So, I was recognized at work a few weeks ago.

I was very honoured and moved by the recognition.

One of the items flagged?

My ability to maintain work-life balance.

At which point I remembered I had a blog.

Life’s been busy. So it’s been quiet over here on said blog.

But the reminder soon found me itching to actually post rather than just surf my past music posts when I got struck with a case of the warm blog fuzzies.

I thought about what to post.

Perhaps about the Summer of Lice?

Because every time I thought I’d get a moment?

There they were again.

Four rounds before I finally went to Nit Hunters and paid to make it no longer my problem.

Perhaps about my 5-year-old discovering little girl videos on YouTube and edging me off the computer so she could have “her time”?

It’s a big, weird world wide web out there of little girls opening LOL dolls and acting out intricate scenes with their dollies.

My general thought is that if they combined forces they could out-earn the Chive with relatively little effort.

I could tell you work’s been busy. That I’ve been travelling. That homecoming happened. That the new neighbour has a daughter my eldest is fast becoming besties with. That I met a theoretical physicist. That both my kids had birthdays. That my youngest started Sparks so now we had twice the amount of cookies to sell this fall (the mint ones, not the good ones).

But, well, that’s already past.

So, I thought I’d give you homework.

Because, wow. THAT is what is going to be the end of my always precarious work-life balance.

I made you a collage from just this past week to help bring you along (or down) with me:

Working our way down and around the L, we start with swimming lessons. We were five lessons in this fall before my 5-year-old revealed why she was pretending she no longer knew how to swim. Her goggles had gotten a run through the dryer and no longer fit. We got her new ones and that seems to have fixed that.

We got a new tutor for my eldest, now in Grade 3, this summer who is working out fantastically. In any event, most sessions no longer end in tears. She comes Wednesdays and Saturdays to help with reading. In the absence of any reading homework for the last three weeks from school (I sent a note, I suspect I’m missing something) we pulled some of the texts from last year and are going through them. That’s working well for repeat sight words and tracking where issues are.

That said, there is much computer homework now for my eldest. We’re doing math through NetMath. The teacher informed me this was too complicated for her, so she’d send something else home. That was a month ago (so I’ve sent an email to see if I’m missing something). In the interim, we play around on it. The loading page nicely sums up the anxiety much of this online homework causes me:

Next, we head over to the Senior Kindergarten class where my youngest had a book report due this week. Because they are in French school, it needed to be a French book. I was tempted to run her favourite “Green Eggs and Ham” through Google Translate.

But then realized I didn’t have to, because there’s a French version:

But we don’t own it. So it didn’t really feel like an honest choice. We landed on The Story of Moses, which we do own in French. So that’s Moise to you.

We have it in pop up. Which I suspect is the main selling point. That, plus it starts with a baby in a basket, involves a princess, a king, a talking bush, a journey, magical parting of the ocean and magical bread falling from heaven. It might as well be a fairy tale.

November is also our month on the play-doh making schedule for her class. We were assigned blue and made it this past weekend.

My youngest is also musical and I’m a fan of musical education, so in a delusional moment in August, which involved nostalgically staring at my piano and wondering if this might help my eldest with concentration, math and fine motor skills, I signed both kids up for piano lessons on Saturdays. They are both at Yamaha Music School (click here for a Hot Cross Buns sampling of that). Evaluation two months in is that this was a bad move and I should just cut my losses. I’ll give it another two months before making a firm ruling.

Chugging right along, we are still doing Kumon to supplement math for my eldest in the absence of any further direction from the school as to a better option.

And most recently, I was notified by the “l’ergotherapeute” that my eldest is to learn typing. So we now have 10 minutes a day of “fjf’ing” through typingclub.com.

That last big photo? Well! Il pleut des mots – it’s raining words. A game assigned as homework to help with reading. It sums it all up rather perfectly.

And to end? Amidst this structure, I like to note the encouragement to be innovative, creative and yourself in all that you do.

At work? That means we are all about design thinking which found me recently at the Government’s Design Thinking policy lab posing with their Zebra. The girls at home saw my zebra, raised me an entire design lab and despite advertising to the contrary, refused entry.

They were in there with a friend for about a week designing doll dresses.

How’s fall treating you?