Have A Seat...NOT!

It's a good thing I didn't have any "surprise" company drop by today. Not only would I have been extremely embarrassed, but they would have had to sit on the floor.

I started my day ready to put Brother on the first school bus outta here. We reviewed a new phonetical sound that we learned on Friday. Friday he had it down. Friday he zoomed through all the reading words with that sound like greased lightning. Friday he was a genius, a boy wonder. Today...not so much. We began with spelling words, reviewing the "ng" sound. First word, "win". Second word, "wing". Third word, "thin". Fourth word, "thing". Notice a pattern? Unfortunately, he didn't. And for some reason it was driving me CRAZY. Of course, it might have had something to do with cranky Baby and restless Sister clammoring for me attention, too. It took us half an hour to do eight words, but I managed to keep from throwing the teacher's guide across the room. Next we went over some reading words with sounds he already knew. The last row of words went like this: "funny, sneaky, baby, tricky". He read the first three fairly quickly. But he got hung up on "tricky". He kept saying "trickick". Trickick?! I tried to help. In a very soft, soothing voice, through clenched teeth, I said, "If this says funn-y, sneak-y, bab-y, what does this say?" His reply? "Trickick." He got the "trick" part, but couldn't make the connection at the end. He was squirming and trying to change the subject. He was sooooooo not interested. I wanted to scream. I wanted to jump up and down. I wanted to throw things. I wanted to tear my clothes and rip my hair out by the roots. Okay...well, maybe not the hair. I pay good money to make it look like my daughter gets the blonde hair from me. (Just for the record, she does.) I was so incredibly frustrated I couldn't see straight. I wanted to just put the books away and put on a video for them. It was all I could do to muster up the little bit of patience I had to help him through it. It took an hour and a half to do a lesson he usually does in thirty minutes. But once we did it, I was so glad it was me there to help him. It was one of those moments that would have been completely different for him in a classroom. It could have been a day he would have come home from school defeated and hating it. Instead, I got to see him through to success and then we moved on to fun things. We made a volcano. I taught him to play Uno. We played a math game.

My house is a disaster. But man, what a great day.