I’m Blessed

6:30am: Finish quiet time, and start writing a blog post.  Read it back to myself and decide it’s all stupid.  Erase the whole thing.

7:00am: Knut gets up and starts making his legendary coffee.  I start a pot of oatmeal.

7:20am: Kids start heading downstairs, and I go upstairs to wake up the few stragglers.

8:00am: Knut heads off to work, and I get the kids started on chores.  David is in a good mood and dives right in.  Silje is surprised that we still do chores at our house, and that she has some.  She says she’ll start by feeding the animals and takes 30 minutes to do it.  So much for starting school at 8:30.

8:30am: Start David on school, Silje starts the dishes.  I put on some Muppet music on Pandora to lighten her mood.

9:00am: David is shocked and surprised that I’m still making him do math everyday.  He thinks he’s going to die.  Total meltdown, but lasts only 5 minutes or less.  Also, Ingrid is starting to run around crazy and shows signs that today might be a morning nap day, which is good because we have a field trip this afternoon and she has no shot of an afternoon nap.  So I lay her down.  She falls asleep immediately.

9:15am: Silje finishes the dishes, and seems shocked and surprised that I expect her to do school as well today.  I’m trying to get apple bread in the oven for morning tea time because I need to go grocery shopping tomorrow and don’t have any snack for them, but I have a ton of baking apples in a bucket in the kitchen that need to be baked or thrown to the chickens today. Plus apple bread is everyone’s favorite and think it will raise everyone’s spirits mid-morning.

9:20am: Elias and Solveig conspire to wake up Ingrid and disrupt the whole day, though I thwart their plans.  I have to fight to get every ingredient in the mixer.  They won’t stop screaming at and kicking each other.   I put on a movie.  It doesn’t help.  I turn it off.  That made it worse.  Give David a new reader.  This one is by Beverly Cleary, and it’s the first time he read one of her books.  The chapters are long so I tell him he only needs to read 5 pages today.

9:35am: Finally get apple bread in the oven, and help Silje understand her math problem related to degrees.  I help her look it up in her textbook because I have literally no idea how to solve it.  We figure it out together. Then she moves onto Tom Sawyer.  Solveig and Elias have stopped screaming and are involved deeply in an imaginary world of their own involving tea parties and Buzz Lightyear, and a zoo of animals, and a few other super heroes, and a sword or something.  They are playing on the 3 season porch.  I check on David.  He accidentally read ahead, and asks to finish the chapter, even though it’s 25 pages.  He excitedly explains the chapter to me.  He asks if this author wrote anything else.  

10:00am: Silje is ready to discuss the elements of the chapter she read.  She can’t stop jumping because our field trip to the Prairie Wetlands Learning Center is getting close.  The smell of apple bread starts filling the whole house.  

And I begin to think that we might actually make it today despite the fact I’m still in my pajamas, and robe, and take a few spoonfuls of oatmeal every few minutes.  I have plans to gorge myself on apple bread in a few minutes.  

I’m so blessed.