Gracie has her first double earache. I called in to work, which I never do, and got her into the doctor, which I also never do. I love staying home with them. I made Charlotte eat green beans. She gagged. It took her twenty minutes to eat one bite. She cried. Eleanor and I each ate about two cups of these delicious frozen french green beans with butter and sea salt. I also made meat loaf. For lunch we had pork tenderloin fajitas - without the tortillas. I'm feeling low-carb today. But tonight I made chocolate pudding from scratch. The big girls played in the snow for hours today. It was the first snowy ground of the season. They made elaborate fort play with garden frames and tires and rickety fence pieces. Mondays are for grocery shopping. And cooking. We knocked out at least a half hour each girl of math u see and even read about Egypt in the Story of the World. All of these good things were nestled in between doubts about homeschooling at all today. I thought about how hard this is and that maybe I'm not doing enough or am not consistent enough. This is so hard sometimes. We now live where they could walk to the elementary and the junior high and the high school. Why do I always have to do things the hard way. I looked up the school district online. Charlotte saw what I was doing and started crying. I told her I was just curious and I wasn't going to send her to school. Our school district is at the bottom of the barrel - not too tempting even in times of weakness.

The girls put up the tree. the bathroom is still gutted. We took our annual silly family photo for Christmas. I still have Anthropolgie - itis - a disease that has me obsessed with getting my house to look like an Anthropologie catalogue. I never had this problem before. Rentals never felt like a reflection of me. They were just a place to stay.