Another beautiful snow day. I will post pictures when I get them uploaded. Oddly for myself, I didn't even set a foot outside even once today--it was cold, the wind was blowing, and I managed to stay occupied indoors. It's a rare day that I go nowhere, but if any day was appropriate for this, today was it.

Lots of reading was accomplished today:

115 pages of "Understood Betsy," a sweet little book about Vermont farm life in the early 1900s, and also a book about orphans or functional orphans.

60 pages of "The Graveyard Book," which was the 2008 Newbery Winner and the October book club pick for the Clover Hill Library book club. Ollie is loving it. My jury is still out. It is written by the author of "Coraline," a weird book and weird movie, and this is weird in a similar way. I'm just not that into fantasy, so that's my issue. I'm waiting to see how themes play out to determine if it's engaging enough for me or not--that's what will make or break the book for me.

50 pages of "The Dead and the Gone." Great book, lots to think about, but darn does it read slowly! I don't know what the problem with it is--long pages, comparatively small type, but we are very into it, read for what feels like a long time, and only 20 pages or so will have gone by. I despair that we'll never finish it as a group, but it's inconvenient to have three people vying for one book on our own.

Poor Rutty got nothing, though he was around playing DS when some of that reading was happening, so maybe some trickled in. I feel awful because I haven't been spending good time with him. I think he played computer games all day long, and that's just wrong. Tomorrow he's going to get the attention he deserves, whether he wants it or not.

We also had a poop day. Someone scooted across a toilet seat and got poop all over it, though no one claims responsibility. Then I went upstairs and nearly stepped in poop on the floor of my master bathroom. It think a dog had something to do with it. This precipitated a huge desire on my part to sanitize most of the house. Gross. I bleached the floors and toilets and tubs and sinks in both the upstairs bathrooms. I rearranged some things in Rutledge's room and did a much-needed vacuuming and evicted all items belonging to Frances, who had taken over his bedroom as sleeping quarters before she switched to sleeping on Walter's bottom bunk (why doesn't she sleep in her own room? She believes that Bloody Mary is in her mirror and will talk to her at night.). I also cleared out some things from Ollie's room, cleaned the floors, and tomorrow we will strip out the wallpaper cutouts of dragonflies and hang his college banners, something we've been meaning to do since last summer.

Tomorrow is supposed to be freezing as well, so little snow melt will likely happen. It looks like school and RES will be closed Monday, but we really need to get back on track with our writing. I think Walter and Ollie haven't finished their writing from last week, and now I want them to do two more things--one for this Monday and at least one for next. I think we'll take this opportunity to go back to the basics, as well as to introduce the six sentence openers and practice them in a low-pressure situation. Ollie read through his Latin passages today, but Walter is woefully behind. Everyone needs to practice their instruments.

Today was a big Ticket to Ride day. I lost a lot. Especially when playing with real people and not robots. I need to hone my skills. But I do think that I'm breaking my addiction to some degree. Last night I bought the Europe version, and I don't like it nearly as much yet--I wish it was exactly the same but with European capitals. It has some less-well-known-to-Americans non-capital cities, and I feel like it would be more educational for the kids if it had fewer foreign spellings and was more all-star with its city choices.