Lucy, Alexander and the Terrible, No Good, (Mostly) Bad Day

Today was a bad day. A day this bad always reminds me of that book title "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day." Today was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. I don't know if I've ever even read the book, but, for me, the title says it all.

It started with a screaming child who prematurely woke up another (up until that point) sleeping child. Then I had two screaming children. It's the mathematical laws of children, as far as I'm concerned: if you have three children in a room and one of them is screaming, how many screaming children are there? Nope, not one, but THREE screaming children. That's lesson one in the mathematics of children. Although the day had lots of screaming (none mine, I promise), tears (okay, some of those might have been mine), and temper tantrums (ummmm...I plead the fifth...), there were many good moments throughout the day. This post is as much to remind me that there were good moments, as to share them with you! =)

In my Life Science class this week we studied collections: birds' nests, leaves, seeds, insects, and seashells were the main ones that we discussed. I suddenly remembered my own seashell collection, painstakingly labeled for 4-H about 20 years ago. This collection was labeled with love in a time, as I pointed out to my horrified students, when you couldn't just pull up the world wide web and use a search engine to do your work for you, but rather, you painstakingly looked up books at the library and poured over them, page by page, looking for what you needed. I recall this project with great clarity, for I have a large collection, one I love, and was quite proud of all of the work that had gone into it; it turned out fantastic. My class was properly awed as well. I had forgotten the universal fascination that seashells hold. They seem to transcend age, gender, social status, and more. Since my daughter was in need of distraction, I pulled some extras out for her to play with. Here is some of the fun that we had.

I am completely uncertain why, but Lucy was initially convinced these were hats!

We played with the sand that poured out and explored the different textures.

We stacked them in a great big heap.

We neatly stacked them like blocks.

We also went outside to enjoy the crunchy leaves that are starting to cover our lawn. Alex, in particular, enjoyed crunching these between his pudgy little hands, and trying to eat them. =)

"Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!" ~Psalm 127:3-4