I planned to give myself the month of September to take it easy and not worry about school. (That's one of the reasons why we have school year round--so we can take a break anytime we need one!) But when I found myself alone with the kids all day for the first time last Monday, I decided that a bit of routine might be helpful for all of us. So I gathered everyone together in our schoolroom to begin our devotional. That was the moment when Luke decided to have his first blowout. So we paused before we had quite begun and the kids cheerfully ran upstairs to grab me diapers and a change of clothes for Luke (the first sign that shows you how unprepared I was that morning). After carefully extricating Luke from his clothes, I began changing his diaper and bathing him with wipes. I didn't do the traditional 'put the clean diaper under the dirty one' trick because his dirty diaper was just as messy on the outside as it was on the inside. (Can you see mistake number two just around the corner? You'd think with this being my fourth child, I would have seen it a little sooner.) As soon as he was perfectly clean, I prepared to put his new diaper on, when, of course, he began to wet all over the entire couch. Don't worry, the changing pad stayed completely dry. A new errand for the kids-going to get me the vinegar spray bottle. I cleaned Luke up again, quickly put his diaper on this time, and got him dressed. Then I laid him on the one dry section of the couch so I could clean the rest of it. Please don't ask me why I didn't put a burp cloth underneath his face, because I simply can not tell you. Oh, maybe it's because it had already been used to try and catch some of the previous body fluids that were erupting from my darling babe. So I didn't have it ready to catch the spit-up that Luke decided to leave behind on the one clean space that was left.
Even with our rocky beginning and the long delay, we still had a pretty productive day. We memorized a few more lines of our Robert Frost poem, the boys got through several math lessons, Robby finished a few reading lessons, and I read and pondered this quote for the rest of the day:
"The woman receives from the Spirit of God Himself the intuitions into the child's character, the capacity of appreciating its strength and its weakness, the faculty of calling forth the one and sustaining the other, in which lies the mystery of education, apart from which all its rules and measures are utterly vain and ineffectual."
~Rev. F. D. Maurice (found in Charlotte Mason's book, Home Education)
School is going to be a little different this year, but none of us are complaining. How could we when we get to have this adorable face smiling up at us all day?
