School Year Leap

I am typing furiously tonight. All is in flux. Its time for a new season! I have decided to scrap all the ideas I had for how everything normally goes and start over from ground zero in every way. Home schooling starts in earnest this year...we have a genuine first grader in the house. In order to maintain some level of sanity, make sure the laundry gets done and assure ourselves that said first grader learns to read his Dick and Jane we need new rules.

Henceforth, starting not this week but the next....if you try to call me in the morning you will go straight to voicemail. If you knock on the door and are not bleeding from an orifice I won't answer and if you are waiting for an email from me, rest assured it won't arrive before noon. I am blocking off all morning hours for housework, reading together and school lessons, such as they are. All our social engagements, museum ventures, errands and other jaunts will be shifted to afternoons. Life will become ironclad and organized.

 

Tell me its smart.

And clever.

And so soothingly arranged.

Will you? 

 

I'm pretty sure its the right thing to do and yet...its a big leap.

This involves letting go of my current art fellowship group and every single other thing we've been involved in.....besides our homeschool co-op. And no...we're not going to become one of THOSE families...I think social involvement for Mommy and kids is extremely key. It just means we're starting completely over. Everything I had in place is gone so we're on the hunt for all new, afternoon events. I'm feeling alternately optimistic and lost.

Poetry Friday: A Laundry Poem

Today, a laundry poem that I chuckled while writing, because I am working on my own mountain between attacking the last of the last of the moving boxes. And we all need a little touch of comic relief + heroism now and then, don't we? Sometimes it is just the thing.

Joan of D’ark and Dirty

Laundry is the great monster

Mommy wrestles; her eternal foe.

Every day, long tentacles flailing from the

Hamper, dripping ooze in the form of

Socks and spotted onesies, by the pound.

She hacks at it, vigorously sorting its many limbs

Into piles: whites, darks, reds.

She rises periodically from the latest fray,

Ceremoniously mounting the stairs,

A badge of crisp pillowcase on her arm.

She strategizes the endless new advance,

Not faltering in the face of the grim smells

Of covert hand grenades the enemy leaves

Moldering in the depths of the diaper bag.

We are polished, lest the monster take our very skins

And admonished sternly of his wily ways

She sprays over us her protective elixirs:  

Tide (jumbo, extra concentrated)

And Shout, in little rhythmic squirts.

Laundry sometimes roars and beats Its chest

Rattling the floorboards with the throaty,

Conquering cry of a monster that has

Boldly taken our last dish towel to his bowels.  

But, Mommy rallies with a Monday morning war cry.

There is a great clanging of machine lids and

The sound of lusty Patsy Cline yodeling from the basement

And before we know it, Laundry is only a simpering

Trio of washcloths and a single pair of underwear

Slinking there behind the dryer hose.