06 April 2020

Bess Tuggle's Memoirs of Surviving Children: Home Schooling the Grandboy

I’ve been pretty slack with my writing lately.  In my own defense, I’ve been busy home schooling a 4 year old.  Mr. B.  Most of it’s been really fun, but I’ve learned some important lessons.

We work on learning letters on the ‘fridge. 

Did you know those magnetic letters can suck up dog hair?  Seriously -suck- it up!  We have two big house dogs.  I now have a big towel in the kitchen to place on the floor when we study ‘cause I don’t want to scrub dog hair out of plastic letters  again.  Ever.  

Mr. B can now kick anyone’s butt at the card game “War” (basically flipping cards, and the one with the greater number wins).  I took the face-cards out of a deck of cards, and he knows his numbers 2 through ten, and also greater and lesser.  He -loves- to beat me, and no, I don’t stack the deck.  I do turn a blind eye when I flip a card and he searches through his cards to get a bigger number.

He also knows the number one, too.  Ticks him off when he only gets -one- gumball out of the machine.  (We count those and discuss colors).  His favorite number is five, but he has to brush his teeth before we spin the gumball machine again..

We took a “field trip” from studies one day.  We watched Spider Man in bed, complete with popcorn, strawberries and PB&J sandwiches (which he makes on his own now).  Those sheets are now in the wash pile.  Crumbs are one thing.  The dogs clean them up.  Our big dog trying to lick the PB&J out of the sheets is a whole different story.

I dug out puzzles that I bought for his sister’s.  I have 3 100-piece puzzles.  I chose “The Lion King” for Mr. B.  That’s when I learned his sisters weren’t too conscious when putting up their puzzles.  The pieces are all mixed up.  I got called a “butt crack” over arguing about the piece for the monkey’s face.  That was an automatic time-out.

But the best was explaining to my visiting Marine why I had Cheerios in the bathroom.     Aim control, Baby.  Aim control!   

I almost forgot one other important thing.  Boogers come in many colors.  Crayola crayons don’t match any of the colors, but our puppy will eat them regardless.  

- Bess Tuggle