I am very naughty starting a post at 11:59 p.m. when I should be sleeping. Tomorrow's a school day after all (for Rutledge). It's the most treasured, anticipated day of the week, Lunch Bunch. We all love lunch bunch. I'm in it for the extra two hours that Rutledge is out and occupied doing age-appropriate activity with friends, time that I can use to be productive with the other schooling we do at home. Rutledge, however, is in it entirely for the Lunchables. Yes, I'm talking about the King of Processed Food. Processed lunch meat cut into perfect, processed circles, processed American cheese cut into precise, stacked squares, real Oreos (none of those Paul Newman imposters or the overpriced gluten-free K-Toos), and most important of all, the juice box. All tucked into what has been caustically indicted as the most wasteful packaging in America, which is saying a lot. In a panic with no "real" food in the house--or should I say, no easily shelf-stable and able to be thrown together in three minutes before we walk out the door food, since our problem is that we have an abundance of genuinely "real" food like frozen, organic grass-fed beef, brown rice that needs 45 minutes to cook, and raw potatoes--I ran into Wal-Mart on the way to preschool one morning and bought this for him. Now he expects it like clockwork every Wednesday. Did I mention or emphasize enough, With A Juice Box?

The trouble is, I often forget to pick it up before, well, Wednesday morning. So I often have to make a blitz trip into the store to get one on our way there. Well, let me just tell you, it is freaking cold out there. I thought I was going to perish on my way into the Ukrop's tonight while Frances was at ballet without dinner. It's that kind of cold. And there is no way in hell I'm going to make an extra trip out tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn to pick up any Lunchables. The kid is going to have to suffer and figure out how to deal with the leftover Papa John's pizza he's going to get. And he's going to have to deal with water in his new camo stainless steel reusable bottle. And he's going to be reducing, reusing, and recycling, being a good steward of the earth and our family's food supply, and he's going to like it!

Yesterday was one of those perfect days in our homeschooling life. It was what I wish every day felt like. We were so productive. We read Act I of A Midsummer Night's Dream, we actually got to our science books, I felt responsive to people's reasonable requests for changes in my agenda. All of this happened in less than a whole day. They went to music lessons. They went to Latin class. Okay, well I forgot both and they were late for both, but it all worked out in the end. There are a couple of keys to our success here, the most important of which is WE DIDN'T LEAVE THE HOUSE. At least not until all of our work was done. No classes, no activities. No distractions. I put that little patch on Walter's back and I was one disciplined puppy. If he started to wander away or was lured by Frances suggesting he join in her imaginative play in the other room (no, we can't all work at one time...), I immediately squashed that. Nope--you've got about 3 hours and you're not going to be soaking in medication so that you can make cardboard houses for Calico Critters or shape cheese wax into little people. When that patch is on your back, you are working! I have no idea if it actually made him concentrate any better than usual, but it sure kept me focused on the limited hours for the tasks at hand.

I've faced a lot of protest as our schoolwork starts up again. Frances simply burst into tears when I said that I'd like for her to read to me from a book I had pulled out. She was sent to her room where she promptly fell asleep. Walter started fussing and whining because math is boring and there's too much review. He made a reasoned case for a new math book because his current one, as he put it, introduces a new concept and then goes on to immediately ask you do a pile of problems about everything else you've ever done in math and not much on the new thing. True. So I have him doing a few pages out of the "Key To..." series on dividing decimals and he'll work through that series of books while I figure out a way to ramp up the pre-algebra class he's taking. I think what I'm going to do is use that, have him watch the videos (one of which I broke, unfortunately), and fast-track what they're doing. It's moving a little slow, so I think I'm just going to have him work ahead in that book, which will have several effects: he won't be scrambling to do each week's homework and should already have done it weeks before, eventually; he will cover the whole book instead of half, which is the teacher's plan. I think he can handle it, and I think he needs to not spend two years on this. I was going to have them work through the rest over the summer, but maybe it's better to just do it now. We can always change our minds if it gets to be too much. Then the material will get reinforced in class as it gets covered, so he'll get review.

Frances is deep into tech week for her dance show this weekend. I'm going to take Walter and Ollie to it, under the guise of "field trip," since it is a super show for exposing them to traditional Latin American dances, Colombian culture, a traditional legend, and the Spanish language. I can't believe this is true myself, but they have never been to one of Frances' shows before, mostly because they are across town and can get expensive for the whole family to go to. Tonight the rehearsal ended fairly early--we were home by 8:20. Last night she wasn't home until 10:20. Tomorrow night is the run-through of both acts (Monday and Tuesday are only one act each), so it's likely to be long. Thursday night is the dress rehearsal, which is always a late night. And Friday starts the 5 show run of the production. She has never done 5 shows in 3 days before, so I'm a little worried that we'll all be worn out. Friday and Saturday nights she won't be home until 10:30. But she is passionate about performing, being on stage, and being a star, so although I'll deal with the fallout of her physical exhaustion, she will, like always, end the run by fervently wishing that it would go on for several more nights.

