OK, so we had a pretty good school day. Grace was reading her phonics book, Bethany wasn’t crying about division, and Joel was doing math. Now I have teacher books for every course, but I hate that in higher math they don’t show how they got the answer. It’s not enough if I know what the answer should be, if Joel gets it wrong I have to determine how to do the problem and then work it through with him to figure out where he went wrong. So sometimes I have to work backwards and figure it out, like today. It said draw 2 supplementary angles, the measure of one angle is 58 degrees greater than the measure of the other angle. So I knew they added up to 180 degrees, but you have to say x(x+58) = 180, solve, then plug in the number. But still, it would be easier if they showed the whole problem.
After lunch we wrote our Tea Tuesday letters and I remembered to put the tea in this time. So if you got a letter from last week and wondered where the tea was, I forgot. I buy Celestial seasonings tea (ok, herbal infusions) because it’s made in Boulder and I live in CO, so why not? But I ran out of the commercial tea bags that are in a package, so I was just sticking plain tea bags in the letters. Last week I wondered why the envelopes where so flat, but this week I remembered and stuck in blueberry tea. Sounds like it’s time for a trip to Boulder again.
Then I cleaned the den and by that I mean that I vacuumed the tops of everything, the ceiling and the curtain rod, moved the couches to vacuum underneath them and then moved the furniture around. Wow, that looks nice. I took all the fall stuff down off the mantel so I could put my snowmen up there and moved the dog’s cage (which comes up later.) We’re going to get our carpets cleaned soon, yay! 6 people tramping on the same beige carpets for 3 ys. 5 months, plus 2 cats and a dog = yuck!
Normally I don’t rant about stuff here, but after we ate dinner we went over to Barnes and Noble to look around. We knew something was going on because there were jugglers and unicyclists outside the store. Inside there was a table that said free face painting and had a giant bowl of candy on it. Of course the girls waltzed over to the candy bowl and started pilfering. The lady handed me a paper and said sweetly, ‘Hi, here’s a voucher to use up front. If you buy anything tonight the store will give our school a percentage. Here’s the book lists, just pick the grade your kids are in.’ I said, ‘Oh, I home school, so we don’t use any of these.’ To which she responded, ‘Well, you probably don’t want that voucher then, I’ll take it back.’ I said I’d just keep it and walked off, but as is often the case, what I really wanted to say was…’Wait a minute. You’re making the parent’s buy the books for their kids at your school and then also getting money from the bookstore with every purchase? Yeah, of course I’m not going to buy anything with that voucher and give your school the money, I seem to think I already do that. What is that called…tanks….twitter….oh, yeah TAXES! Yes, I pay taxes so your school can buy books and here you are pushing it off on the parents, so what? So you can buy candy and hire unicyclists to entertain the kids? UGH!’ Maybe I conveyed all of that in my look to her, I don’t know.
Anyway we had a good time looking at books, meeting a few children’s book authors and then on the way out the kids gravitated to the candy bowl again. The lady, get this, put her hand over the bowl (but not before Hannah grabbed a piece of candy) and said, ‘I’m sorry, this candy is for High plains school children only.’ OMG, suddenly she is the candy-Nazi! Suddenly, I am not normal; I’m a wicked, evil HS’er?! I made Hannah put the candy back and we walked out with her boo-hooing, but again I really wish I would have said…..’Oh, before you offered us candy because you thought I was a parent of a kid that went to your school, but now that you know I’m a HS’er the candy is only for public school kids? Hmm., I think I’ll stand outside of your school with a big bowl of candy and ask kids as they come up, ‘are you a HS’er?’ And when they say no, I’ll just say, ‘sorry this candy is for HS’ers only’.’ OK rant over.
OK, lastly 2 funny things. Hannah found Bethany’s cat that is named Kitty 4,5,6 (don’t ask.) When she gave it to Bethany Hannah said ‘Here is kitty wour, wive, six, and I wound wishy (fishy) one, two, wee, too.’ So she can count to 6 just by naming Bethany’s stuffed animals. Too bad most numbers don’t start with a ‘t’ now that she can say it. The other thing had me laughing so hard I was crying. We let Maisy in last night and told her to go to bed (she sleeps in a crate and is trained to get in it when you say go to bed, which seems to make her pretty smart.) However, I had moved her cage to the other side of the room. Not a different room, just the other side of the room. I said ‘go to bed’ and she walked over to where her cage was and looked, and looked, looked at me, looked at the floor. In her mind I know she was thinking I was insane, what cage, where, I can’t see it! I kept saying ‘go to bed’ and she kept creeping over to the empty floor and then getting up and wandering around the room and coming back to the empty floor looking up sadly at me. I swear this went on for 10 minutes and I was laughing so hard I could barely say ‘go to bed’ anymore, I was on the floor gasping for air, and Maisy was still cowering over by the empty space looking around for the cage, all the while I’m pointing to it and Joel is telling her here it is, and finally we just dragged her over to the cage and….she jumped. Like it was a total surprise to her that the cage was over here. Oh my gosh, it…was….so…freaking…..funny. I can’t wait to see what she does tonight!