Return to Routine

A break from the routine of life for too long makes getting back into the swing of things difficult. When you've been sleeping until 9 a.m. it's not easy to rouse yourself earlier. When your days have been spent humming Christmas carols and baking cookies, it's not fun to return to learning about topic sentences (Madeleine) and nouns (Hank).

We eased back in today. Grammar. Reading. Playing Cribbage for math. Reading aloud from our history text, but performing a play about King Charles I of England's beheading instead of writing a summary of the execution. Slow. Easy.

We are calling it quits now at 3:16 p.m. Only half of my to-do list for today is crossed out and yet, despite the more relaxed day of schoolwork, I feel good, as if we accomplished something, as if a today were a success, and not a failure. Sometimes success and failure can't be quantified from items ticked off a to-do list. Sometimes it's those intangibles, like the absence of weeping and hysterics when we started reading aloud from The Treasury of Daily Prayer this morning and the realization set in that today was, *shudder*, a school day. Or that when I got out of the shower this morning, yes, I tripped over the eight gazillion toys littering our stairwell, but Madeleine and Hank had also taken it upon themselves and start and watch the next lesson on their Latin DVD and were halfway done with the workbook assignment.

So, for today, we rest. I will straighten up. I will cook. I will run Hank to hockey practice. All the while I will acknowledge, happily, that the first day back from Christmas vacation was a lot less painful than I anticipated.