Tomorrow we go live with school again. It's sobering, but I'm very ready for it. Most of our holiday stuff is packed away, except for the outside of our house, which still looks very much like it is anticipating a jolly visit from Santa Claus. I didn't want to put away a bunch of wet wreaths, and my house is messy enough without a lot of soaked fake greenery all over the foyer floor, which is where it would inevitably end up.

Tomorrow starts with a hair appointment bright and early. My hair is too short right now, so the thought of getting rid of any of it is a little odd, but at the same time, I haven't been too happy with this haircut, so maybe Tara can do some magic and make what little hair I have do something completely different. Or tidy it up while it grows into the longer, less-layered thing I covet. Then I already have our books set out with an ambitious plan for a day at home.

Tomorrow also starts, I think, our trial of Daytrana, for ADD. I don't know whether ADD is really behind the inattentiveness and driftiness in classes or during work, or, should I say, I don't know WHOSE ADD is responsible, since my doing-ten-things-at-once-and-not-finishing-any-of-them and my organizational challenges can't be exactly a benefit. Of course, given my own inattention to time and detail, I don't even have the medicine yet, since I forgot to go to the pharmacy. Actually, now that I think of it, I was even in the store on Saturday, but I was trying to put one foot in front of the other without falling over, so my mind wasn't really on what I was forgetting at the pharmacy.

We have been reading some really lovely books lately. If there is one thing that I could firmly say I stand for, it's reading aloud. I love to read aloud, love to spend time with my children and even with others' children reading great books and enjoying them together, talking about them afterward, and commenting in the midst of them. The way that we read aloud makes it sometimes difficult for my children to be in other settings, since they are so indoctrinated in interrupting to ask questions, to make connections, or to respond to something I ask them to look for. All of us just finished Babe, The Gallant Pig, which was every bit as good as the movie, which has always been one of my favorites ("If I had words to make a day for you..." is a song that makes me so happy and that gets delightfully trapped in my head for days and I can't help singing aloud, which is not such a good thing). Unfortunately, it was about 9:10 when we finished the book, and I had an immediate hankering to watch the movie immediately, while it is still fresh in our minds. Thank goodness we don't have to be at a bus stop or carpool line early tomorrow, but it was absolutely worth the late night. Whirly-Popped popcorn with a ton of butter and salt, our new little pull-out loveseat...pure bliss. We could immediately note the many differences from the narrative in the book, but it was nonetheless a fairly true depiction of the characters and their traits.

Babe is one of the books dealt with in the book _Deconstructing Penguins_, which I read a few weeks ago. It's a book about parent-child book clubs and how they might be structured and how to read literature with children, especially in an inquisitive, interactive, analytical manner. There's not much, or even anything about deconstruction in it, at least from my own lit crit vantage, but that's a good thing. I took a good reading list from the book that I've decided to prioritize in our read-alouds for the next month or two. I plan to start Animal Farm with the older two tomorrow, which will coincide with a multi-part show tomorrow night on Russia's Tsars on the History Channel. We also seem to be on an animal stories kick (Frances keeps asking why we are reading pig books and what's up with so many butter baths and talking barnyard creatures, since we just read Charlotte's Web, too). I think I'm going to make her listen to Ace, one of Dick King-Smith's other books, just to get her goat.

With the older boys, I'm reading _The Wednesday Wars)_, which is also a really nice book full of material to think about, discuss, take apart, make connections with. I wasn't familiar with this book before, and I've been quite taken with the way that it introduces Shakespeare's works, mirrors the themes in its own story, and yet feels close and relevant for right now. We have been studying Shakespeare for the past two months in an indirect way--that is, we're not directly reading plays yet, but we have been to see one (Hamlet), have read synopses of three of them, watched a movie of one (Henry V), and have read middle-grades novels that directly treat Shakespeare without actually being him: The Shakespeare Stealer, Shakespeare's Scribe, Shakespeare's Secret, King of Shadows, and The Wednesday Wars. I didn't originally set out with any real intention, and some of the books just happened to auspiciously appear for us even when I didn't know what they were about, and yet they fit in perfectly in this sequence. My plan for the next two weeks is to read A Midsummer Night's Dream together. I'm kicking myself for not buying at least two copies of many of the books I had come through my house when I was collecting items for the used curriculum sale at the VaHomeschoolers conference last spring. We ended up donating a bunch of these books to St. Joseph's Villa, and now I realize that I would like to have had more of them and should have bought them when I had the chance and they were cheap. Hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it?

In the South, there are many superstitions surrounding the New Year. One of them is that you don't do any chores on New Year's Day that you don't want to repeat all year. Okay. So I didn't do any laundry that day. Now, three days later, I'm still waiting for the New Year's Chore Fairy to show up and deliver me. Hasn't happened yet. I just finished folding and putting away five mega-loads of clothes and towels (we had another disastrous aquarium sump siphon moment yesterday, which is a major towel-consumer). I had to empty the dishwasher, load it, hand wash big dirty stock pots (Kerry made a delicious hambone and black-eyed pea soup today), mop the bathroom floor, clean my bedroom, and sort silverware anyway. New Year's Day: YOU LIE!!!