Holy cow, today is just beautiful. I'm sitting cross-legged on the back deck, still hot in the shade (but not minding too much), burning my toes on the hot wood, watching the kids chase a lizard through the trees. Built to Spill is playing on my computer, the songs drifting past me like the most laid-back, sighing breeze...soft, gentle, just loud enough for only me to hear. I read a nicely written post and of course I had to listen again, even though we were just playing the same thing this morning. The kids don't care, and it's so completely perfect for today.
We spent the morning doing the work I had prepared: fractions, Greek heroes, Latin, Custer's last stand, reading. It was when the kids started writing that things went awry.
"Didn't we spend, like, two weeks discussing proper punctuation?" I asked, using my super-serious Mom/teacher voice. The kids didn't even look up from their papers, writing away and ignoring capitalization, quotation marks, and commas like nothing had ever happened. I think they do this to get back at me for getting rid of cable on a regular basis and making them spend months studying the polar explorers. (Now that it's written out there like that, I think that's a definite YES.)
(Also, I hope they never read this blog. My own punctuation and sentence structure are pretty abysmal.)
"Fine," I said. "This is how we're going to do it. Quotation marks-Hey-comma-Allie-comma-would you get me a pencil-question mark-quotation-asked Mom-period."
Allie played along. "Quotation-sure-comma-Mom-comma-I'd be glad to-comma-quotation-replied Allie-peroid."
Ian giggled. "Quotation-gosh-comma-Mom-comma-this sure is stupid-exclamation point-quotation-said Ian-period."
"Quotation-Whatever works-comma-kids-period-whatever-works-period-quotation."
And that's been our day so far.
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