A great day

Wow.

Yesterday was a great day.

It was one of those days where you pause many times and think to yourself, "This is great!"

A fit beginning to such a splendid day was me, waking up when I felt like it. Now you moms and dads out there can imagine that after three kiddos stealing my sleep for many years, my relationship with sleep is pretty tight. Me and sleep, we're like two crossed finger. Or two fingers crossed. Whatever - you get the picture.

Now that my youngest has been waking up after I do (yes! it does happen) , I can complete my sleep cycle and wake up when it is light. Ahhhhhh......snuggling in bed for 15 more minutes - ALONE - what a luxury. Love it. Love it. Love it!

So at 7:30ish I roll out of bed. Make my Peet's Decaf Sumatra coffee. Mmmmmmm. Pot of decaf green for the kids. I treated myself to a bowl of ceral, some sugary, fruity, supposed to be good for you kind from Trader Joe's. Usually I am forced to eat very, very branny bran muffins for reasons I won't go into now.

After dropping Marie at preschool, I drove the five blocks back to my house to begin "school time" with Rose and Richard. We sit on the couch, all snuggled together, and I read to them. It is my absolute most favorite part of homeschooling. We are together, we are reading and we have great talks.

Currently we are reading a book called Breadwinner, about a little girl in Afghanistan under the Taliban. You can bet I stopped quite a few times to sputter,

"Can you believe in our times that women are treated like this? It's ridiculous!"

I knew the women had to wear burkas and be totally covered. What I didn't fully realize is that all women were (are?) not allowed to leave their home with out a man. If they did they had to have a permission note from their husband pinned to their burka. PINNED TO THEIR BURKA! Women with degrees. Writers, Teachers. Treated like kindergarten children. In this story, the mother and older sister hadn't left their house for over a year and half! I was fuming.

But it led us into a great conversation about equality and how great our country is and how lucky we are. Man, we are lucky.

So that was reflection moment #1: I really appreciated: being with my kids, talking about important things, and living in the US.

A few hours later, I was sitting at the kitchen counter. Rose was at the computer getting all excited about the progress she had made memorizing her multiplication tables. Now, the fact that she is excited is enough to make my whole year. For at least two years she has been fighting and dreading any kind of timed multiplication quiz. So the fact that this new computer class she's taking has got her enthusiastic is BIG in itself. As she typed away, she would occassionally turn and say,

"Look at the progress I've made!" with a big smile on her face. Melt. Melt. Melt. (maybe only homeschool moms will understand that).

So, I'm sitting next to Richard who was taking a pretty difficult chemistry test. I looked out the window and had my reflection moment #2:

I'm doing it. I'm really doing it. My kids are really learning. Rose is making huge strides this year in reading and math. Richard, for goodness sakes, is converting grams to atoms with conversion factors and Avogadro's Number and back again. This is something I don't think I ever mastered in high school. And he's 11. We are really homeschooling! Hooray!

In the afternoon, my dearest, bestest friend from high school came over with her two kids. The one who was supposed to move to Germany, then lived in SoCal, has now moved about 4 miles away from me. And her kids and 2/3 of my kids play really well together.

We sat on my front balcony and watched them zoom around on scooters, bikes, tricyles and feet. I turned to her and said,

"Our kids are playing together. Who would have thought in high school, that we would be sitting here twenty plus years later, watching our kids play together?"

How cool is that? That was reflection moment #3.

I don't think I had any more major reflection moments that evening. We just had a nice dinner of homemade lentil soup and mmmmm...fresh french bread - lots of it. I put littlest one to bed. Then to top it all off - we indulged in ice cream with chocolate sauce! My jeans may rebuke me, but I couldn't resist.

We ended the lovely day watching the 2nd half of The Hindinberg, a surprisingly good movie about, you guessed it, the Hindenberg. Turns out (Joe looked it all up at work - is that what he does all day?) there was never any conclusion about why that German blimp exploded. The movie postulates that it was sabotage by the resistance to the Nazi's. A bomb. Yikes! It was so exciting.

But since the ending was so sad (36/90ish people died), we had to watch a few minutes of Monte Python and the Holy Grail to perk up. "Bring out your dead!" never fails to brighten my outlook. And the kids could go to bed happy.

Before knocking off, I read a bit. A fascinating book, Three Cups of Tea, is about a mountain climber who ends up building schools in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. And girls can even go to them! A pretty cool way to end the day, especially considering the book I'd been reading to the kids in the morning.

This kind of day doesn't come often. Today, as I carried my screaming, kicking three year old to her room for various and sundry infractions, I longed for yesterday.

I did my best to savor it.