Tonight the savage beast that needs calming would be me.

It's been one of those days...I knew it would be a rough one when I'd only had 5 hours of sleep and children were already up and arguing early this morning. This penguin looks how I felt this morning.

I know I don't do well during the day when I haven't had enough sleep the night before, and when kids were already sniping at each other this morning, I decided I needed to do something. Caleb was having a rough morning and was on the verge of a meltdown on a number of occasions.

I decided to put on some soothing music in the background during homeschooling time, only this time I decided to put on a CD of Chinese music that I bought from our church. The songs in English are familiar to my other children, so the music in the background brought a sense of peaceful familiarity, but the words were meaningful to Caleb. I wasn't even sure if he was paying attention to any of it, but his moods seemed to calm down. When Micheline tried to turn it off just to be a stinker, Caleb came unglued and wanted it back on, so I am only guessing that familiar language combined with soothing music was calming the savage beast he had inside this morning.

After a very long day with a headache that would just not let up in spite of many Ibuprofen, I ran to go get Ben from flag football practice only to come home to a house that smelled like a campfire. Micheline had made a hockey puck out of a bagel by nuking it in the microwave until the kitchen filled with smoke. She isn't allowed to use the microwave alone, but since Jeff was out in the garage and the teenagers were in their bedrooms, she decided she would just make a little snack on her own. She discovered that three minutes (or so she says) was a bit too long to warm up a bagel.

When we opened the family room windows to air the place out, one of the brand new screens we had just replaced to the tune of about $40.00 was broken off of the window by a son who could only say "I don't know" when asked why he would have done such a thing. He later fessed up to wanting to use it as part of a fort he has been building in the back yard. This is a child who has a combo platter of diagnoses after his name as Julie refers to it on her parenting children with special needs blog. As I have said before, I didn't request the combo platter...I thought I ordered the happy meal instead, but life has a way of giving you surprises.

part 2