If yesterday was the perfect homeschool day, today was the typical one. For one, I completely neglected the educational needs of an entire child. Rutledge went to school and I did math, grammar, vocabulary, science, and root words with the twins, and then we read half of the second act of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Frances, however, made headwear for herself out of construction paper and kept appearing in the doorway of our room with her crafts, clearly wanting attention that I didn't have to give her at the moment. By the time the boys got done, a friend was coming over to help me rearrange furniture in my downstairs, so Frances never got to any of her own work. I have to console myself that at least she is "learning all the time" about theatre, Spanish culture and language, backstage bustle, and playing imaginatively with a 4 year old. Rutledge's friend David was over, and Rutledge refused to play with him, instead hovering around Walter and Ollie, who were playing video games and weren't letting him join. David played for hours with Frances, who was happy pretending to be a puppy or a pirate shipwrecked on a desert island. Witnessing this strengthened my resolve and reminded me that we need to banish all video games to the weekend and have no computer time except for research and school time until 5 p.m. The break got us way off track. It shows in everyone's behavior and in Rutledge's inability to play like a kid because he's obsessed with technology and what the older kids are doing.

Rebecca and I moved furniture for three hours. I'm not sure things are any better than they were. I have one very empty room, but it isn't set up, either. My schoolroom is still not functional, and I still don't know if a schoolroom could be functional for us. We just may not be schoolroom homeschoolers in the first place. If my current vision is going to work, I need to get at least one and possibly two more big desks. I just freecycled a small desk, and though it really didn't meet our needs and was badly painted about five different colors, mostly hot pink and purple, I'm second-guessing whether I did a smart thing. What I'd like is three large computer desks with file cabinets, shelving, and hutches on top and cushy leatherette executive chairs with very high backs for each one. But I'm not naive enough to believe that if I bought this that they'd really all sit there doing math, or that we'd be able to find the math books every single day because they would be exactly where they belong, which is on the shelf of that child's desk. And I could invest a lot of money and have a lot of furniture that takes up a lot of space and that would need to be sold in Craigslist a year from now. So I'm working on a more realistic Plan B, which would be to use the antique table/desk I already have and maybe use bookends for the current and active schoolbooks, perhaps take a large desk that Rebecca thinks she has in her attack for the second person, and maybe make something out of the slab door in my garage and some shelves or file cabinets for a third person. And think about putting our computer in that room, which is challenging because we don't have the cable for internet in there, and the desktop is really slow when it is operating wirelessly.

What we did accomplish was moving and repairing some very big bookcases full of books. Now they are on another wall and blocking the french doors that go into our living room. I like those French doors, so I'm not sure how I feel about that now that it is done. But I'm terrified to change it, too! I don't think the bookcases can handle too much more movement. I can't handle any more unloading and reloading of books. We moved the TV on its cart out of that room, which I'm not sure was a workable solution. The room looks better without it, but I kind of liked the small TV with the DVD/VCR and the Nintendo 64 in there. It's true that a video game system tends to generate a mess--cartridges on the floor, too many cords, controllers all over the place. But it's a finite thing in a finite room, and it's kind of nice to have a place to sit and a separate place to go. I also don't really want these things in anyone's bedroom, which seems the only alternative now. So I'm still fiddling with the arrangement. We had to rearrange some things in our living room as well, and that's taking some getting used to. That also is going to have to be re-evaluated over this week. And last, I have a big mess now. I need to get rid of our china cabinet, since it doesn't match anything and has no functional home in our house. I need to move the "workboxes" that we didn't end up using much to a new place in the house (Playmobil people?). I have a corner bookcase that doesn't have a clea home in our family room any more. And, of course, we're still doing all of our schoolwork all over the house, mostly in my bedroom or on Ollie's futon. I'm probably delusional thinking we'd ever do it anywhere else. Hey, I like to be comfortable, too. It's no surprise that as usual, I set out to clarify a room, and what I end up with is an unfinished project and a really big mess that spreads through many rooms.

I have that awful feeling that there is something we're supposed to be doing tomorrow that we're not, and I can't, for the life of me, remember what it is. I hope that I'm wrong, that we have no real obligations until the evening. But if my track record this week is any indication, I should trust my gut and check and double check my calendar!