Randomday; Little Things, Big Things

Very few blog posts in the last months could mean that I am unusually busy, unusually distracted, unusually sad or overwhelmed by life, or unusually unproductive in the areas of quilting and knitting that are my usual blog fodder.  All of these are true, I suppose, in varying degrees.  But I still miss blogging when it doesn't happen and want to do it more.  The thing I am really struggling with is taking, organizing and editing the photos that make people want to read the stuff I write.  Because I'm always writing in my head, but I know that most people won't read it without a photo.  I can take photos of little things, organize them, and eventually blog about them (witness, these pictures of my minor domestic achievement in January, organizing my spice cabinets):

(I have three lazy susan organizers, one for herbs, one for ground spices and one for seeds and whole spices.  After a trip to Penzey's in January I organized and alphebetized them beautifully, and stored the extra spices in the restock box neatly on the top shelf).

This, unfortunately, is no longer what my spice cabinet looks like when I finally get around to blogging about it months later... but the thought was there!  In the meantime, though, an awful lot of real and meaningful family life has passed by without photo documentation, and the alphebetized caraway, celery, cumin, and dill seeds on the whole spices organizer kind of pale in comparison to the son in college, the son graduating from Cedar Tree, the daughter in 9th grade in public school special ed, the daughter in 7th grade, and the nearly 40 middle school students I have the seemingly impossible task of teaching Latin. How can anyone adequately photograph and write about all these experiences?  I tried for a few years with varying success, and I guess the moral of the story is that you can only control the little things and try to position yourself as best you can for the big things that will happen with or without your help. And ideally, be able to "let it go" when you encounter the real or perceived disapproval of others.  That's the hardest part for me and will always be so.

Last night was Senior Thesis presentation night at Cedar Tree.  Here is Peter giving his 6-minute or less presentation on his take on the Just War theory.  I am very proud of him.  He's very glad it's over, and graduation is coming up fast.

The annual Hazel Dell Parade of Bands was this morning, just a few blocks away from us.  I've blogged about it more extensively in previous years when I was, you know, blogging more extensively.  It is an amazing bit of Americana and even though I get overwhelmed by standing for a few hours with loud noises and people all around, I still love it.  This year, three of Quarta's friends accompanied her home from Peter's senior thesis night, watched a Dr. Who marathon and went to the parade all together.  There were bands from all over, local politicians, antique fire trucks, local businesses throwing around candy.  Jimmy John's gave out sandwiches, someone else had popsicles, Big Al's moving company with the map of Samoa on the side of the trucks were handing out plastic leis.  Fun times for all.

And Daniel is coming home tomorrow from his Junior year at Grove City.  We are so excited to see him again.  And only three more weeks of school for the rest of us!  Maybe, just maybe, I can shampoo the rest of the carpets before graduation.  I wouldn't go so far as to plan to clean the whole house or anything.  Just the little things are quite enough.

My Little Leprechaun

Tertia gets up very early for school; the bus comes at 6:50 most mornings, and we are still recovering from Spring Forward in our house.  She usually gets downstairs a little before me, fixes her breakfast and maybe even her lunch (although I like to make sure she isn't just packing rice and applesauce).  This morning I noticed her outfit as she was eating breakfast.

She didn't have the hat then, but it was pretty obvious, she was trying to be a leprechaun.  I really was hesitant to let her go off to school that way, but there wasn't a whole lot of time to make any changes, and her natural stubbornness was starting to kick in.  Sister Quarta is down with a stomach bug and I had been up since 3:30.  So I gave in.  "Just tell everyone you're a leprechaun, and it will be okay," I told her (I hope, I was thinking.)  I shouldn't have worried.  The shorts over tights with a shirt/jacket combo cut down from a somewhat outgrown dress has that look that I call "ragamuffin chic" - Tertia excels at taking that and walking it as if she's on Project Runway.  It must have conveyed enough of the leprechaun vibe that one of her friends gave her the hat to complete the look.  When I picked her up for her orthodontist appointment (she picked green rubber bands, of course!) I was fretting a bit that her fellow-students might have made fun of her.  But she is just a little too happy-go-lucky to be a target for bullies... it must be one of those natural defensive mechanisms that kids with Down syndrome have.

