This morning I woke up as early as usual and started the laundry... let the dog out.. fed the cats.. changed a couple diapers.. refreshed some bottles... made some coffee... and crawled back into bed. I was guessing the boys wouldn't be getting up and coming downstairs any earlier than 9:30 am anyway -- and the bed was warm...

I soon awoke to the sound of shuffling and whispering in the kitchen. I threw some shoes on and braced myself for whatever mischief the boys were sure to be making... To my surprise I found them carefully laying out their textbooks for the day. "Wait, Mom - wait! We're making a surprise for you!" they shouted as they shoved me back out of the kitchen.

They had gotten up early - but were apologetic that they didn't get up as early as they had hoped. (William explained that his clock said 'eight' but when he came downstairs my clock said 'eight forty-five'.) They went through my dayplanner for today and gathered all the necessary materials for each lesson and put them out in order on the kitchen counters. Sharpened pencils were neatly placed at the kitchen table and on our little blackboard they had scrawled the words: "Good Morning! We love you, Mom!"

Sigh. If only every day were like this....

We finished our math lesson in record time (and with no battles to speak of...) - added King Menes of Egypt to our timelines... Had a great discussion from the 'Touchpebbles' series about criticism & self-improvement... Put together a light hut for growing our plants and even planted some basil seeds.

William puts his freshly planted basil in the shop-vac box light hut....

And George too....

Voila! Light hut! Now let's see who remembers to water these poor things...

We're almost done for the day now... George is just putting the final touches on his drawing of Humbaba from the Epic of Gilgamesh and then we're all free! Free!

Yet again we are totally behind schedule... and I'm tempted to throw the whole schedule out the window. There have been plenty of days when I think I could have chased the boys around with pencils and notebooks until they finished all the work I had planned -- but I couldn't help but stop myself and let it go. I don't want any of us to start resenting the process already.

On the bright side -- the boys completed their Level One Red Cross swimming instruction over the last couple of weeks... All is not lost.

Today we're catching up on all the fantastic lessons I had planned for the last two weeks. Okay that sounds bad -- I have no intention of doing two weeks worth of work in one day. We worked yesterday too. Er.. wait that still sounds bad but it's not like that at all. Hmm.. Now that I think about it - there isn't all that much catching up to do.

It isn't that we didn't do any work at all over the last couple of weeks... It's just that our lessons were limited to maybe and hour or two per day rather than three or four... Not bad at all.

We started talking about ancient Babylon yesterday... and I'm looking forward to learning about the Hanging Gardens this afternoon.

We have begun to lean heavily on notebooking activities. I like the fact that the boys' work is entirely their own - and that they are allowed to come away with what interested them the most from each lesson. It's really neat to see what each of them come up with when a lesson is over. Sometimes it's rather predictable... like yesterday both boys chose to draw a picture of what they thought the Tower of Babel would have been like for their notebook activity... But when we read a few chapters of 'Black Beauty', for instance - William drew a detailed picture of the tragic hunt of the hare - while George drew a picture of the locomotive speeding past Black Beauty in the field. Aaah... It's good to know they're actually reading and not just sitting with a books in their laps trying to look interested.