Holidays

Well, of course, it was Good Friday on Kitchen Cleaning Day, so I started on Saturday afternoon. I vacuumed, then washed the windows, and that was as far as I got before I started throwing up. Which just goes to prove how unnatural and unhealthy cleaning the kitchen really is. It was all very sad, because I missed Easter Sunday lunch with friends, and only managed a brief glimpse of the little girls hunting for eggs before I had to fall back into bed again.

Now, school holidays, which we were all so in need of. I am loving our new routine, but it really is very tiring for someone as lackadaisical as me. I am very proud of keeping on day after day, and proud of the girls for working so hard. I am loving the Well-Trained Mind books, but the grammar and writing ones are quite repetitive. I realise that this is necessary for absorption of abstract concepts, and really, it's done quite well...but, the girls got very bored going with the same format every week. I am trying to think of ways to make it a bit more fun. We were taking lessons off just before Easter to make cards, or to play a game of Monopoly or one of our endless supply of educational board games, which perked everyone up a lot. And the Domestic Goddess, such a treasure, organised Easter egg decoration this year, in charge of blowing, dyeing and decorating eggs with melted wax crayons. I am so grateful that she is the eldest daughter! I carefully arranged to be somewhere else, doing something relaxing, like the washing.

And now, holidays. I was wondering how it would go, as I had no intention of doing anything more entertaining than cleaning out cupboards. Luckily, we had a tonne of dirt delivered over the back fence by our wonderfully helpful neighbour-with-an-excavator. We intend to put in a lawn over the weekend, but in the meantime, two small girls and all their friends have spent countless hours playing in huge piles of dirt with all the neighbourhood Tonka trucks. I don't let them back in the house once they are in the dirt, but they don't even want to, so I have been serving lunch in the backyard. I allow them back in at bathtime, once they have shed all their clothes at the back door. I am seriously considering having a pile of dirt delivered every school holidays. It is so peaceful and quiet inside.