That, and I have to give credit to her school.  I can't imagine a girl like Tertia being accepted and genuinely liked at the public schools I attended decades ago.  It was a huge factor in why I was really hesitant to put her, or any of my kids, in public schools.  But the climate has so vastly improved since then.  They really are on her side, and they won't tolerate unkindness to her.  I love the fact that wherever I go, as soon as people figure out I'm Tertia's mom, they start to gush.  It happened multiple times today, picking her up at the attendance office - "We LOVE her!", being greeted by a girl she has known since elementary school, then later when I returned to the school for her IEP.  And this evening when an old teacher called to see if I'd be willing to talk with another mom about her middle school experience, and then was really thrilled to talk to the leprechaun herself, who had just finished doing her dishes.

There's always a bit of a disconnect for me, though.  I read this blog post recently, which sums up the difficulties parents of special needs kids face.  Are we just lucky that Tertia has so few issues and is so well-liked?  Is there something really important we're missing?  Is it about to get much, much worse?  What happens when you're double and triple booked and showing up late to your daughter's IEP because you're bringing her home from an orthodontist appointment that went late?  And what in the world am I supposed to say when some of my own students, when I detail some of the horrific deeds of the emperor Nero in a history lesson, respond with multiple cries of "that's so RETARDED!"  Sometimes there's just not enough bandwidth in the brain to deal with the complexities of life.

Case in point: Tertia and her childhood buddy from early intervention days, prepping for the first of two choir concerts this spring.  This is the young man we encountered outside of Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland a few years ago.  She's a bit of a mother hen, I guess it looks like here.  And that would be a correct assessment.  So her buddy, at the second of the two concerts a few weeks ago, was singing at a volume that she did not approve of, directly behind her.  First she put her hands over her ears.  Then she repeatedly tried to shush him by turning slightly and making shushing motions with her hands.  All of this while belting out "Yo le canto todo el dia" in front of a packed audience.

I laughed... and I was mortified.  Here's all this wonderful inclusion, with kids with disabilities being fully included in a concert choir, and mine is not being very inclusive herself.  It has taken me this long to write about it.  Now granted, everyone I have talked to about it thinks it was hilarious, and I should probably just roll with it and sincerely hope that Mr. Z's mother will be able to do that too.  But still, it makes life complicated.  Sometimes I really want a nice, simple life.

Run-around Thursday

It's not Randomday, but it sure feels like it.  So, I was in the middle of teaching a lesson on oddball adjectives to 8th grade this morning, and things were a bit wacky and unruly as they sometimes get when the fascination of putting inflected endings on "audax" and "celer" starts to wear off and I had inadvertently made a quip when I had translated "pueris integris" as "to the fresh boys" and then hastily corrected "to the uninjured boys, because if they got fresh they would be injured," and we were all recovering from the embarrassment of me having said that, when the classroom phone rang.  And the office tells me that Quarta broke her tooth and would be waiting in her classroom for me to come and evaluate at my earliest convenience.

Sooo... it was a molar, 2nd in from the top left, and it had split in half as she had taken a bite of pita chip.  There were two fragments out, and half of the tooth still seated in the gum.  I get pretty queasy during dental emergencies, just ask Secundus, who has had plenty.  But the pediatric dentist she sees could see her if I took her to the mall office right away, so I scrambled to give a quickly-arranged sub the information she would need to handle 7th grade (Thanks, Peggy!)  The good news is that it was a baby tooth, and came out fairly cleanly after the dentist did his thing while I studiously looked the other way and wished I had brought knitting.  The bad news, there apparently is no permanent tooth behind it.  This will mean a follow-up visit and we will see what needs to be done about orthodontics, spacers, and an eventual implant.  I keep saying, I'm hoping for the price of implants to come down to where the middle class can consider them.  Our family is going to need at about 5 in the next several years.

I took Quarta back to school (she really wanted to be there for art -- P.E., not so much) and went home for a late lunch and watched an episode of West Wing on Netflix while trying to overcome my queasy post-dental-emergency stomach.  Then it was time for the kids to come home from school.  Quarta had survived the rest of the day fine; Tertia got off her bus in tears.  Checking with the bus driver, a boy had just hit her over the head with his library book.  Well, that was a shock.  She has never been bullied before, to my knowledge, in 9 years of public school.  The bus driver witnessed it and wrote it up as a report; I emailed Tertia's teacher and assistant principal immediately and the school is dealing with it appropriately.  I can only hope the boy's parents are dealing with it as well.

