First Snow Crazies

Funny how two girls that are usually such bed slugs in the morning both leapt out of bed with wild shrieks this morning when their Daddy told them it was snowing! The fat, white fluffy flakes had turned to sleet and slush by the time we went up to the bus stop, but both girls were taking great delight in making tiny piles of slush to jump on and spattering me with “wet slush guts!” Yeeeesh!

I’ve assigned this morning as “catch up on e-mail” time since it is so easy to get impossibly behind when over 80 messages a day come in. I’d love to delegate that task to someone, but since Erin isn’t old enough yet to be a computer helper, I try to keep on top of things as best I can. I have over 750 in the box right now and need to weed that down to at least 650 by filing, sorting and saving them to disk. That should clear up some memory in the e-mail program and stop it from being grumpy.

Yesterday was the only sunny day since last Saturday and I ran around the house in a blaze of energy sorting and tidying, getting laundry on the line and sketching out ideas in the sunshine at our dining room table before Erin took it over with her homework. We knew that being in a 4-5 combined class would challenge her, but the homework has been exceptionally heavy this week and she felt very overwhelmed by bedtime last night. It was the first time she looked at me at 8:30 at night and said “I just want to go to sleep, my brain is tired!” She leapt out of bed to see the snow and then remembered a small assignment that wasn’t in her homework book so she raced downstairs to copy out her verb conjugation of MANGER (to eat) 5 times before breakfast. The average rule of 15 minutes per grade level certainly didn’t apply this week, but she’s learning to get things like projects and book reports done steadily instead of waiting for the end of November deadline. I’m also learning from her as well. So often, I end up with crazy, last minute deadlines... but since Toronto, I have been doing well at keeping ahead of the game and not giving myself too many “superwoman” goals. Now that I’ve written that down in my blog, I hope those don’t end up being famous last words!