This is one of those days that rolls from one into the next. And this time it isn’t the kids’ fault. It’s my husband’s! We’re so used to him working at night that when he’s off we either can’t go to bed at the same time or we’re like middle school girls at a slumber party and end up talking half the night.

We finally went to sleep around one. Tom had an early work meeting, he has them weekly. They used to be on Wednesdays, but they moved them to Mondays. So he left at like five-thirty. I vaguely remember him leaving. I turned my alarm off so many times that when my sister called at six-thirty I hung up on her, thinking it was my alarm again!

I finally got up while talking to her. I stirred up a loaf of sourdough and chatted with my sister. Lou Bae hates sourdough, but I finally found a recipe that tastes enough like plain white bread that she begs for it!

My grandma told me when I was first starting out to find ONE recipe in every category and perfect it before adding more. Like, find one pie filling recipe that you use with store bought crust and make it until you have it down pat, then learn a crust recipe until you can make it without thinking, then learn a new filling. And on and on with everything.

I’ve ignored this advice most of my life. But, I think there’s a lot of merit to it. Especially with things like bread. I’ve been trying to lean into that idea more lately. Instead of trying absolutely everything, finding a recipe and tweaking it and making it until it’s awesome and you can be counted on to make that one thing. I love that Lou Bae can now depend on bread being one of those things.

Honestly, it’s true with most of life, isn’t it? Find one anchor that you can do until you feel like you aren’t drowning any more and then build from there. Another example of this is that I realized that our days went so much smoother when we had a cleaned off table every morning. So for a long time I focused just on that before bed. My one job was to make sure the table was cleaned off before I went to bed. Once I was consistent, I built on more. A lot of my failure comes when I try to do too many new things all at once. One at a time is a really great life motto.

I used to be such a purist when it came to baking and mixing. I always kneaded everything by hand. I didn’t even use a hand mixer for years. Other than pulling it out for meringue. I’ve recently started using my stand mixer to knead for me. Game changer. I got so much done while my mixer got the dough ready.

I took my supplements, stacked the dishes, refilled the flour container, and wiped down the counters. Teeny woke up and watched me for a bit and then went off to work on Lego. I set the dough aside to rise and got Phita’s meds ready.

Lou Bae woke up and started on her math while I worked on reading with Teeny. I rotated the girls through their Mom Time. Tom got home and we had breakfast. He went out to put up a flag pole. The girls went out to play and I wrote for a bit.

Evie had the idea to plant red, white, and blue flowers around it. Which we thought was a very good idea. I’m going to take her this weekend to pick out the flowers. After a snack I was able to corral the kids and bring them inside for group work.

Phita held Evie’s hand the entire time. We just finished reading a book about the Constitution, so the girls insisted I read the entire text of it, too. We did that. We had an interesting discussion about it. The girls had a lively discussion about the difference between happiness and the pursuit of happiness.

We focused just on our core subjects today because I had to leave. Part of Mom Time is math and language arts with each kid. As a group we covered religion, history, and science.

I had to leave early. I got the bread in the oven and left. Obviously, Tom was home and taking care of the kids and the bread.

Every week or so I pick up my grandma, who is in her late eighties, and take her to do errands. She’s about forty-five minutes from us, so it was almost one by the time I got there. I picked her up and changed my calendar.

She has this velcro calendar in her kitchen. Like in a pre-k classroom. Every time I go to her house I update it with the current date. It’s a silly little thing, but it makes us both happy. She also found a goose cookie jar in her pantry for me. You know the old 90s goose pattern? I love it. I even had it on my shirt today!

We hit the post office, paid her water bill, and went into town. As always, we started with lunch. Another piece of Grandma Wisdom is that it’s a rule that one cannot grocery shop on an empty stomach. One will buy too much junk food.

Lunch had, we carried on to the grocery store. I ran into like four people I know. In the checkout line I was telling Grandma a story about Teeny telling me she was more stubborn than me. We both laughed.

The elder woman in front of us asked how old she was. I told her 6 and she asked if she was my only. I laughed and told her my kids were 9,8,7,6. She was horrified and informed me that when she got married, her husband said he wanted twelve kids, but she only gave him two. Like that was a good thing.

It’s weird how anti-children Boomers are. The cashier on the other hand said that she had a six year old and a four month old and wanted all of the babies. Somehow we got on the topic of homeschool and she had a bunch of really insightful questions. My grandma gave me a hard time because there’s another cashier there that I’ve already made homeschool friends with.

Grandma has this guy who keeps her yard taken care of in all seasons and does random house repairs for her. She pays him a flat rate every month to just do all the things. He’s really good. Once when she was out of town we went over to check on her place. Within minutes the guy was there to see who we were and why we were there.

Anyway, we drove all over town looking for him because he doesn’t do cell phones. Like any self respecting curmudgeon with a secret heart of gold. Found him. We talked for a while and then I took Grandma home and got her groceries put away and she gave me money for the girls.

On Easter my mom got them a piggy bank that keeps track of the change you put in. They were so fascinated that they found every last penny in the house and put it in. They ended up with like $76! My grandma bought it from them. Which they were so excited about. Especially when I got home and they realized that she paid them all in ones.

They took turns holding it so that they could be rich. Grandma also sent them some chocolate chip sandwich cookies and peanut butter ice cream. They may have been a little more excited about that!

I cuddled Phita and the other girls built giant, magnificent towers. Tom ran to town to get more mulch. I’m working on getting my garden ready and I was like four bags short. So he went. I read with the girls.

We had supper, did bedtime and books. And, well, that’s all she wrote! Toma nd I are hanging out. He’s watching a show, I’m writing to you. I hope you all had wonderful Mondays, too.