today part I

at least i hope it's part one and i'll have the oomph to finish up later. today was one of those days where i woke up with a to do list that was too long to keep inside my head. it was also one of those days where we had absolutely nothing scheduled. which chana really loves, so she can spend the day pursuing her projects (currently making littlest pet shop films and uploading them to youtube) and playing in the playground. ah, childhood.

i probably had a to-do list because i'm thinking of it as a catch up day. this is a bad day to go into homeschooling all together, because as many homeschoolers know, one of the rules of homeschooling is that if you're trying to do something else other than "being" w/ the kids with full mental and emotional presence, you're going to end up snappish.

naturally, jack, who is teething, was grabbing at me. elazar was doing not too terribly with a spray bottle and the hose and his trains. he is thankfully in a phase where he has a lot of activities that he likes to do around the house. jack, otoh, gets bored easily. so i decided a trip to the playground was in order, even though i really didn't want to go. so we did that. then i wanted to do chumash but chana said later. then i ended up making dr appts to go to the dr that day. we had about 1/2 an hour and i asked chana to do some chumash. she said she wanted to do it when i got back. i said, chana, you know how i always want to do it earlier and you always want to do it later, and then oftentimes later is not a good time and i get frustrated. indeed, she knew. she still wanted it later. i said next time it will be my turn to do it earlier.

sure enough, later came, and chana asked for 10 more minutes to finish her tv show. then it was only about 10 minutes until the time she likes to meet some friends in the playground. talk about crunching in chumash.

i told her to do shishi and to do it to herself, even though i am not sure she has a good enough grasp on these pesukim to follow the flow in her head w/o doing it out loud. it was going ok (insofar as she was asking me for the words she didn't remember; i am not sure she actually knew what she was reading but that's ok, at worst it was a chazara of words and she'll do it out loud tomorrow and i'll get a sense of where she is). she was asking questions about if hashem would have given eisav a bracha of wealth if it actually was eisav instead of yaakov. so she's still processing the issue and thinking about it, which is great.

as the clock crept towards the time she wanted to go out, she began to get angrier and angrier and her tone towards me got louder and more belligerent. i began to feel angry being spoken to that way. among the things i said to her were: "would you like me to yell at you like you are yelling at me?" (i think i said that more than once in different ways) and "i don't think it's fair that you pushed off doing chumash and now you are frustrated and you are yelling at me."

anyway, we took a break for her to play outside. and we have 5 new pesukim and one small new rashi to do today.