Also known as “back to school.”
Mark planned on a full eight-hour workday Wednesday. We work when Mark works, I told the kids. “The way we’ll think about it,” I said to Leo as we were walking uphill trying to get some sunshine, “is that each day has three parts. Morning, afternoon, evening. On days that Dad works he’ll work for two of those parts. And we will too.”
We won’t work for eight solid hours of course, homeschooling simply doesn’t take that long, especially when you have expressly planned to only work half time. It did mean that on Wednesday, for example, Leo did geometry in the morning (while Mark paged through some mandatory training modules) and French in the afternoon (while Mark zoomed into morning meetings).
Our apartment bedroom has a nice little table which I yielded entirely to Mark for a desk.
I started the day (after a lot of coffee) reading aloud from the novel we’re in the middle of, on my Kindle. That’s how we wake up and get ourselves im the mood, so to speak.
Simon can do his Beast Academy math workbook pages independently, so I set him on that and sat down with Leo to go over the first couple lessons in the Geometry book. Leo’s the first one I’ve used Art of Problem Solving with, so I want to pay attention to the approach, but the first lessons in any geometry book are highly predictable: this is why we need to learn a lot of specialized vocabulary and notation; this is a point, a line, a plane; this is a locus.
Not too stressful there, and when Leo finished the exercises in the first two short lessons, I released him for the morning. He went out to walk around. (Phys ed! Geography!) I turned to Simon and read aloud to him from a history book—we are just starting the Civil War volume of Joy Hakim’s ten-volume History of US, to which Simon is quite attentive and so it works well as a cozy sort of way of entering systematically into U.S. history in elementary school. I believe I can access my Prime Video library here, so we might put on Ken Burns later this month.
After that I made Simon start his new science module, expressly chosen for the trip because it consists of one workbook and almost no experiments (basically, a human anatomy worktext). These are exactly the same reasons why Simon is not exactly enamored of it. Oh well, can’t pack the chemistry lab in the suitcase.
Mark took a long lunch break and we met Leo at a creperie. The kids got sweet ones, Mark got le Savoyarde which means lots of cheese and ham, I got l’Azûrienne which meant tapenade, tomatoes, and chèvre.
Mark still feels a little off from the jet lag but I am definitely getting my appetite back.
Leo had walked all the way to the other, more fashionable end of town, past the marina and the sand beach. He showed us lots of pictures of winding narrow stairs and pedestrian ways, hemmed in with pastel walls and dotted with flowers. He wanted to walk more later. (And we did!)
But first back to the apartment for 1) a nap and 2) French-from-a-textbook. I’m afraid the beginning of French II is a little boring as it starts with some review material, such as quizzes on numbers and time-telling, to find out where practice is needed. So that part wasn’t very fun. Especially since the wholly necessary nap pushed the schoolwork to later in the day than Leo is accustomed to doing it at home. But Mark was working till 6 pm… and, like I said, we work when Mark works.
We ended the day by leaving Leo in charge for a bit while Mark and I went out for a drink, and then I fetched pizzas.
Leo wasn’t in a pizza mood, so he ventured out separately to Kebab Berlinois and brought back some kind of wrap? in a Chipotle-quality flour tortilla, which is to say a better tortilla than I expected. The effect was of thinly sliced, mild gyro-type meat, with lettuce and a lot of onions. He thought it was a little bland and regretted bot asking for spicy sauce; I had a few bites and it was one of those things that tastes better and better as you go. If I had had one of these right when I got off the plane it would have totally hit the spot.
Anyway, yesterday being a workday made it less fun, but it was pretty good for a workday if you ask me.
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