Deranged by Decibels

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:

• Hardware Busy Board
• Dusting
• Transferring

If they hadn't already shown us abundant amounts of kindness and generosity, I'd suspect our neighbors/landlords of a little noise pollution retribution right about now. The Porters' apartment abuts ours and they've been subject to a cacophonous soundtrack of car noises, music shows, animal sounds, cries, shouts, laughs and squeals since we moved in over a year and a half ago, performed by our son (with occasional cameos from his parents). The Porters recently decided to do a little remodeling, and the decibel level in our apartment building has consequently increased so much that our very floors often vibrate due to the din. Demolition of their upstairs bathroom began four days ago. Upon breaking for lunch today, one of the guys doing the remodel told me that he'd finally finished the deafening demo work. That was three hours ago, and it still seems pretty freakin' loud here to me. Ah well, such is life.

Probably due to a combination of his dad being off work (and thus home) this morning and the sanity-shaking remodeling racket, Parker at first didn't seem to have any desire to do school today. He put up a big protest, in response to which I just kept saying, "It's time for school. That's what time it is." I didn't want to engage in any verbal battles; as I've said before, I definitely do not want to develop a habit of pleading with my son to sit down and do school stuff with me. I tried my ask-for-help technique ("Hey, want to help me pull out the shelves?") and then, when that didn't do the trick, proceeded to plop myself down on the sofa. Parker moaned, groaned, trod off to his room and lay down in bed. I stayed seated, trying not to think about the fresh plate of brownies sitting in our fridge. After about seven minutes, Parker strolled out of his room and stated, "Here I am! I'm ready for school!" Things went swimmingly from then on. Well, except for the insane noise emanating from next door, that is.

I was rifling through my jumble of kitchen utensils while getting ready to make brownies this morning (if you want to bake anything in the Caribbean, you MUST do it early in the morning--it's simply too hot to turn on the oven at any other time of day), and came across some old scooping devices hidden in the back of the drawer. I fished them out a little later during school, when Parker pulled out the materials for the transferring activity. He loved the "new" tools and tried out each one repeatedly, scooping up and transferring rice from one container to the other over and over again. I'm sure I've got more stuff lying around the house that could be given new life within the context of our homeschool; I'll just need to get into a MacGyver kind of mind set and start seeking out the unsuspected potential uses in everyday objects.