Spring has settled in for good.  The rainy days are lessening, even the nights are warming up and the mosquitos are fat and happy.  The mosquitos are very fat and happy.

We’ve almost settled back into stationary life.  School started with the usual week of gnashing of teeth and the slap, slap slap soundtrack of flashcards hitting the table, lightening fast, as we pounded the multiplication tables that certain boys who shall not be named had flushed over the winter.  Hannah proclaimed Henry V most unsatisfactory.  Ezra insists that cursive is USELESS (I’m not telling him that he may well be right!) and I’ve had plenty of opportunities to practice my lamaze breathing.  Those deep cleansing breaths did little for me in childbirth, but have been priceless in keeping me from killing the kids since I brought them home.  Ahh home schooling… why am I doing this again?  Having taught in classrooms and in living rooms, I’m firm in my belief that no educational process can be judged by how the first week goes.

Elisha and Ez with a race car in Boston

We rewarded ourselves on surviving one another and conquering our first week by embarking on a new “culturally broadening experience.”  We made our first visit to a big roller coaster theme park:  Six Flags, New England.  Few things can match the excitement of kids who’ve been generally deprived of the noisy, frenetic, ridiculousness that is an amusement park on their first visit.  They saw the signs from the highway, “No way we’re going there… looks cool though.”  We overheard the commentary from the back seat.  “It’s probably WAY expensive… maybe when we’re older we can go.”  Little did they know, Daddy was springing for a season’s pass and the fun was just beginning.  I dug around in my purse for a pre-emptive dose of Tylenol for the inevitable headache I knew was coming and an extra dose of “happy mommy enthusiasm.”  Luckily, I found both.

Ezra was immediately disappointed to be declared two inches too short for the biggest and meanest of the roller coasters, but rallied quickly when he realized he could ride FOUR of the smaller rides and eat a whole bucket of popcorn in the time it took the big kids to ride one.  He was disembarking from his third round on the mixer ride when his siblings emerged, looking a little shell shocked.  “Ugh… Mommy, I’m not feeling so good, I think that mixer makes me have motion sickness.”  Fabulous.  And me without my puke bucket.  Whose idea was it to take the puker to a roller coaster park?  Evidently I’m not the first Mom to overlook this tendency in her kid and anti-nausea meds were quickly procured, chewed and swallowed with the usual “you really hate me to make me take this” face and he lead the charge for the red roller coaster.  You know the one, it has a full loop-de-loop and four upside down twists.  The one he’s one inch over tall enough to ride.  The one we had to ride twice.  This time I emerged looking shell shocked and Ez was grinning from ear to ear.  “This is GREAT Mom!!  With that drama-immune, I don’t feel like barfing at all!!”

Drama-immune.  Indeed.  If they sold that next to the Dramamine I’d have bought out the whole shelf and I’d sell it to my friends at a 500% mark up.  I could single handedly sell a semi-truck load to just the families we know.  Heck I had five Moms put in their requests from just the Facebook post that evening.  If there was EVER a kid I’d load up with Drama-immune, it would be Ezra.