Little House-Style

Last night our power went out. It was about midnight, and usually we sleep in the dark anyway, but having no lights made it very hard to go to sleep in the dark.

We survived the night, but this morning was crazy. My kids woke up at 6-pretty unusual for my guys who like to sleep til 8 on the weekends. It was as if someone said, "Wake up! There's nothing to do, and you need to get a jump-start on pestering mom!"

I told my mother-in-law that it was like "Lord of the Flies." My precious angels might as well have been beating their chests in loinclothes. They went crazy! Normally they do cereal for breakfast, but this morning just because a hot breakfast wasn't possible they were dying for waffles. And they wouldn't play-they wanted to sit right on top of me to whine.

We decided we could not spend a perfectly good weekend day at home with our kids going nuts. We were packing up to head to our river cabin when our air conditioner whirled to life. We wouldn't have been any happier if a rainbow came shinin' throught the window and a dancing little leprechaun personally handed us our pot-o-gold.

We love camping and roughing it, but only when we are properly physically and mentally prepared. And this weekend was not one of those times. Our big shouts-out to those electric company guys who saved our sanity and our Sunday.

What was that?

I just had the weirdest experience. One of my classes I am taking is research methods. I have been dreading this one...it is supposed to be one of the hardest in the program. But I know I have to do it, and planned to just get it done and be done with it.

Here is the weird part. It is a group project. I am reliant upon 5 other people to help me get the grade. And I live here in Arkadoo, and one of my group-mates lives in Mena, 2 live in Conway, and 2 others live in Nashville, TN.

So we are working together online (finally-after taking nearly 2 weeks to pin everyone down to one time and place.) And all of our work has to be submitted electronically, individually, but must also be IDENTICAL. That really confuses me, because how in this world are all six of our papers going to be exactly the same from six hours apart.

Now, I'm sure that other groups are flying through these proximity issues by discussion boards, chats, posting, whatever, but I am not tech saavy (see my back arrow post!). These things make me feel old. When I graduated from HSU, email was still pretty tricky, but now there are whole classes that meet entirely online! You can take a test while eating popcorn in your p.j.s. Wow.

So for the past two hours we have labored online talking about font size and indentation, and wording. And this is just for our practice sheets...we haven't even started the actual paper yet.

I am so going to have to give up control of this. But I don't like it.

Rain, Rain, Go Away (After 8 am!)

Rain Day! No School! Even though the kids think we hate weekends and holidays, and that we sleep at school, it's true. Teachers love the day off, too!

So here we are in our jammies. At 10 am. I woke up and turned on the weather this morning first thing to find out if it was worth the effort to straighten my hair this morning. I am so thankful that I found out before waking my kids-those extra 2 hours of silence were amazing.

I have a million things I need to be doing, such as laundry, cleaning bathrooms, making play dough for school, and getting ahead on my assignments for this sememster. I seriously need to go through the stacks of kid clothes and hang/price them for Duck Duck Goose. All of these "bonus" hours could really be productive. Could be....

But instead we ate banana pancakes. Don't get to make those on crazy school mornings. Now the boys are playing playstation, and I am watching "The View" and indulging in my facebook and blogging. I can't get over the new VP nominee, and the coverage is endless.

And nothing is getting done that needs to. But it will later. In just a few minutes I will get up and put on my superhero cape, and CLEANING MOM will step out of the closet (if you could walk in my closet.)


Right now, though, I am half browsing, half listening, and loving that Maddie is climbing all over me babbling in her new language. This found time will be precious if not productive.