Thursday in the Life…

…of an ordinary woman who tries to be faithful in that which is least, but mostly it’s just stuff that has to be done so her people don’t starve or join the anarchists.

7:30-9:00

• Wake up with a start and realize that the midnight chat with your husband after brothers’ meeting has you off to a late start already. That’s all good, because you signed up for this flexibility when you decided to educate the kids at home.
• Get dressed, fill the teakettle with water for coffee, start the cream of wheat cooking because fewer people fuss about that than oatmeal.
• Read your Bible at the kitchen counter while you wait for the water to boil. Discuss the parable of the rich man and Lazarus with your husband. Press the coffee.
• Ahhhh. Coffee.
• Call the children. Direct the kitchen helper to make toast and set the table.
• Blend a protein berry shake and eat breakfast.
• Hand out morning chores to the children and finish your coffee.
• Brush and braid little girls’ hair.

9:00-10:00

• Send the older three children down to their desks to start their assignments.
• Jot a quick note to a friend.
• Wander through the kitchen and do a quick tune-up of crumbs missed on the countertops.
• Wander into bathroom to brush teeth. Brush with right hand and do a counter wipe with left hand.
• Dig wash out of the hamper where the short people can’t reach.
• Go downstairs and sort laundry; start a huge load washing.
• Settle at your desk and field questions; coach dictionary skills for the 3rd grader.
• Organize the first grader’s papers and call her away from her drawing. Admire her picture of a farm, complete with canary cages on top of the rabbit hutches.

10:00-11:00

• Teach first grader her 12’s addition and subtraction family. Work on her arithmetic until she can power along on her own with her worksheets.
• Do speed drills; coach cursive writing.
• Help the dictionary child again. Tell her brother to stop volunteering how to spell words. She is supposed to look them up!
• Admire the poem the boy wrote and feel secretly amused because of how often he has protested that he doesn’t need to study Language since he will never be a writer.
• Talk on the phone with Mom for a while.

11:00-12:00

• Clean up the sewing area, (which is handily situated right next to the classroom) where a pile of mending converges with scraps from canvas slippers, stuffed foxes, and embroidery projects. Only the mending is yours; pull children one by one to clean up their own messes and send them promptly back to school.
• Sew the L shaped tear in the flannel sheet. Alter the little girl’s Goodwill dress with some elastic in the huge neckline. Iron a patch onto the khaki cargo pants that are too nice to pitch.
• Change the laundry loads, out of washer, into dryer, another huge load into washer.
• Do some quick swipes with the iron and put it away.

12:00-1:00

• Dispatch the son on kitchen duty to make quesadillas. Serve them with leftover chef salad.
• Enjoy the sensation of all sitting around the table at lunch, chatting about the day.
• Assign cleanup to the girls, since it’s just paper plates and forks anyway.

1:00-2:00

• Take the boys back to class to finish up assignments.
• Take your daily dose of algebra instruction. Find yourself pleasantly surprised at how it is starting to all make sense. Pinch yourself a little.
• Quiz the 6th grader for his geography bee.
• Change out loads of laundry again.

2:00-3:00

• Sweep the kitchen floor before your sister-in-law gets to your house.
• Sit and drink tea with your sister-in-law for a while. Snuggle the sweet little baby and chat about anything and everything.

3:00-4:00

• Mix up a custard and put it into the oven.
• Dress warmly and head out for a 30 minute walk.
• Listen to The Grand Weaver by Ravi Zacharias while you bask in the sudden rays that burst from the clouds.
• Watch the turkeys in the field and the hawk soaring above it.
• Wave at the neighbors.
• Get home just in time to take the custard out of the oven. Scour the fridge for supper. No joy. Oh well, you have a plan.

4:00-5:00

• Remind your son that he has a guitar lesson tonight.
• Briefly connect with your husband and feel grateful that he is home so you don’t have to haul everybody across the mountain to the lesson.
• Load up the milk jugs to fill at a friend’s place.
• Stop for cheap cereal at the little discount grocery store en-route.

5:00-6:00

• Drop your son off at the teacher’s house.
• Browse at a nearby fabric store for the happy feeling it supplies.
• Buy a lovely piece of twill with some Christmas money. Also white thread and black thread since the children have used up every scrap of it for their projects, which you didn’t know until you went to do mending and had to use bobbins and hope they wouldn’t empty before you were done.
• Impulse buy a rusty tin sign that says, “Life is beautiful.” Because Christmas money.
• Yawn and yawn on the way home. Listen as your son explains how spies can tell if someone is watching them by faking a yawn.
• Arrive home to a surprise. The little girls have folded their laundry and vacuumed the living room. Praise them extravagantly.

6:00-7:00

• Serve cereal for supper. Yup. Cold. Plenty of milk, plenty of Kix, and even some “chocolate frosted sugar bombs”. Everybody loves you.
• Do dishes while your husband and sons finish the chores in the barn.
• Fold the laundry that was too challenging for the girls to do.
• Read stories to the little girls and record their reading challenge times for the day. Olivia: 2 hours. Rita and Addy: 1/2 hour.

Call it a day.