In all the stress I completely forgot I needed to pick up our vegetable basket and Quarta's piano teacher for her piano lesson until 15 minutes later than I should have.  It all did happen, but I was so glad I had gone Costco shopping yesterday and had a lasagna and other elements of a pre-fab meal all ready to go.  And it is definitely an evening for blogging, putting my feet up and watching mindless TV while enjoying a Hagen-Daz salted caramel ice cream bar.  And I will be in bed by 10:00 tonight.

Sustainability; or, the Midlife Crisis of a Worker Bee

Koyaanisqatsi is a 1982 art film on the theme of the frenetic and suicidal pace of modern Western life.  I had to watch it in Intro to Film class in College.  It's worth watching, even if you are not an environmentalist or neo-hippie... and for the record, I am not.  I often think of it on days or during weeks like this, where there is no let-up of the stress and it is hard to see any positive results for my hard work.  Those blurry images rushing by, that impending sense of doom.  The 7th grader who lost the make-up final exam.  And this was even before Quarta got sick.  People at school were telling me, "well, she was lying down on the cot for awhile... she didn't want any lunch... but she went back to class."  Not until after Tertia's first orthodontist appointment and forking over a 4-figure down-payment for that whole process, and then she got sick.  So, it looks like Steve will be staying home with her tomorrow, because I sure can't.



On the subject of hard work, I consider myself a worker bee.  Definitely not a queen bee.  I dislike queen bees and their close cousins, the bossy and domineering types.  You may not know it, because I have been well-trained to be polite to everybody, but if you are the bossy, domineering, queen bee type, I am humming "Prima Donna" inside my head when you are around.  Seriously.  Long, long years of being in the chorus at work here.  Support staff, auxiliary teaching staff, yup, been there, done that.  I don't even rank high enough to process with the important high school teachers.  It doesn't bother me... except when it does.

It's probably a mistake for worker bees like me to go on vacation, especially to places like Disneyland.  We start to get ideas above our station, and resentment starts to build.  We start to do the math.  Like how my annual salary now, after 13 years of teaching, is less than half of what I earned when I was fresh out of college, also working at one of those jobs that could be described as a ministry -- so what I'm saying is that I didn't earn a whole lot then.  And if I saved every penny of what I earn now, my entire year's salary would be enough to pay for one third of Daniel's yearly college expenses (and he's at Grove City, remember, so that's a lot less than other places).

And yet, for what I earn, I'm being asked to put in an additional 20+ unpaid hours of grading, correspondence, or conferences during some weeks.  I have to somehow bring new students up to speed with the class and keep the stragglers from straggling too far behind.  Of course, my own daughter is not smart enough to be at my school, but other kids, the ones who average less than 40% on quizzes -- somehow I have to make sure they don't get discouraged.  I have to catch the cheaters, and there have been several of them lately, and follow up.  I have to make the class appealing and fun enough so that the students like it.  And then there are the smart ones whose parents want them to take the Latin SAT or AP test -- after 8th grade Latin finishes.  I'm not sure how to break it to them -- in one way I'm flattered that they think 8th grade Latin with me is the equivalent of a Senior AP Latin course, but I'm not really a miracle worker.  Eighth grade Latin at Cedar Tree means you are translating edited passages from Caesar's de Bello Gallico in the Henle Latin 2nd year book.  That's pretty darn good, but if you want 3rd and 4th year Latin and all that goes with it you would need to expand the program into High School.  And if I were going to teach such a program, I'd want about triple what I'm getting now, and the flexibility to take time off to take care of my kids when they're sick.  Maybe I don't need to sacrifice the best interests of my own family to teach, but it sure feels like it on days like this.

Where was I going with this?  These are my own, personal issues, born out of 13 years of very tough, very frustrating work, and triggered by a rough couple of days (that aren't over yet).  But I think Classical Christian Education has arrived at a turning point where, put very simply, it needs to grow up.  I know there's a clause somewhere in my employment contract that says I am not supposed to be critical of my employer, my students, or their parents.  And I'm not intending this to be a rant.  I like all these people, I love my work, and I think I'm good at it.  But it's not sustainable.  I would discourage my best students from considering a teaching career in Christian schools, because it simply doesn't pay enough to support even a young single in today's world.  At my stage of life, it's not really about the money... thankfully, Steve's job is stable and he is a good provider.  I taught several years for no pay other than my children's tuition.  (Yeah, I know, I'm a sap).  More positive feedback would be awfully nice.  More family-friendly flexibility would be ideal.  Health benefits, maybe even sick leave, less of the reflexive "blame the teacher" policy.  I already get a basket of flowers every June.  Realistically, though, the only concrete measure of my success is the paycheck I draw, and that will continue to be small.  Because charging more in tuition would mean fewer students.  I can do the math.

