Monday is my favorite day of the week. Everything starts over again and it's just so nice not feeling behind on anything. It's also the only day of the week that no child has any outside activies. On Tuesday the little girls and I go to Sue's house in the morning and in the afternoon Katie has drama class; on Wednesday the boys go to Discoveries; on alternate Thursdays I go to Tots and Co. with the little girls and every Thursday Jacob has drama class; Friday Jacob has a guitar lesson and Marie has band practice, Bible study, and youth group; on Saturday Marie has her violin lesson and orchestra rehearsal; and on Sunday at least the three older children and Jörn go to church. That's not counting spontaneous get-togethers with friends during the day (as happened today), Jacob (and last week, Marie, too) going sailing, a friend of mine coming here with her 12-year-old son for an hour or so every other week, or things we do as a family such as house group and YWAM team dinners, nor evening adult-only-plus-Elisabeth get-togethers with Sue and Richard.
Life is busy. It's good and I'm happy with everything we're doing, but it's busy! So Monday is a nice break.
Homeschooling-wise, I print out a "record sheet" every Monday where I keep track of things that could be called school-ish, dated with that week. (So this week's says "April 4-8, 2011." Not individual days, much less hours.) I started doing that about eight years ago, in Germany, with the idea that if we ever ran into trouble I would have some written proof of educating my children. (As it turned out, they weren't interested in anything at all we had to say until we could fax them a letter from outside of Germany that we were no longer in Germany, but that's another topic.) I've kept it up since moving to Cyprus, though, because it's cool looking back and seeing when we read which book or just how many times Jacob has been sailing or when it was we went for a walk in the park with the new home-ed family, etc.
So although I do have a vague sort of plan for by when what maybe ought to be more-or-less finished, those dates aren't written down anywhere, so we can't get behind. The record sheet has a list of the books we're reading/using at the moment, and sometimes a blank space for a long time after a particular book does motivate me to think about continuing, but that's about it. Also, if the page is pretty much blank at the end of the week, then on the following Monday I just cross out the second date and write in the Friday of the next week, and voilá--we're no longer behind! Monday is cool.
Last night I was asleep before 10:30 (very early for me), and slept straight through until 7:00. I vaguely remember Helen coming to our bed and Elisabeth must have nursed, but those events didn't fully wake me up. When I woke up, I felt so refreshed and AWAKE, so crawled carefully out from under Helen and Elisabeth and got out of bed to a quiet house. By 9:00 I had had breakfast (well, I'd had breakfast by 7:10--a bowl of granola doesn't take long when I get to eat it all in one sitting, without holding anyone on my lap), read the blogs and forums I like to read, read my e-mail, started answering one (didn't get far with that, because once children woke up, I turned the computer off), gotten three people dressed (one being myself) and told four other people to get dressed, started laundry, started bread, made breakfast for four short people, printed the weekly record sheet (sometimes that doesn't actually get done until Tuesday or later), reorganized the "school stuff" table, and probably some other things. Sunday morning by 9:00, the only thing I had done from all of that was get out of bed, and that wasn't willingly.
The rest of the day has gone pretty well, too. I haven't had to rush around trying to get anything done before the next thing happens, because nothing else was planned. When a friend called to ask if her boys could come over to play with my boys, it was so nice just being able to say, "Yes, of course!" (I did enlist Katie's help to spend five minutes--by the timer--picking up whatever we could from the living room floor in that time, but that was the extent of my preparation.)
For the last several months, Jörn has been home Monday evenings, as well, which has been great. However, the prayer meeting that used to meet on Mondays and got changed to Tuesdays in October or so last year is probably going to be changed back to Mondays soon. That's good from the point of view of my Greek class (which, if I got into the second level class, starts tomorrow and is Tuesdays and Thursdays), but means that Monday evenings will no longer be totally peaceful, so that's why I thought I'd better post this (which I'd been thinking about for awhile!) tonight, a very good Monday.
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