Friday, June 2, 2017

Home Summer School Challenge

Last night after I brushed her hair (amidst squeals and shrieks of pain, which, duh, wear your hair down all day and it’s going to hurt to brush it at the end of the day) Olivia took it upon herself to ‘sooth’ the back of her neck by dunking her head under the faucet of the bathroom sink.

Girlfriend has a lot of hair. See:


So this made me…unhappy. I told her to knock it off. Tom heard my admonitions and took it upon himself to yell at her too.

Then he declared, “Okay, one of us has to go!”

I asked him, “You or me?”

He shook his head vigorously and said, “No. You can’t go anywhere. Lyssie needs you. It’s either me or Olivia.”

Olivia stood toe to toe with her dad and declared, “DAD! I need her too!”

Things are starting out…rough this summer, to say the least.

I think we need to channel O’s energy into something positive, rather than leaving her to sit and watch Youtube videos of the Merrell twins for hours at a time.


That’s not to say that the Merrell twins are bad Youtubers, just…she needs to get outside, run around, play in the sun and fresh air and do other things, things that keep her brain from atrophying.

I get Tom’s frustration. By the end of a Sunday evening, I’m ready to go back to work just to get a break from arguing with Liv. But I also think that as the work-at-home parent, he might need to stop the ‘working’ part of being at home once in a while and just…be at home with the girls.

This weekend we’re going to work on a schedule for A and O. They need to do more than be on electronics this summer. They need chores (believe me, Olivia is perfectly capable of folding towels and even washing windows, even if she doesn’t want to do those things) and they need academic activities to keep them up on what they learned last year.

And the guy who declared, “One of us has to go!” He’ll help me plan this scheduled and he gets to be the principal of project Home Summer School…whether he or the girls like it or not.

Olivia has so much energy, she needs help channeling her energy into good because if she doesn’t get it, we’ll all be in trouble and I’ll spend all summer scrubbing melted red Chap Stick out of my footstool. And nobody wants that.

1 comment:

Julie said...

I love this idea!! I can't wait to see how it goes.