Oh well, I need to go to bed.  Maybe the space cadet will have found the missing final by tomorrow and I can get my grades in.

What I really need is the time to devote to some kind of stress-relieving hobby.  I hear knitting and quilting are really fun.

Design Wall Monday and Stash report

I had a tiny bit of time to play with the Scrappy Trip Around the World over the weekend.  I have a second block started, with some of the 2.5" scraps I've been sorting.  I've been spending a lot of time trying to organize the fabric, but it's not done yet.  I do find it very soothing, though.

Saturday was very crazy busy.  Secundus had a planning meeting for his Mexico service trip; Daniel flew in for Spring break; we had about 15 minutes for him to shower, change, and eat and then we left for the wedding.  Steve and I let the kids stay longer at the wedding reception and we had to duck out early to attend a memorial service for Steve's coworker.  Lots of emotional highs and lows.  I gave pretest quizzes for my final exams on Thursday and there's an obscenely large amount of other end-of-quarter grading still to do, besides all the extra work last week for parent conferences.  But Spring Break is coming!

Remember the shirts that were waiting for Daniel to decide if he wanted?  Well, he says they're "too blah" for him.  Yes, I actually thought that.  But they'll make great backgrounds and blenders!

Smudge showed up for some cuddle time this morning.  I wish he wasn't such a naughty kitty indoors, because he's very affectionate. 


Stash Report

Quilting fabric:

Fabric used this week: 0 yards

Fabric used year to date: 22 yards
Added this week: 4 yards from the 4 shirts Daniel didn't want
Added year to date: 17 yards
Net used for 2013: 5 yards

Knitting yarn:

Yarn used this week: 0 yards
Yarn used year to date: an even 5500 yards.
Yarn added this week: 0 yards
Yarn added year to date: 910 yards
Net used for 2013: 4590 yards

Yarning Along on WIP Wednesday

This tangled mess is Zero to Fifteen, the confluence of my two current knit projects.  Socks for Steve on size 0 needles, and a jumble of 8 cotton or linen strands at once knitted on size 15.  It will be a very absorbent bathmat eventually.  Notice that I've now turned both heels of the socks.  And you'll have to take my word for it because the cats have been messing with the rug, but the circle is about 2/3 done.  So things are coming along!  It is such a confidence boost to knit about 5 square inches of rug fabric in the time it would take me to knit one half round of the socks.  I know I'm supposed to comment on my current book that I'm reading, but right now, it's the calendar that I'm studying, and all the emails I'm falling behind on. 

Family calendar events include dentist visits, orthodontist consults, a choir field trip, a symphony field trip, a bowling match, upcoming IEP for Tertia, upcoming part time job for Secundus, and a trip to the grocery store that just isn't happening even though it desperately needs to!  The only reason that I'm reasonably able to handle it today is because I just came back from my massage and chiropractic adjustment.  The kids don't know it yet, but they are going to have to come up with a side dish and veg. for dinner.  I am just not going to be able to deal with strategic planning for any Latin events or grading for the rest of the week.  And that will have to be okay.  Sorry for whining about the stress on Monday; it must be building up too much if it breaks into my blog.

Easy Street is mounted on the Megaquilter frame!  It is big -- at about 97" square, I decided to go out and buy a King size batting rather than have to piece a long skinny strip onto a Queen size.  Now I'm thinking I will probably go out and buy aqua thread to quilt it, rather than white.  I just feel like any bit of aqua I can add to the mix makes it less Christmassy (especially since I pieced the entire back from my lime greens and reds)!  I'll be cogitating on what quilting pattern to use and then I just need to dive in and do it!

The crumbs blocks are still waiting for me to get back to doing some more of them.  You can see some leftover Easy Street patches in there, and a bit of Jack's Chain next to a giant fish from scraps from boxer shorts, and of course the trees.

