The Mixed Blessing of Rain

We've had nonstop rain here last week; I never say no to rain as it is a blessing; we only got 1/2" in all of Nov. but by day 4 we were going a bit crazy. It's main impact here is on the laundry.

The week before the Week of Rain Victor had had a night time accident. Happily he's old enough to strip his bed, clean his mattress, change his sheets & wash his own bedding. All except wringing out the comforters & that's hard for me, so he calls me over when it's time for that. And then the next next morning Miranda crawled into bed w/ me to snuggle as she usually does & had her first accident in about 5 months. Mike was still sleeping so I couldn't completely strip the bed & my mattress doesn't wipe off. I had just thrown our other mattress pad out due to wear but hadn't yet replaced it. I soaked up as much as I could w/ cloth diapers, febreezed it & set a little fan to blow on it all day to dry it out. Our mattress is 10 years old & we're considering how we can best replace it after this next baby is born.

The point of airing out all of this dirty laundry is to illustrate how much an accident throws off our laundry schedule. In the winter the loads are (happily) much smaller, less dirty & less frequent. The water also takes much longer to smell mildewy which is another bonus because I fill the sink up at night before I go to bed so it can be up to room temperature by the time I begin washing. Washing straight from the tap is COLD, & the mud room has the main entrance point & is furthest from the stove. So I'll usually put 6 or 8 hours between "cycles".  Is it a cycle if I'm the machine?

I got half of the children's clothes washed before the rain began but the comforter & mattress pad were still wet so I left them outside where they probably would have washed themselves if I'd just hung them outside w/out washing them in the first place, lol.

So this is what our living room looks like much of the time in winter inclement weather. Summer inclement weather everything is on hangers hanging from Victors loft bed w/ a fan blowing on them. I can't decide if this looks more turn of the century or just European. Either way it leaves half as much room for playing any kind of physical games. Mom had given me some Tae Bo tapes I had never looked at but was considering breaking them out in order to spend their energy some how if we could only see the tv. I probably would have but they're not quite tall enough to see from that far back.

No exercise makes it doubly hard for them to concentrate on seat work. We were actually slack on seat work, I've been implementing a new chore system & getting that running has been my main focus. Not Charlotte so much, she can sit & color all day, which has been nice. Victor did get 100% on a math test but it took him 45 min which is a lot longer than average. He got a silver star which he prefers to gold & when it was still raining the next day I assigned him cookie math.

Cookie math is when I don't feel like baking or teaching & so contract him out to do it. I started it to give a more tangible reward for his reading skills, but we were more arithmetic focused today. He picks the recipe, reads & gets out the ingredients, measures, & pours & hands it off to me to mix. The only different thing we did this time was bake w/ a ruler as he didn't know what a 13x9x2 was, so we had to measure a lot of pans. He enjoyed it more than ever because we had  just done a lesson on cups & quarts, a week of telling temperature & he's pretty proficient at telling time, though not quickly & he had never had to calculate time ahead for baking so there was a double digit mental sum that he surprised himself by doing & we subtracted 3/4C of sugar as we were adding chocolate chips. Peanut butter bars w/ chocolate chips, mmmm, It was especially neat to see his confidence in his knowledge.The girls had refused lunch & were acting like banshees; I laid them down for a nap so it was just him & I, it was nice.