Beginning Well to Finish Well...

It's officially summer break around here.

How do I know? Because the fourth grade class science experiment (also known as Maisy, the friendliest albino rat you'll ever wanna meet) has now taken up permanent residence in our home. Tyler may or may not have reassured me just a couple of nights ago that really, there was no one breaking into our house at 2am. Apparently when you're half asleep, an excitable rat (who, in my groggy half-slumber, I had forgotten really does now live in our upstairs... and on purpose, no less) sounds an awful lot like a burglar when she creatively redecorates her cage in the middle of the night.

And here I thought we had agreed to stick to raising children. Ha.

I also know it's summertime because after spending much of the day on Monday clearing fallen sticks from our back yard, I peered out my kitchen window on Tuesday morning to find three imaginative boys dragging every last stick back into our yard so they could build their first fort of the season.

Of course they did. And it's a great one, at that. (For the record, I have an engineer, a laborer, a narrator and a clear Miss bossy pants on my hands. A well rounded crew, I tell ya.)

By Wednesday morning, the four had barely swallowed the last bites of their breakfasts before collaborating in the kitchen for a family science experiment. While I really don't wish for their little minds to shut off completely during summer break, I would settle for a couple of hours each morning so I can catch up with their growing intellects. Call me crazy, but I can't seem to effectively answer physics questions about momentum, vortexes and inertia before 7:00am. Go brush your teeth, please, and let me Google it think about it for a second.

One boy needs me upstairs while another pair needs an intervention downstairs, and the girl needs me in the same room as her always, don't you know. The phone rings, ironically always at the exact same moment that someone needs me in the potty. And while it would be a whole lot faster to sort the laundry myself, teaching is absolutely more necessary than efficiency. The gaps are filled in with everything from neighbor kids to baby dolls, important Lego repairs to grocery store runs, baseball games galore and questions of all kinds, with barely a down moment from the minute my feet hit the floor in the morning until I sink into bed each night.

In my own strength, I'm always a step behind. It's four to one after all, and clearly they won't be sleeping in anytime soon. While the surface things may (or may not) get accomplished, if I'm not careful, their impressionable hearts might not be any more nourished by the end of the day than when we started. 

Join me over at Good Morning Girls today, where I finish this story and share how I'll be starting my days this summer...