Design Wall Monday and Stash Report

{insert primal scream here} I'm stressed beyond belief and really wishing I could afford an appointments secretary to make sure my kids get signed up for the things they need to get signed up for.  How is it that I spend ten hours (that I don't get paid for) making sure everyone else's kids are signed up for the Latin Olympika, and miss the fact that Tertia has missed the first two weeks of play practice because of a conflict with bowling?  The teacher's children have no permission slips.  Seriously, how do other teachers manage to get everything done and still have good attitudes?  I guess she won't be doing the play this year.  I hope I can get Steve to break it to her.  I just returned from the dentist where they ground down the chip on my crown that probably was caused by my chronic teeth clenching.  Stress, what stress?  All I can say is that however hard I work, it's never good enough.  Tertia, plodding along in the special ed class in public school, is always getting the short end of the stick.  I can mostly keep up with things at Cedar Tree (with anywhere from 5-20 hours of unpaid labor a week in addition to what I get paid for), but I still seem to have lots of people upset with me at any given time.  People, I dare you, try my job for a week.

So here are the most recent crumbs blocks on the design wall.  I'm really not sure how I feel about my job right now, so maybe I should wait until I'm in a better place before planning the quilt I'm making for the auction.  It will look great... if I ever get to work on it.

Stash Report:

Quilting fabric:

Fabric used this week: 6.5 yards for Easy Street backing (to be mounted very soon on frame)

Fabric used year to date: 16 yards
Added this week: 0 yards
Added year to date: 3 yards
Net used for 2013: 13 yards

Knitting yarn:

Yarn used this week: 0 yards
Yarn used year to date: 880 yards
Yarn added this week: 0 yards
Yarn added year to date: 910 yards
Net used for 2013: -30 yards in the hole and working hard to finish more

Spontaneity

Today was the day the accreditation team sat in on my 7th and 8th grade classes.  They slipped in the back of the class in their navy blazers and khaki pants, with their clipboards, opening the manila folder with the carefully-prepared, in-depth lesson plans.  I got the kids to stand up (we had already run through the more boring of our warm-ups) and we did the silly verb songs:

(to the tune of "Three Blind Mice")
o, s, t, mus, tis, nt
bam, bas, bat, bamus, batis, bant
bo bis bit bimus bitis bunt; or am es et emus etis ent
These are the endings for present system
Active voice.  Use the 1st principal part

i, isti, it, imus, istis, erunt
eram, eras, erat, eramus, eratis, erant
ero, eris, erit, erimus, eritis erint
These are the endings for perfect system
Active voice.  Use the 3rd principal part.

(and then to the tune of "Yankee Doodle")
r, ris, tur, mur, mini, ntur
Present system passive
r, ris, tur, mur, mini, ntur
Subject receives the action

Perfect system passive is a compound tense
with the 4th principal part;
PPP agrees with the subject,
then add a form of sum.

Then I hummed the "Twilight zone" theme and we entered the subjunctive zone.  Kids earned the right to sit down by correctly giving a grammar rule or verb form or translation.

Then I felt extremely awkward and self-conscious and I basically ditched my lesson plan.  Well, not really.  But in a flash of self-awareness I realized that I can't stick to a lesson plan when it's written out in that much detail, and the inspectors would not like to see me up at the board diagramming sentences, and anything else we might work on would be too much lecture and too little student involvement, but the kids really needed to work on translating sentences with purpose clauses.

So I invented a game.  I called on a team of two volunteers from each House to come up and jointly race to translate and diagram the 1st sentence from tomorrow's homework.  I called on members of their Houses who remained seated to help them with grammar advice.  This is 7th grade so there was a lot of need for grammar support.  It actually went surprisingly well, for a seat-of-the-pants innovation.  Either I've invented the newest fun Latin game, or I've cost the school its shot at accreditation. 

Eighth grade was a little more traditionally structured.  We had a bread-and-butter lesson to get through.  The fun review happened before the inspectors walked into the classroom, and then it was just going around the room and correcting sentences.  Simple sentences, so we didn't have to put any up on the board.  Then introduction of the new lesson (hic/haec/hoc and ille/illa/illud).  We made vocabulary and grammar cards, we reviewed the honking geese who aren't shy (these geese that come right up to you) and the tweety birds (those shy birds off in the forest).  My kids were troopers and had their homework all done well.  It might have been a more interesting class if they hadn't, but I'm glad they had.

I'm putting an end to it for tonight and making grape pie. 

