Surviving Day 1

We started school today, despite J's holiday objections. He managed to get over it pretty quickly. We've all been excited for today.

We decided to make this a half day because, one, it IS a holiday, two, I'm feeling lazy, three, I know we have a lot of fine tuning to do before we get a full routine down, and four, it's also my first day back on Solo Parent Duty.

The first thing I noticed upon waking this morning- I need black out curtains! Without the husband around to disturb everyone in the wee hours, all of the creatures in the house seem to sleep in until 7-ish. Except for the creature sleeping right beside sliding glass doors that face east. Life is unfair.

While trying to save my retinas, I temporarily forgot that I am on dog duty. Or doody. Either way. Knowing that dawdling wasn't going to change anything, I managed to tug on some jeans and leash up the beasts. As they bolt for the door, doing their potty dance, I notice that I have a stark nekkid maniac who has already taken care of his business. Everywhere.

Figuring that the baby has already done as much damage as he can manage, I go to get the dogs out before they do *their* business. Except I seem to have just one shoe. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not the type to walk around in my dogs' favorite potty area barefoot. I'm also not about to turn my entrance into their new favorite potty area, so my vicious looking German Shephard/mutt and Rottweiler/mutt went barreling out of my house off-leash. Except they were on-leash.

They're pretty funny off-leash. They know they're not supposed to be, and you can see how conflicted they are. They run in circles, celebrating their freedom, and then they come back without having done what they were out there to do. It's a whole production of shooing them off, having them come back, shooing them again, and then watching them try to turn their inch into a mile by heading for our back woods. They're very much my children.

I need a damn fence.
And another shoe.

I still had C to deal with, so I only played The Game with the dogs for a short while. Sleepy toddlers taking a shower are a funny sight. It's not quite as funny when their sister flushes the toilet and Mom forgets to adjust for that. Oops.

All in all, a shitty morning. And a bad pun.

The kids started "school" by spending some time reading to themselves. I think that's the first time the t.v. hasn't blasted cartoons in the morning in... how old is J? A long time. And it was especially cute because C curled up on the couch with his own books and "read" for a while. I was in heaven for a good 30 minutes!

We moved on to some seat work, and I realized how much tweaking is going to need to be done. J was pretty much fine, working in his room, but it turns out that H and M either have ADHD, or I was never aware of how annoying little girls can really be. They don't like to work on subjects together, because they fight over who gets the right answers first, so I tried having one do math while the other did reading and writing. We had an hour of "What are you doing?" and "Look what I'm doing." Kind of cute. Very annoying. We'll figure it out.

Surprisingly, C handled the morning really well. He only ate cat food once (Note to self: find a new place for cat food) and he seemed to be perfectly content playing with his toys.

Now comes the hard part- working one on one with J while trying to get the baby to nap and the girls to act like reasonable human beings. I really hope I'm not jinxing myself, but I do predict that I'll be able to say that we have survived Day 1.

But first I have a shoe to find.
A temporary husband would be nice, too.