Yes, it is that time on Monday morning before Tyler has gotten out of bed and I have finished my exercise routine, the house is quiet and I have a few minutes to think to myself.  Mondays are always hard.  Tyler’s had 2 days off of our “normal” school routine and doesn’t want to get back into it.  He usually pouts, sulks, demands, etc. and it’s my job to not give in.  See, I know he’s testing me to see if he can find any weakness and if he does, he exploits it to it’s full potential.  It’s my job to be strong, even if I also want to crawl under the covers to sleep the day away or just go off and play.

We are also coming off the last week and a half of being somewhat distracted because Trent was home.  He starts a temp (2-4 weeks) contract job today, but he’s also still interviewing.  The main thing is that he has been here, at home, around and now he won’t be again.  I thought we transitioned to having him here rather well and I’m hoping that we transition to not having him here just as nicely.  In some ways it’s been nice for me because he’s been helping out around the house with chores (dishes, shoveling the driveway, taking the dog out, cooking, cleaning, etc) so my days haven’t been as full, but now it’s back to just me.  Good thing it is supposed to get warm today and tomorrow (in the 40s) so some of this snow will melt and I won’t have to worry about shoveling, I did my upper body strength training today and I upped some of the weight so shoveling would be very difficult.

I’m still following my exercise routine (still in the get back in shape part of it until the end of Feb) and Trent is exercising as well.  I exercise in the mornings and he does his stuff in the evenings after dinner.  Tyler has lost interest, but that might change because we will be starting a chapter on health for science today and it talks about exercise, eating healthy, etc.  So it might renew his interest again.

We didn’t have art class on Sat because the instructor was ill.  It was too bad because I was really looking forward to it.  Tyler finished up last week strong.  He got 14/15 on his spelling test.  He’s been working on the relationships of fractions, decimals, and percentages in math and on Friday he learned about numbers greater than 1 (like 1 1/2) instead of just fractions of 1.  He finished up learning about the body in science and started learning about Jupiter.

He’s become super interested in Pokemon.  He’s found a website that will tell him about Pokemon cards, how the things evolve, what they use to fight, what defeats them, and how to play games with the cards.  Now because his mom (that’s me) won’t buy him real cards, he’s been making his own.  He’s made enough that we now have to play a game with them at least once a day.  It’s been good for him to have to make them because it is practicing a lot of skills: he has to cut out paper the size that he wants, he has to draw lots of pictures, he has to write things on the cards, he has to plan out which ones he wants, we’ve talked about how to make the 2 decks of cards more even so the playing of the game is more balanced, etc.  Personally, I think Pokemon is like dinosaurs.  They were invented so that parents would have no idea how to pronounce any of the words and therefore, kids would have another reason to think that their parents are dumb.  Seriously, why is it that kids have no problem pronouncing or spelling any of these words.

Funny Pokemon story from this weekend: Tyler has been getting videos from the library.  He came into our room yesterday morning and asked when his movies were due back to the library.  We told him they were due back on Mon (today) so he decided he had to watch all 4 of them yesterday.  He comes in a few minutes later, after deciding the order he wanted to watch them in, and tells me that he’s watching the one that was made when I was young, like his age, first.  Now I don’t remember Pokemon from growing up so I asked him when it was made.  He tells me 1997.  I laughed and told him I was graduating from college in 1997.  So he says, you were a teenager then, right?  I tell him, no I was around 22.  He proceeds to tell me that then I was really old when the movie was made and goes off to watch it.  So if I was “really old” 10+ years ago, what am I now???  I told Trent this story and he laughed, but wisely didn’t comment since he’s even older than I am by a few years and I’m sure that takes old to a whole different level in the world according to Tyler.