For-Real Friday: December 2018

For-Real Friday is a quick glimpse into our lives, usually from the previous week. Sometimes it’ll be pretty, sometimes ugly, and sometimes just plain ordinary–but it’ll always be real: no posing or faking.

Today’s For-Real Friday is a vignette I like to call “Thursday afternoon”. I call it that because…I took these pictures on a Thursday afternoon.

Deep, I know.

Now, it’s worth saying that these photos are a little more subdued than what might normally be the case on a school day around here. But this was a day with double the usual work and half the kids had been gone for a couple of hours to the dentist in the morning. Thus they were under Dad’s “work quietly and hard, or you die” rule.

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Here’s my oldest daughter teaching a subject to one of the little guys. We don’t have the siblings teaching each other very often (each kid has plenty to do on their own) but a few like doing it and it frees up a bit of time for Courtney to do the other 365,780,947 things she does for our family. I particularly like the artistically placed (i.e. balled up) lime green blanket in the background.

Here’s our youngest trying to get all of his papers back into his school binder, which he’d apparently just dumped them all out of. While he looks nice and tranquil here, he was in full-blown tears about three minutes later when he couldn’t get the papers back in the binder on his own. I’m not sure how “Let’s Go Fishing” was helping with school, but that’s probably because I’m the clueless dad.

Look at these three young scholars working hard at their school in harmonious accord… What you can’t tell from this is that two of these kids are actually painfully behind in their school due to some poor choices. I like the leopard print cardigan on the chair and especially the leftover lunch plate that I’m pretty sure had been sitting there for a few hours after lunch because the kid who’s supposed to clear the table after lunch didn’t bother doing it. But the festive advent wreath negates that, methinks.