A Week, Briefly (9/16/19)

Waving good morning to Pixie (sent via text) during Morning Meeting

It was a hard week.

Hard enough that I yelled to my husband, "I'm sick of being the mother!  I'm going to go cool off!"

And then I slammed the door on my way out to take a walk. 

(Barefoot . . . but it was hot all week, so shoes weren't really necessary.)

My behavior was hardly fair to anyone in the house.

But my family eventually forgave me, and we mended what we could.

Our education this school year certainly has less to do with math and more to do with learning to live with one another!
 
Brother was released from the psych hospital on Thursday morning--just in time to attend dance with us.  His psychiatrist took DMDD off his list of diagnoses and added a new med to control his aggressive behavior. 

It was incredibly challenging getting the prescription filled--eventually we asked the pharmacy if we could see what our private insurance would cover instead of using Brother's medicaid.  What a blessing!  Our 36 hour fight (which doesn't sound that long except that every hour counted as the med wore off, and Brother had to skip a dose, and we were facing the entire weekend without it) ended in 20 minutes with us walking out of the pharmacy with a 3 months supply of his med--at no charge!

We're still in the honeymoon phase after his release and with a new med, but his behavior on the med is so drastically different from his behavior off the med, that we are cautiously optimistic.

Between visits to Brother, family therapy sessions, and psych appointments, our regular schooling was badly interrupted.

I cancelled school on Monday, as I'd had less than 3 hours sleep, and I desperately needed to reconnect myself to home and family after spending the entire weekend apart from them.  Kind church members had delivered a couple of meals to us, and my mom had kept up on all of the laundry-folding-and-putting-away, but there was still ever so much to put back in order after so much chaos and crisis.  I also interviewed each child who works independently on schoolwork, reviewing their planners and looking over their work. 

Really, they're doing remarkably well!

We had all of our Morning Meetings, and I read aloud to the young ones every night except church activity night.

The teens and I managed 2 Symposiums, during which they started working on Unit 2 of The Good and the Beautiful, continued reading The Codes of Hammurabi and Moses, and read/discussed quite a bit of interesting Puritan poetry.  They also did 4 days of independent school, went to work, attended the Halloween Haunt at the amusement park, and had a blast at the church dance on Saturday night--it was a blacklight dance.

My tweens and I only had 1 Colloquium.  We reviewed stories of Hera and Hephaestus, read about Patrick Henry, and discussed various functions of our bones.  They were faithful little workers at their independent school subjects.  In her free time, Nature Angel completed her darling crocheted dragon!

 We had 3 Academy sessions during which we finished our study of lions and moved on to make "All About Me" books in preparation to do a mini study of the human body.

Mister Man forgot to do school on Tuesday, and he spent the rest of the week catching up.  I didn't push him (he's 7), but I did encourage him to do his best.  He was quite self-motivated to get everything on his list completed, and he was incredibly relieved to complete everything by mid-day on Friday.

Ladybug had a really bad week--defiance, tantrums, physical aggressiveness, and urine ruled her days.  She was worried about Brother, and we tried ever so hard to help her talk it out, but she has regressed at least 2 years in her behaviors.  I can't help but wonder how long it will take for her to recover.  She did a couple of math lessons, a few phonics worksheets, and quite a bit of drawing, but she was otherwise unable to function.

Brother was in the psych hospital until Thursday, and then spent most of Friday with his therapist and regular psychiatrist; we were unable to do any individual school lessons.  It was enough to just deal with his psych needs.

Beowulf's meds are still settling into his system after the disaster of his withdrawal.  He's doing much better than he was, but we still only manged to sit down together to work on reading and math once this week. 

My Jr. Kinders and I read stories, sang songs, and did workbook pages twice in the week.

Sweet Nature Angel organized most of the young ones into doing an original adaptation of The Three Little Pigs called The Four Little Pigs.

Ladybug and Mister Man play the twin pigs who built their house of bricks.

The pigs build their houses.

I was charmed beyond words, and my favorite part was the song the wolf sang:

"I'm a big, bad wolf with a big, bad snout

and a big, bad tail that I wiggle all about.

And I'm hungry!"

Seriously, this song sung by a cherubic 4-year-old boy with rosy round cheeks while he wiggles his little behind?  To die for!

Instead of the wolf landing in the pot, the pot landed on the wolf!

Pixie is thriving at college.  We've stayed in touch by text, Snapchat, and video calls.

She loves her classes, loves her roommates, loves the social life, loves dancing . . . and she auditioned for and was accepted to join the Collegiate Dancers!  They accept dancers to a certain number (or numbers), and Pixie will be doing a K-pop number--which is a total surprise to her as she wasn't even planning to audition for it (a friend talked her into it), and she thought her audition was really bad. 

:)

She didn't get accepted into any of the other numbers she auditioned for, but she's super-thrilled to be included, and she's super-motivated to work hard in her dance classes so that she can eventually perform even more.

She also dutifully reported, "Mom, I'm doing all of my homework in a timely manner."

Saturday was Sir Walter Scott's last day of his scheduled vacation/emergency leave.  He took the kids to the park while I did the grocery shopping and ran other Saturday errands.

 It will be hard on us all to return to days without him around to help buffer the challenges.

Little Princess and Ladybug went to a church Activity Day, and I arranged for Nature Angel to have a day with a friend--to just be a young, fun 12-year-old instead of an overly-mature-incredibly-responsible 12-year-old.  It was wonderful to pick her up at the end of the day and listen to her giggle as she talked about being silly with her friend.

Her giggle had been gone all week.

In truth, all of our giggles have been gone for a long time.  Little Baymax woke up this morning saying, "Mom, I dweamed that [Brother] got weally mad, and [Mister Man] and I had to stand by the mudwoom door to keep him fwom wunning away."

It hurts my heart that he dreaming such things--that's a lot of responsibility for a 4-year-old to feel.  I reassured him it was only a dream, and now he's playing Legos.

He's okay.

And alongside the hurt in my heart is gratitude that we feel responsible for one another. 

I've spent much of the week feeling that I'm failing my kids in their educations, but as I write this story, I'm beginning to think that if we learn to love one another, to forgive, to work out problems together, and to care for one another, then perhaps we'll be learning what's most important of all.