We had a bit of a reverse school day today, spending the morning at the Gondolia Fun Fair with some friends and then the afternoon at home doing our lessons. It felt like an extravagance to take the kids to an amusement park, but as I was riding around on the carousel with Phoebe, I remembered many other times I'd taken my children on similar (contrived) adventures in the past.
It's just not something we've done in the past...while. I'm not sure quite how long, but it's been years. Living in Georgia, specifically, such outings felt unobtainable (too costly, etc.). So this felt like a luxury (and is surely a luxury), but it's not entirely out of the ordinary...it simply feels like it because we haven't done anything like it in a long while.
The kids had fun—perhaps I'll borrow their ideas for a post later since I was largely a chaperone and not a participant—and then knuckled down to do math and science and writing this afternoon (even staying on task during their science lesson while I ran Miriam to the orthodontist).
It did mean, however, that our school day abutted dinnertime.
I was still in the middle of slogging through a methodology book I had to read for my ethnography class (which I finally finished—alhamdulillah) when the kids asked me what the plan was to fill their bellies before our evening activities (the older kids have mutual, the younger kids want to go to the pool).
"What's for dinner?" they whined.
"Excerpts," I told them absentmindedly.
"Experts?" they asked.
"What?" I said, looking up from my book (where I was reading about how to select and edit passages from long-form fieldnotes into appropriately-lengthed excerpts in a polished ethnography). "Oh—leftovers!"
I suppose leftovers could be considered excerpts of weekly dinners.
It's been a busy day, trying to squeeze in everything we have to do, but I think we've mostly gotten through it!
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