Do you suppose spontaneous is just another word for random?

Four Round Trips

Thursday, the fourth day of school.  The day I don't have a carpool, and I get to appreciate the huge favors others are doing for me on the other four days.  Thursday is the day it will take some time to understand.  At present I have to make four round trips to Cedar Tree.  Here's how the schedule worked today:

6:50 - wake up kids
7:40 - drive to CT with all 3 kids (Daniel in Pennsylvania is on his own, but I send love!)
7:55 - 8:10 - prayer with other members of the staff.  This is the reason I'm willing to attempt the four round trips thing, but if somebody offered me a carpool I'd jump on it and just ask people to send me a memo instead!
8:11 - collect Tertia and drive home, arriving a little before 8:30.  Tertia was a little concerned when she saw her bus going the other direction, but I explained the driver was probably just heading off to pick up the first kid on the route - 1st round trip completed.
8:43 - Tertia's bus collects her, all pretty in her dress for school pictures.
8:50 - drive to CT again, arriving 9:05.  Open the classroom, attempt to untangle the blind cords, lay out 6th grade materials and review lesson plans. 
9:20 - arrive in 6th grade classroom carrying basket of supplies (plus the 1st declension classroom mascots Prunella, Rubella, and Vacca Caledonensis).  Set up vocab charts and, when math is finished, conduct Latin 1st declension and sentence diagramming practice until 10:15.
10:20 - 11:10 - conduct 7th grade verb synopsis practice and distribute materials for Roman culture overview.
11:15 - 12:05 - conduct 8th grade sentence translation practice and adjective review.
12:10 - 12:50 - drive home, stopping at Target to pick up halogen light bulbs that cost $9 each, and some parmesan cheese to go with leftover spaghetti tonight - 2nd round trip completed.  Technically I could have hung out at CT for a few hours in the afternoon, but I'm a homebody and I was tired by this time.
2:15 - 2:30 - drive to CT again, pick up Secundus after he has changed for cross country practice.
2:47 - deliver Secundus to CRHS for cross country practice - 3rd round trip completed (it's walking distance from there to home).
2:49 - 3:02 - turn left instead of going straight out of the parking lot and go straight back to CT. 
3:03 - 3:30 - Pick up veggies from Grace's Garden, pick up Quarta, and drive home - 4th round trip completed.  Quarta is excited when she sees Secundus jogging by our house.
3:45 - Tertia gets off the bus.  Unfortunately her teacher has emailed me that she didn't have money for her school pictures.  But I had sent a check in Monday, along with another check for lunch money.  So now we have to figure out what happened to the two missing checks.
5:25 - I think that's all I want to think about for today.  I'm going to go heat up leftover spaghetti.

Kid updates

Primigenitus is in a play this week.  He's also finished up his Senior thesis (a 9-page essay on leadership), his Senior project (a science fiction novella), and is taking off with Steve next week to visit his two college choices, at the end of which he will have to make his final decision and make his deposit.  Stress city, yes it is.  I've proofread both his writings and pronounced them good.  I maintain my right to favor my alma mater over the other school whenever the subject comes up.

Secundus keeps stealing handfuls of the dried fruits I'm planning to put in the granola I haven't had a chance to make this week.  He has a hobbit-like appetite and believes in at least one snack per year of his age after dinner.  He's 15, and no, I don't think I'm exaggerating at all.

Tertia had a rough day today, but she was very brave.  She had to have three baby teeth extracted, to make room for a few permanent teeth (she's missing several and will probably eventually need implants) to poke through before she has to start going to the orthodontist in a few more months.  She got out of school early and missed drama practice for this, and came home to the ultimate comfort video - Cinderella.  And soft food for dinner.  The Tooth Fairy sent her a note with her special package deal: a Webkinz of her choice and a trip with mom to pick it out.

Quarta is, according to her own account, having a rough life.  She has been on the unloading/reloading the dishwasher chore for 2 weeks and holding because she can't do it without complaining at the top of her lungs.  It's a test of wills, and I'm most definitely not looking forward to next week with no backup.  And yes, she's almost 10 and should know better.

And school... there's school tomorrow, and Grandparents' day, and a special assembly.  I have promised my 7th and 8th grade classes that we'll play Latin Jeopardy.  Sometime I have to finish grading the quizzes and writing the parent memos for the National Latin Exam results.  It would be preferable to do it before tomorrow morning.