A Little Rebellion Every Now & Then

On Gillian’s desk, there is a lamp and a pencil sharpener. While the pencil sharpener still has old batteries, the clutter around and on the desk is gone. On top of the rolling storage drawers, books are ready for the coming year. The assignment sheet sits on the clipboard.

Inside the drawers, last year’s books and papers are filed away, and this year’s are waiting. In the window alcove, a few reference books sit, easy to access for Gillian, and so does the globe. The rest of the floor is clear.

Most of the piles near my part of the schoolroom have been cleared, save one larger, more troublesome one. The notebooks for organization of school papers have been separated from the other school supplies and are sitting beside the bookcase waiting for me.

I have a few more tasks to complete before I will feel ready for the new school year to begin, but I feel much calmer than I did two days ago.

One week and three days until we officially start our 2006-2007 school year, that is.

The school area is, to put it mildly, a mess. There are schoolbooks strewn everywhere around the house, and there are non-school things everywhere with the school stuff.

Our routines are completely off. We haven’t had a consistent wake time in weeks.

We haven’t managed to reconfigure the playroom to keep Jacob happier while we’re doing school.

I haven’t picked out items for recitation, I haven’t replaced the batteries in the pencil sharpener, and I don’t have my organization system for school papers set up.

I’m planning to work on all of this for awhile tonight, again tomorrow, and possibly Sunday. I’ll do what I can during the week next week, but I don’t anticipate it being very much. Then I’ll have the long weekend to finish what I can. The playroom won’t be reconfigured until at least three weeks into the schoolyear, and I don’t think that the batteries will get replaced until then either. It’s a toss-up as far as the organization for school papers.

Despite all of that, I think we’re just about ready. It’s time to note the turning of the year. I wish we could wait and start on the first official day of autumn, but we’d need to continue too far into June for Gillian to attend some of her camps and things that she enjoys so much. So we’ll mark the turning twice, once when we start schooling again, and then once more on the first official day of autumn.