Monday's Child

Today we got started a bit late with school. We covered the basics and then had to go to Cub Scouts where I was leading the GirlsClub activity for this week (as well as for next week). The den's Circle Time was for working on the Texas Badge.

The girls, in the meantime, were working on basketweaving. Yeah, it sounds simple, but it's not. I even got a cheater kit so the little ones wouldn't struggle too much. I'll try to post a picture of it next week, then you'll see what it looks like. The girls start out with plastic rectangular baskets (looks like a portable drawer) that have vertical rails along the sidewalls. Then they weave long rainbow-colored paper strips between the rails' vertical posts. They alternate the posts that they weave around with each subsequent row of paper.

Well, some of the older girls did great with it and completed a good portion of it. The younger ones struggled more, as did some older ones. One got really frustrated so I worked with her for a while, observing her technique to see where she might be making her errors. Her persistence paid off, and she improved quite a bit.

When we pick up next week, the girls will finish up what they can of the weaving strips. Then we'll add pipe cleaner handles and felt for inside the base of the baskets to finish them off. Then they'll have cute baskets to hold trinkets in as well as experience in basketweaving.

After scouts, we got to come home and rest for almost an hour. Got dressed for swim class (kids) and exercise (me) and went to the YMCA. After the kids' swim class, I put them in Childcare so that I could work out for 1/2 hour. In that time, my son managed to get put in time-out twice. I won't go into details here except to say that the rest of the day did not fare much better.

I had my virtual class to attend just after dinnertime, during which time I had the children watch the Eyewitness: Rock & Mineral video that we had borrowed from the library. They both liked it, my son in particular. As soon as it ended, though, he started asking me if he could go on the computer (to look up something on a Transformer robot). He had started the day with that question, to which I had said that today was not a good day because of our tight schedule. He continued to ask me the rest of the day, and by evening I had had it. It was 9:30pm by this time, and he couldn't seem to understand that the day was over, his bedtime had passed, and he needed to be in bed, asleep. Well, he's asleep now. I pray that these trying-behavior days come to a close soon. It's exhausting.