180 Days and Walk the Plank

No one has strep throat, thank goodness. I took only Oldest Child to the doctor (though I had all the kids in tow), figuring that if she had strep then I could assume Child Three did as well. Oldest just has a virus that seems to mimic strep.

Today is the last day Husband has kids in class. They get out before lunch and then he's done with that class for the year. I asked him if he was glad to see them go and he said that most of them were okay. There were just a couple who caused problems. What I thought was funny (funny hmmm, not funny ha ha) was that the school district got really distressed about one girl who had switched tracks mid-year and had recieved her allotted 180 days of public education, though the school year wasn't over for her new track. They essentially kicked her out, told her to go home and not come back until next year. There were only two weeks left at that point. If I have a kid who has missed more than seven days in the entire school year I get the attendance police threatening me with charges of truancy and negligence, though my kids get straight A's in all their classes and it's obvious that I'm not keeping them home because I'm too lazy or whatever to send them to school. Well, that's government for you (motto: Waste, Want).

As today is the first of the month the kids are rotating chores. For some of them this causes great joy and eagerness to get their chores done when I ask (at least for the first couple days). For some there is weeping and wailing, especially for the one who ends up with dining room duty, which is considered the worst chore. We use our dining room all the time. I would love to pull all the carpet off the floor in the dining room (who puts carpet in a dining room, kitchen or bathroom and thinks it's going to stay clean, I wonder?). As we have three different floor types under the carpet, my mom doesn't want to pull it up until we have some means to homogenize the flooring. Until then, the dining room carpet looks like we let a bunch of incontinent dogs loose for several hours after feeding them Slim Jim Beef Sticks (the spicy kind). Thankfully it doesn't smell like that, but with six kids in the house (one a messy baby) it sure looks like it. So the dining room chore includes tidying up the toys and other things on the floor, tidying up the table, (which seats ten and is always covered in paper or dishes, though I yell and scream about cleaning up after yourself) and vacuuming the carpet and hallway. It takes a while. The upside is that the Dining Room person gets the best seat in the car during that month, the seat between Child Five's and Child Six's car seats in the middle row of the van. That seems to mollify the unlucky child somewhat, though I don't know why. The kids decided among themselves that that seat has high status ranking, the same way kids come up with status ranking for the cups and dishes they use at dinner. "I get the blue plate, I called it!" "I get that cup and fork! I already licked them!"

The easiest chore is probably downstairs in the family room. There's a toy box down there that only gets used by visitors, and since we had the TV off during much of June, it stayed pretty tidy most of the time. The only disadvantage is hauling the vacuum cleaner up and down the stairs.

I really need to expand the chore list and give each of them two chores, as there are more things that need cleaning in heaven and earth, Horatio, then is ever thought of by mortal children.

Child Four gets her stitches out today and she is, in a word, ecstatic. I'm just hoping her wounds are healed enough that they don't split apart, as I have vivid mental images of them doing the moment she takes an incautious step and flexes her knee too far. I don't know if she will have to continue with the leg brace, but I imagine she'll need to start flexing that knee so her scar doesn't heal rigidly and prevent her from walking normally. It really was a hideous gash.