Does _____ count as ____?

I get this question in many forms all day long every day. Mostly regarding exercise. Does jumping rope count as exercise? Yes. Does jumpinge bouncy thing count as exercise? Yes. Does counting my bioncles count as math? No. Does playing the guitar count as anything? Music.

Just for the record, lying on the rug in front of the TV, wiggling, does not count as exercise.

School blahs.

I admit it. I've got a case of the school blahs. I can't really call it 'spring fever' because it's not like the weather is nice and I want to be outside. The weather, with the exception of yesterday, has been rainy, rainy, rainy, rainy and rainy. I'm just blah. I got up and did my list today, walked in the rain and everything, but I really didn't want to. The kids have got some blahs/crabbiness going on too, so I did the only logical thing and set the bouncy thing up in the living room. It's one of those inflatable bounce houses, one of the smaller ones, about 7 feet x 7 feet square. It has been known to cure bad moods in this house. We pull it out about once or twice a year. I would post a picture of it, but blogger is doing odd things with picture uploads, trying to save something to my computer when I try to upload a picture. It's very weird.

Anyway, I guess we'll do school today.

Blah.

Art class.

We've got our last art class today.  I hate to say goodbye to it.  We've learned a lot.  (yes, I'm including me!)  I guess maybe we'll schedule park days or something for the summer?  We've got a planning meeting for the homeschool group this week on Thursday.  We plan about 8 weeks at a time now.  We used to sit down and try and plan a whole year at a time and that did not work out at all.  Everything changes in a year.

Here it is.

I uploaded it to Flickr instead, since blogger was giving me trouble.  You can't really see it very well here, but there is a master schedule for the whole family including weekends and meals for each day, then each child has a chore list section and an academic list section.  You can see that I've scheduled myself a nap in the middle of the day.  I don't always take one, but I've got chronic fatigue and sometimes I need a nap.  My list is very simple and small and is in the top right corner.  It takes me about an hour and a half to get through my list, which includes cleaning, exercise, cooking, goodwill and shower.   I abbreviated things like shwr for shower and gdwl for goodwill (we put something in the goodwill bag every day, trying to declutter.), so that I could get it all on one page. 

Well,

I was going to post a picture of my wonderful master list today, but the upload to blogger didnt' go well.  Anyway, it's very nice, almost a thing of beauty. 

This weekend was okay, my last free one for a while.  I have to work next weekend at the hospital.  I had some kind of stomach upset this whole weekend and consequently didn't get a lot done.  I did manage to spend the rest of my birthday money on paint for the kitchen, gardening stuff and books, so I'm a happy camper.  I've got tomatoes to set out this morning which will count as exercise, then I'll take a shower and be done with my morning list, much to the kid's disappointment.

I also started a novel this weekend, I got a book about the National Novel Writing Month or NA NO WRI MO (weird abbreviation) which is supposed to be in November, but I thought, what the heck, I'll start now.  I've written a book before, but it was pretty bad, now I'm trying again.  According to the rules of the book, I'm not supposed to share the details of my book, just write every day.  I probably won't finish in a month, but I am motivated to try and finish it, at least get the 50,000 words in.  So far, I've got 2000.  It's fiction.  Later on, at some point, I'd like to write a nonfiction book but I have no idea what about. 

Anyway, I'm off to set out my tomatoes and then the school week for the 3-D Academy will begin.

Finally I worked on the lists.

This time, I made one master list for us all. I added in a meal plan for every day, separated the chores from the school work for the kids and wrote a weekly schedule for all 7 days of the week. I'm pretty happy with it and since the kids chores got cut back a little, they are too. That really just means they have to do more cleaning on Saturday, but they don't know that yet. :-) I tried to include all our weekend and evening activities as well, so that it is pretty comprehensive. We'll see how it goes. We've never had everything scheduled before and although this is a very loose schedule, it will probably take us a while to adapt to it. We'll see how it goes.

He's the Man.

My 10-year-old gets the man award for yesterday.  We had a spider about the size of a small dog in our shower yesterday.  It crawled onto my leg.  (Eeek!)   I can tell you that my heart is very strong and I have no need for any expensive cardiac stress tests.  I took care of that at home.  The spider was not so lucky.  I scared it literally to death, either that or it drowned.  Anyway, I spent yesterday  unshaved and unconditioned because of my hasty exit from said shower.  A little while later when it was time for my daughter to take a shower, we had a discussion of who would get the nasty thing out of there so she could get in.  Not her.  Not me.  Even 16 year old son who has often taken on such jobs in the past, could not stomach getting anywhere near this large spider.  Daddy was unavailable.  So youngest son took the dustpan and broom and bravely did it. 

We're so proud.

Okay.

Things are going okay this week.  I finished reading Twilight and now I feel like a person who has come out of a 2 day coma.   School has been going okay.  No one's been grounded this week for school reasons, although I have been easing up on them a little, letting them do art instead of math one day (although it was geometric art so that might count!)  

I got a textbook the other day on science and my daughter, while flipping through it actually said this sentence:  "Oooh, Egyptian heiroglyphics!  I love Egyptian heiroglyphics.  They're so cool!"  I told her she sounds like a homeschooler. 

Last night we went to a 4H awards banquet.  The food was really great but we didn't get to stay until all of the awards were given out because we had to go pick up my oldest from the library.  Anyway, I'm glad we went. 

I'm not doing very well with my blog post this morning, it's taking me a long time and it feels stilted or something.  I guess I should've known better than to try and write before coffee!