homeschool fail: I lose the war

You know what they say... well, they say a lot of things. It could be anything. "Don't eat yella snow!" they say. "Kissing makes babies!" they say. Well, my mama used to say that, anyway, when I was 15. I think I might have been sheltered. The point is, you still don't know what I'm talking about. "You can't win 'em all," that's the one I mean. Today, I think I lost the Revolutionary War. 

I have books, you know, books I am supposed to read with my children, so at least when they come in my room at 3 am, telling me they dreamed they took musket fire and bled to death on a cold battlefield, I will have a frame of reference. But today I was on my laptop, pseudo-cursing at my printer while trying to print a couple of activities, so I made them read the books themselves. 

The printer, last week, was all like, "OMG, I'm totes out of ink, bro," so I bought ink and installed it, and now it's like, "I have a communication error, bro. My bad." So I'm plugging, unplugging, threatening, messing with system preferences and googling like a BOSS, while my children read up on amputation in the late 1700's. "I don't want to read this," Toby says. "I just want to dance." "*&*^$!" I answer, sending laser-ray eyes of death at the printer. 

Some people might say, hey, how about preparing ahead of time, like a grownup? People. I have to think about other things during that time, like youtube videos and couch forts. The problem with technical difficulties is that no one around here understands the THREAT LEVEL MIDNIGHT frustration boundaries. They climb on me, asking questions, like, "Is it working now? Why aren't we having school, mom? Can we take all the brownies and eat them under our bed? Can we go to the zoo right now? Can I glue this paper to the wall? Is it working now? Why is it taking so long? Where's dad? Can I eat all of the grapes? Is it working now?" 

In those early days of the fight for freedom, as colonists patched together uniforms and militias and statesmen became great, I know there were women gathered around rustic wooden tables, yelling at their children. Those were tense days, dark days. Days like today. I felt a kinship with those women today, taping together tricorner hats in a glorious succession of fails. 

They ended up being some kind of goofy crowns, which they paired with Nerf guns and went on the hunt for British soldiers. Listen, um, if you're one of my Brit friends or an Epson executive, you might just lay low till we get through this section...