Sometimes it balances out in the end

Today was an awesome, incredible day.

I feel I can say this with assurance because I have yesterday to compare it to, which was decidedly not awesome. Yesterday being a day when I was trapped in a local department store -- at the mall -- for a half hour with an incredibly dysregulated boy while we waited for his brother to get a haircut. And the only reason I found myself inclined to enter the purgatory of the mall is because I'm too cheap to pay for a haircut for my boys and this particular store was offering free haircuts to kids through the month of August. And, because Sami is now -- ahem -- gainfully employed (finally pulling his weight), I had to do something about his hair. And to the lady behind the reception desk who looked at me with the evil eye? C'mon. I apologized for the mess those papers from your desk made when they landed on the floor and maybe by next August when we visit your establishment again you'll have found your sense of humor. Otherwise you might lose us altogether.

He's wearing that cap to hide all the wild red hair.

But Today! Today was awesome!! (Incidentally, isn't it funny how 90 really bad minutes in a day can make you feel like giving up altogether and that 90 totally awesome minutes can make you feel energized and ready to look for more challenges to tackle? Thank goodness life balances out like that.)

Today we started talking in earnest about ancient Greece. I was actually surprised by how much the boys already knew -- like Greece is where they speak Greek! But also that it is on the Mediterranean and that it is part of the European Union. And, as Oliver pointed out, the ancient Greeks loved math and gave lots of unique properties to numbers. For instance, the color of the number one was considered to be red. We had talked about all of this in relation to the myths we are reading and the history of number systems, so technically I shouldn't be surprised -- but, you know, they were paying attention and they are interested and that thrills me to no end!

It was Sami's idea to map everything we know and, as usual, I just do what he tells me.

Then, to totally make my day, I asked them if they knew what B.C. meant and, although Sami didn't know, Oliver wrote: "Before Christ". So naturally I asked him how he knew that and he said "I remember from when we learned about the Mayans."

Yeah. So last winter we took a trip to Mexico and in preparation we read a lot about the ancient Mayans. At the time, of course, I had no idea what Oliver was taking in -- this was before he could really communicate -- but he was always there, apparently taking everything in. I don't know why this kind of stuff still amazes me but it does.

Everything was already broken when we got there. Honest!

Then, after almost an hour of talking about Greek civilization I thought they must be getting tired so I suggested that we pick another subject to work on and Sami said: "No, that's ok, this is really interesting." (and that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is why I love homeschooling!) I asked Oliver and he agreed.

So, yeah. Today was totally awesome, incredible. And I hope I won't have to pay for it in the balance of things until at least sometime next week.