I got up just before eight and was pretty tired, having stayed up working so late last night, and having had a very busy day with the kids yesterday. Two library outings, and two taco restaurant trips. It was a lot, on top of working. Today I am hoping to limit our activities to just one trip to do 4H. It is a lot to do two things yesterday, and another today. That’s more than the girls normally would have done in a month! But I feel that they need more of this sort of stuff and the opportunity to do things has just presented itself and I want to squeeze it all in.
So I started the day with moving one scheduled meeting to later in the day so that it will not conflict with 4H. And did my DuoLingo for the day first thing, and worked to prep to get my phone charging aligned with when we would need to head out of the house. Thankfully, 4H takes place just a couple of blocks away, so should be only five to seven minutes in the car, tops. It’s at a local church, right on Josey. So easy.
Luciana really wanted to go to the playground this week. And I have been trying to figure out when we can squeeze it into the schedule. But we can’t do it before 4H today, or else the kids won’t have time to sleep and they will be all sweaty for their first 4H meeting. And they can’t do it afterwards because I had to rearrange a meeting just to make it as it is. And after the meeting will be pretty late, but theoretically possible. We will see about that. We had no possibility of doing it yesterday, because we were so busy. And before that, it had been raining for a few days. It is not so terribly hot, though, so overall it would be very nice to get to go do that.
It is a little hotter than it has been, though. We are supposed to be in the low eighties for at least a week. So before bed last night we had to go back on air conditioning. We really enjoyed the fresh air while we had it, though.
It was a bit of a mad rush to get out of the house in time to get to the 4H meeting today. Luciana had been in a mood all morning and didn’t want to go, until it was nearly time to go then she was ready in a jiffy and happy as a clam ready to head out the door. Liesl took forever getting ready and wasn’t ready on time.
We got to the church only about three minutes late. It is so close, thankfully. We found that the church was locked and that there were no signs, however. Pretty confusing. It seemed like no one was there, even though several cars were parked there. We walked around, but there was no information or guidance. The entrances were all simply locked.
Thankfully, a woman was trying to get in shortly after we arrived to get her child from daycare and she knew to ring a doorbell. Which ended up doing nothing, but while we waited, someone came out a side door and let us in. They had no idea about 4H being there (something tells me the church is too large if people working there aren’t aware of a group of children having a meeting in it at the same time), but let us in to look around. We managed to find the meeting upstairs.
Luciana went to the clover room, where they were just drawing and colouring. But she loves to do that, so not a problem at all. We had heard that there were normally just two kids in the clover group and that Ciana might make it three. But it turned out to be like six or seven today! She drew me several pictures during the meeting, but eventually got caught up in playing with the other kids and mostly forgot about me.
Liesl sat at the table with the big kids and participated in the board meeting and learning about parliamentary procedures. She was super nervous at first, but the older girls were super welcoming and she got into it all and had a great time really quickly. She ended up really enjoying the parliamentary procedure stuff and getting to hang out with the older kids. She might have been the youngest of the older kids.
I got to watch the big kids for most of the time. Then I did a little info session with the other parents. We made a new friends who has five kids, two of which are the same ages as the girls. So hopefully they will be able to get together sometimes soon, and see each other at 4H. This week is very successful on meeting people.
We did have an incident that almost got quite bad. Some parent, who did not seem very official, at some point went into the hallway and I caught her yelling at Luciana and getting quite angry with her. She didn’t like, apparently, that Luciana was trying to use the bathroom and yelled at her and kept telling her to go into some room that was not the bathroom and grabbed her arm and pushed her and was incredibly mean and rude and immature. Then she gave Luciana attitude when Luciana wasn’t polite to her after she had been yelled at. I was about to step in, but the woman left once she realized an adult was nearby. Had I not been there, I would not have been surprised if she would have hit Luciana. Whoever this woman was, she clearly had lost emotional control and was just attacking a child that seemed to be someone she had some power over. Exactly why I fear public schools. I had to wait to talk to Luciana about it at home. Luciana had no idea what was going on, just some crazy mean lady going after her.
There was also an incident (well three) of a two year old nearly plummeting down a stair well because the church doesn’t have any railing around the stairs to stop children from just going over the edge. Insanely dangerous. The bars on the railing are so far apart that a young child can casually just walk between them, even Luciana at seven years old would not be stopped by them.
This evening I read another chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to Luciana while she took a shower. It is so funny how much she enjoys that.
Dinner was mac and cheese. Both girls wanted it tonight.
We had been planning on spending some time all together, but both girls seemed to just want to do something quiet on their own. After two days of nearly continuous activity with other kids, they were ready for some down time.
Liesl did her reading in The Witch of Blackbird Pond just before bed. She has not missed a day of reading since she was at book club. She has not missed a day of DuoLingo Spanish since Sunday, either. And she is really enjoying it.
So I got to put in a few extra hours working, then watched some of Deep Space Nine. I am on the seventh, and final, season finally.
For their midnight snack, both girls wanted two corn dogs. They are really in sync tonight.
I made some generic orange “Kool-aid” tonight and Luciana decided to try it and really likes it. This is a first of her drinking something like this.
Luciana is hoping for another trip to Taco Bueno tomorrow. Dollars to donuts she doesn’t want to leave the house when I remind her tomorrow. She also then said that she wants to get up and go to the Guatemalan bakery because she loves it there. Or to maybe try out Monica’s for breakfast. She is always ambitious at night, and ready to stay in all day in the morning.