and maple tree saplings out and sprinkle Preen and Slug Bait on the whole thing. My 3yr. old has been helping me by picking the dandelions. She has quite a bouquet by the time I'm done so we take them over to Grandpa's house (it's attached to the other side of our garage) as a birthday present.
2:00 I help my 11yr. old find a new piano piece to practice from our books because he has left his backpack at our Parent Partnership, along with his piano book, so until we find it or they have class again, he has no other books. The baby plays with the chess pieces that are loose in the piano room.
3:00 The baby is getting fussy so I sit down with her and nurse her while I read the first lesson in Apolgia's Young Explorer Astronomy book. I've wanted to start this for a while but I've been too sick to do a lot of reading aloud. The baby falls asleep.
4:00 I send the younger kids outside again and try to get started on a cake for my father-in-law's birthday. He's turning 79 today and I always make him a German chocolate cake, which takes a lot of time to make. Half of us are Gluten-free so I have to make it from scratch, but it's worth it.
5:30 With a few interruptions to apply ointment and band-aids to blackberry scratches, explain to my 5 yr. old that if he doesn't want to get hurt, he shouldn't play in sticker bushes with only his underwear on, and try to get my 3yr. old to use the toilet (she keeps appearing with her Hello Kitty underwear on, but has yet to actually use the toilet), I finish getting the cake in the oven. The baby woke up somewhere in there too so she is scooting around getting into things now.
6:00 The cake is done and I've had enough of the 5yr. old screaming about his scratches so I put on "Paw Patrol" and make dinner. It's Taco Tuesday!
7:00 Dinner's ready and the pecan coconut frosting is cooling. My husband is home and already focused on the Pinewood Derby car. In the meantime, our little 3yr. old has finally used the toilet! Yeah! Soon, we'll have only one child in diapers.
8:00 Grandpa comes over for cake and ice cream and to open his presents. Luckily I still had a 7 and 9 candle but the 7 has lost it's wick. We chalk it up to aging.
9:00 The kids go to bed. 3yr. old is wearing a diaper again. She had a little accident and decided she was fine with a diaper for now. She follows the words in "Are You My Mother," with her finger as I read. Then we do the same with one of her "Hello Kitty" readers and she's down for bed. The others just need a little help with teeth and prayers and then they're gone too.
10:00 My 15yr. old has gone to her room to read, having spent almost the entire day in front of the computer (she was working on assignments most of the time, the rest was spent drawing digitally). I feed the baby some yogurt and baby food and then she nurses and goes to sleep. The 13yr. old, a.k.a. the tinkerer, is still up working on his case.
11:00 I think he's finally done and headed to bed. My husband is still hard at work on that car. I don't think he ever ate dinner. He's also finishing up another car for our 7yr. old who has become obsessed with painting his own car for the sibling race. The 5yr. old already finished his a couple of months ago. He found an unused block from a kit, colored it with markers, scavenged old axles and wheels from the parts box and put it all together, all by himself. He's also the one who almost burned my kitchen down two years ago.
2:30 We finally finished that blasted car. Now I'm off to bed.
