Sick Day Journal

My husband and I burned a bag of old paper and cardboard in the wood stove today, and I brought 2 more bags of trash out to the garage. So our total now is 19. Wow, almost halfway there! I plan to keep doing this all through Lent even if I reach 40, if we're not done with the excess.

In the spring, we plan to rent a dumpster and get rid of the BIG junk that doesn't readily fit into a trash bag.

All the boys are sick and I've come down with the virus too, so I'm alternating between resting, bringing the boys juice and medicine and sympathy, and doing short bursts of clearing.

Clare, at college, has the virus too. It sounds like the same one. That's funny, since it's 250 miles away and we haven't seen her since early January.

There's a thread about rotating toys at the Real Learning board. It has some creative ideas for keeping the toy clutter down to a minimum.

I've been thinking hard about toys. My boys are older now -- the youngest three are ages 7, 10 and 14. They honestly don't play with toys all that much. When I put them away, they basically forget about them. So then I tend to just leave them put away, which defeats the purpose of having them in the first place. Maybe my set of youngers just don't need a whole variety of toys? Or maybe I should actively encourage them to play with the developmental ones, like construction sets and puzzles?

Usually Aidan is the one who is interested in educational toys, like the alphabet set and the sentence building tiles he got for Christmas this year. But today Paddy spent a long time playing with the sentence building box. I think his interest sprang, oddly enough, from the fact that I made him do copywork based on the word tiles. No conclusions, it's just that I wonder if I should limit the toys to a few I think have positive value, and a few that the children have invested with positive value -- for example, Paddy plays endlessly with a collection of Beanie Babies inherited from his older siblings, and Aidan specializes in things that can be made somehow to spin : ).