Well, THAT was an interesting first full day!

Today was the first full day of school. Or should I say "school", at least in terms of where my son is concerned.

I don't know if a too-busy weekend had an effect on my kids, or just the simple fact of going to bed too late, compound that for my dd with being sick and typically not sleeping well lately...

The 17yo did not too bad in terms of work. He finally hit a point of being sick of the computer and we tried some offline stuff, but that was it, his brain was done. He ended, therefore, about an hour before we was supposed to. But then his Dad showed up about half an hour before he was supposed to, so it wasn't so bad that he wasn't in the middle of something. His courses are still not worked out right and there is some stuff he can't yet do. We'd left math to the last course of the day--I don't think that's going to work so well. Needs to be in the morning, I think. Or maybe RIGHT after lunch.

Dd kept saying how slowly she was going this morning. It took her about an hour to read through a few pages of her science text. Then she moved onto something else and she just felt sluggish through the whole thing. She had tears in her eyes more than once today--including while we made banana bread as part of her home ec. time. She finally went off to her room to be alone.

Ds... Well... He didn't wake up until 8:39 this morning. I think it might be a record. He can be very slow to get going, so I didn't say anything to him about getting to work right away. Later on, he was reading the Action Bible, so I was fine with that. I did show him at one point some things for him to look at for school work (a book on constellations and another book on studying bugs). He ended up playing with his 3yo cousin and I made mention of him doing his work. He said uh-huh or some such. Finally, after lunch, he was just being loud and bugging others, looking like he ought to go for a nap, and I asked him when he was going to get his work done. "You didn't tell me..." or something like that. Bah. He ended up doing a single page of math and that was it. Grump, grump, grump. Oh boy. It had me sitting down and start thinking about how to best make this transition for him. The threat of telling him I'm going to have to place him in his grade level of lowest ability came to me ;), but that would not be very good. I haven't made it very far with my thoughts. I do know that changing from free play to school time is hard for him and routines will be key. I have to start having my kids get up at a set hour each day, I think. Or clearly posting a schedule/routine for ds to go by.

My 3yo niece has been grumpy on and off all day, as had the little guy (nearly 2yo). It's just been a grumpy day, I think. I will journal about it tonight and see if there's anything I can do differently tomorrow--regardless of people's emotions--that might help!