Roll with It

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:

• Graduated Blocks
• Mosquito Control

I was really excited about doing school today--more so than usual, I mean. In addition to having the materials for another new sensorial activity prepared and ready to present to Parker, I'd figured out a way around his resistance to being blindfolded. Yesterday, while doing the rough and smooth boards activity, I'd wanted to cover my son's eyes with a kitchen towel so that he would be forced to use his sense of touch to differentiate between the grades of sandpaper, instead of his sense of sight (annoyingly, the smoother grades were grey-ish, while the rougher grades were brown). He definitely had no desire to have a towel tied around his head--rendering him sightless--and refused to even experience the sensation of being blind, let alone attempt the activity that way. This morning I put all of the rough and smooth boards into a little sack (a purple, velvet Crown Royal sack yoinked from my husband's restaurant, to be specific). That way, I figured, Parker would still be effectively sightless, but only with regard to the sandpaper squares (which is all that really matters when it comes to this particular activity).

Well, we didn't get to put my sack idea into effect or even take a stab at the new activity today. After just a few minutes of working with the graduated blocks (experimenting to see how stable they are when stacked out of sequence--I dubbed the result "modern architecture"), our landlady/neighbor phoned to gently remind me that all the standing water left on our deck from the recent storms was going to give us millions of mosquito babies if I didn't quickly clean it up. (This is how awesome our landlady is: she didn't just call to say, "Hey, clean up that standing water!" she also volunteered to come over and help. She's very concerned about my propensity to be bitten by mosquitoes. She's given me four bottles of natural, DEET-free bug repellant in the 18 months we've lived here--which end up for the most part sitting unused in my medicine cabinet since I can't stand the smell of citronella.) Anyway, sometimes you just have to roll with it. Parker was patently overjoyed to stop school and start mopping. I, myself, couldn't muster up the same amount of enthusiasm, but I dutifully dragged my new best friend, the Shop-Vac, outside and started moving all the furniture and outdoor toys and useless crap (old litter box, empty--and now soggy!--cardboard boxes, potting soil, neglected jogging stroller) out of the way so that Katie, Parker and I could get all the muddy, leafy, buggy (have I told you about the termites that swarm during big storms?) rain water cleaned up. I'm actually really pleased with the result. Sprucing up our deck had been on my weekend to do list for over a month, but come Saturday and/or Sunday neither my husband nor I ever had any inclination to start scrubbing. Now it looks so nice, clean and pristine and neat and tidy. I'd better enjoy it while I can; it's only a matter of time before it starts getting grubby again.

FYI: I took this picture after about two hours' worth of cleaning.