I did really want to be done with homeschooling. It sounded positively dreamy. But at this point Noah is commenting, “You’ve already made up your mind. You are going to take them out. You are just fussing over when.” I will give the school a bit more rope to hang itself; I will spend a month building a paper trail… then…

We have a home ed meetup planned for later in the week. I’m working on getting the kids to meet folks through home ed. They’ve both made exactly two friends through school in the past few month so if I can help them find two or three friends through home ed… it won’t be a lot less. They are both aware that they get less than two hours a week to really talk to their school friends because of how school is structured. If home ed means spending four or so hours a week talking to friends…

It’s Christmas Eve and I feel like a disappointment. Noah’s non-broken replacement Christmas present is held at the delivery depot. Awesome. It was dispatched weeks ago. I originally ordered it early November and the maker didn’t package it very well. Awesome. Our stockings and Christmas stuff are in a warehouse outside of London. But at least I’m pretty sure it is on the island!

My knee hurts quite a bit. So does my foot. I was riding my bike and I hit a patch of ice. The fall was not nearly as bad as it could be, but I’m in a fair bit of pain. It got much worse after I went for a long walk yesterday. It’s kind of like EC messing up her knee in the airport on the way into Japan. Every time she walked for weeks her knee swelled up like whoa. My turn.

Noah and I watched the first part of The Marriage Story on Netflix last night as we stayed up too late doing chores. It should be called The Divorce Story. It’s sad. It’s realistic. They are both ok people who make bad choices sometimes and what happens to them is incredibly devastatingly sad. We haven’t finished the last half hour but I anticipate crying a lot.

Noah and I are trying to be gentle with each other right now. We are both not doing so hot and we both need to have low expectations of the other person being able to “make” us happy. We can’t. We both feel sad. It’s for a whole lot of reasons and that’s just… going to stay true for a bit.

In milestone news, YC is most of the way to being able to say and sign the whole alphabet and do numbers up to ten. She still makes some mistakes… but she’s not two yet. She’s going to be a firecracker. I should probably stop working on ASL in a country that doesn’t use it, but I haven’t. She enjoys it. I could not begin to count her vocabulary. I think it is in the thousands. She’s super obsessed with these jungle-school videos Noah has shown her. She is deeply concerned about a baby monkey that fell out of a tree. She asks about it being ok every day. I kind of wish there were more follow up videos about that monkey. She likes talking about all the food she likes that the monkeys like. She is fascinated that she wears diapers like the monkeys wear diapers.

We are most of the way through my first Terry Pratchett book ever. Ok, I get why people like him so much. I found a random handful at the local used bookstore and Noah has been saying he wants them so I bought them. My older kids have fallen in love with Agatha Raisin books. My buddy who visited recommended them.

In January our stuff will arrive. In January the nice joiner will show up and build us tree bookshelves. In January Noah won’t be working for the first month in like a decade. I’m going to rest as much as I can this week because I want to be able to walk with him.

At night when preparing for bed YC likes to curl up and browse through Gardener’s World magazine. She tells me all about the stuff she finds. It is really cute.

I’m struggling with having a year I shouldn’t do any projects. Noah has already tried to recant it because not being allowed to start a project means I’m being an asshole who obsesses about how clean the house is. I don’t have control over much else. I can’t control the school letting people hit my kids. I can’t control when our stuff arrives. I can’t control my mood or my attitude… but by golly I can make sure that fucking floor isn’t dirty.

I get the impression Noah would appreciate it if I obsessed over making food so he didn’t have to do it. But that’s harder for some reason I don’t understand. My kids like to talk about how Noah is the cook in our family. But I did almost all of the cooking (like 19-20 meals a week) for around 8 years and then Noah started helping with breakfast and I only had 14 meals a week for a few more years. It’s only been in the last couple of years that I barely cook at all. I’m not sure why I’m so burned out on cooking. I need to start helping more.

I’m just… I feel like an asshole. I feel tired. I feel devoid of joy. When Noah cooks I clean up after it. When I cook… I clean up after it. It’s really hard for me to handle that dynamic. If I make him cook at least I am not doing ALL of it.

Sigh. I’m tired.