Yesterday marked six months in this town for our family. I was going to post about it yesterday, but I was too busy.
On Friday mornings we go to Mass with a few other mothers, which is something I've hoped to organize for years. (The other mothers part is as much about camouflage as fellowship. If you're the only person at a weekday Mass with small children, the source of the kid noise is distressingly obvious. This ratchets up my anxiety level, which ratchets up my sensitivity to kid noise, which never fails to ratchet up my kids' noisemaking. With all this ratcheting we are less a house built on a rock than a house built in the Amazon flood plain. Consequently my efforts to get to daily Mass have always been short-lived in the past but hurray! here several of us go each Friday morning.)
We are also trying a little co-op on alternate Fridays: one woman teaches art and I teach Latin. My kids are more enthusiastic about the doughnuts than the teaching, but enthusiasm is good, right?
Fridays are a short school day for us. When we got home we read a chapter of Luke (each boy does his own illustration from the chapter to add to his notebook) and talked about the Sabellianist heresy. We are doing a little study of heresies this fall, with the idea that one aspect of knowing Christ is knowing who he isn't. I'm using this page as a guide; it should take us up to Advent. Each boy wrote a letter, and then we had a quick review time. The history we studied last year didn't seem to stick very well, so this year I'm setting aside time each week to go back over what we've been learning.
My husband has every other Friday off so he was around -- mostly fixing the upstairs bathroom sink, but available to listen to Alex recite "The Charge of the Light Brigade" as well. The boys started piano yesterday after lunch. They were both a little reluctant, but they enjoyed the lessons and sat down at the piano today without prompting. I found a teacher who is willing to come to us, something I've been hoping would turn up.
Elwood took the three oldest boys out in the afternoon, and I used the time to plan the next two weeks of school and catch up on some desk work while Pete slept. Marty had soccer practice in the late afternoon; after dinner Elwood took Alex and Marty to see an adaptation of a children's novel put on by the community theater group.
Yesterday morning I was putting on a pair of jeans and thinking, "I bet it's been a year since I wore these jeans. I had no idea, a year ago, that I'd be here in this town today."
A year ago my husband was working past ten o'clock every night -- it wasn't unusual for him to stay until midnight. Having him home more is so so so nice. Getting time to plan while he takes the big kids makes homeschooling much easier.
A year ago I knew I needed support to homeschool happily, but I was having a hard time finding crunchy Catholic homeschoolers. Here I have found a little circle of like-minded moms, some who homeschool and some who don't, who understand where I'm coming from and pray for me to get where I'm going.
A year ago I was feeling stretched thin, dealing with first-trimester ickiness and my husband's schedule. I just didn't have the energy to find a piano teacher and get Marty to soccer.
A year ago I was still really stressed about my pregnancy. A good outcome seemed implausible. Today my Pete is working on getting mobile: he wants to crawl but he can only scoot backwards. He has two teeth, too. They popped through on vacation; I had no idea they were coming. (Don't hate me, Moxie. I'd send some easy teething vibes your way if I could.)
A year ago I was thinking that to afford a home where we wanted to live, my husband would need to keep working those crazy hours. I didn't know how I would manage with four, doing dinner and bedtime on my own every weeknight. When my friend Kate was here, after she finished looking around our house, she said, "This house is so you. All those years that you guys were moving around, this house was waiting for you."
Maybe it was.
The last time I wrote a really happy post about my life, my middle boys locked themselves in the garage the next day. It makes me wonder what tomorrow will hold. But I guess if this last year has taught me anything, it should be that I can trust God with my future.
Hey, I have a question before I sign off for the night. It is a question especially for other moms, but any opinions are welcome. One of my favorite things about summer is the respite from laundering socks. (My boys wear sandals all summer long.) I hate pairing socks. I hate the sock terrorist who appears to live in the back of my dryer, where he captures sock hostage after hapless sock hostage. Now I am going to be laundering socks for six people. I need a System -- any ideas?
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