Shipwrecked!: Leaving Us In The Dark

It was a dark, nasty, pouring down rain fall day. Normally this is one of those gross days where I turn on every single light in the house like an anti-environmentalist because I hate the dark! Unless it's fall, in which I turn on all my ~~Christmas~~ fall lights and light all the pumpkin smelly candles in every room and it's just great, thanks.

As I'm warming up my coffee for the 294th time and reading the teacher manual for today's lesson, it suggests that after lessons we turn off all the lights and see what it's like to not use electricity for the rest of the day.

Well, I'm about 3 days behind on laundry and there's a hockey game on TV tonight, so how about we do school without electricity. Besides, it's now still dark at 8:00am when we start, so it will be more effective.

So I reheat my coffee one last time (because I'm pretty certain the early settlers didn't have microwaves and I'm not about to start a campfire in the pouring rain just because I drink my coffee too slow) and kill the lights, all the lights, except for some candles which I put on the table. The kids really enjoyed the novelty of doing schoolwork by candlelight (especially since said candlelight had a specific banana-pumpkin smell) and we talked about what it would be like to live 100% without electricity like the early settlers did, and how I broke some sort of time continuum by reheating my coffee in the microwave for the 296th time (okay listen, it's really hard to drink your coffee while it's still hot while talking all.the.time during lessons).

About halfway through lessons I was totally over it being so dark in the dining room (which already has very little natural light) so I plugged in our strand of lights that I keep around the window. We declared these "oil lamp light", since they were invented just around the same time period (1740s), but alas since I'm not my mother and don't have any actual oil lamps, Christmas lights had to suffice. Fake it till you make it, you know.

During the middle of some math practice, a friend of mine sends me a screenshot of her 6th grader's math lesson. Something about fractions and how to get their denominators to match and who actually cares if their denominators match or not in the real world?! We hadn't covered it this year in math yet (I actually thought it was her 8th grader's math) but since Calen at 11 and a half is basically halfway towards a PHD in math, so I tossed the photo in his direction just to see what he might do with it.

Instantly he was on his feet and to our white board, staring at the screenshot on my phone, and doing his best Winnie the Pooh "think, think, think!" imitation. I told him it doesn't matter but he insisted he knew how to do it he just needed to recall it. Within a couple minutes he's suddenly scribbling a bunch of numbers on the board and explaining it to me, of course I'm staring at him with a blank stare because I have NO IDEA what he's talking about because math just isn't my thing, man. So then I asked him to repeat his little lesson on 6th grade fractions (which I am CONVINCED I didn't learn until like, 9th grade, or possibly even later than that, like never) so that I can record it and send it to his buddy.

This is how friends help friends with math homework in the information age. Cell phone recordings, Facetime, instant messenger.

Also, I still don't see how finding the common denominator matters at all ever in the real world.

It just never stopped raining today, so we made a second round of apple cider donuts from last week, because every Monday is better with donuts, and then the boys built Tinker Crates (another super awesome subscription box - Calen's based around engineering, Cam's based around geography) for science today while I rode our stationary bike in the garage to work off that donut I just ate.