AJ is still under quarantine today, but he is feeling 100 percent better, which has meant we've had to work extra hard to keep him busy today. Last night as I tucked him in, I told him that we would be playing school. This morning, he woke up all excited about it. He got out his school cards and began to plan his day.

"What do you want to start with?"

"Math!"

So after breakfast, I gave him a math assignment (a page of three column subtraction and a math crossword puzzle) from one of his workbooks while I took a shower. He finished before I got out and played rescue helicopter while he waited for me to come back and mark his work. He got everything right.

"That was too easy."

"We'll try something harder next time. What's next?"

"Language Arts?"

I had him read me a couple of chapters from his favorite Magic Tree House Book, Midnight on the Moon. Afterwards, AJ played his "snack time" card, so we took a break for yogurt and celery sticks.

Then it was back to work. I gave AJ a writing assignment. I asked him to write a story of at least four sentences to explain what's happening in one of his Adventures of Pie cartoons. "Tell your own story. If you don't know how to spell something, just try it, and remember to write in sentences," I said. "Let me know when you're done." And I left the room.

A few minutes later he had come running in. He had finished his story. He did a great job with grammar and he only had two spelling errors ("catches" and "again"), but his writing was crooked and hard to read and all his Bs were capitalized.

"Great job. But I'm not sure I can read all of this. Let's try it again, this time writing on the lines and making sure you do capital letters at the beginning of sentences and proper nouns and not anywhere else." AJ was getting tired by this time, so we played a game. He rewrote one sentence and then I gave him something silly to do.

"Run to my room, do six sit-ups, find Daddy and tickle him, run to the family room and pretend to hit a baseball and catch it and then run back up here." I timed him. 26 seconds.

After several silly errands ("Bring me something blue, something shiny and something wet."), we were done.

"Gym class!" AJ announced. So he shot 10 free throws at his toy basketball hoop and did ten situps and ten pushups. Then it was time for lunch. AJ asked for PB&J.

"Do you want to make it yourself?"

"YEAH!" He pumped his fist in the air. Out came the bread and soy butter (we call it peanut butter -- it's simpler) and strawberry jelly. AJ made his work of art, carefully carving patterns in his peanut butter. And then he ate it. The whole thing without complaint. In this house, it is amazing.

After lunch I ran some errands while Mr. "Coach" Spy gave AJ some batting practice. Then they had art class in which they made flags for our new school.

"I think Mrs. Stein should be the mascot of our school," AJ had announced at lunch.

"Great idea. We'll be the Fightin' Pussycats. What shall we call our school?"

"How about The Spy School?" suggested Mr. Spy.

"Uh-uh." AJ shook his head.

"How about naming it after something around here? I used to go to a school called Hollow Tree because there was an old hollow tree there once."

AJ looked at me skeptically.

"What about The Great Lawn School?" suggested Mr. Spy.

"What about The Grassy Knoll School?" I quipped back.

"Plum Tree School?" I'm not sure who said it, but it was proposed and agreed upon, after inspecting the brilliant white plum tree currently bblooming in all its spring glory next to the porch. So Mr. Spy and AJ each made a flag. AJ's has a picture of a plum tree with the legend, "Eat all your plums at the Plum Tree School!" And Mr. Spy's reads "Wisdom, Courage, Honor, Snacks."

Next was science class in which AJ read part of The New How The Way Things Work and built a prototype machine out of K-Nex. "It's a stamping machine. You put the paper in here and the ink here and here's where it stamps it and it moves through and comes out the other side."

AJ practiced some Spanish flash cards and looked up some words for Spanish class. Then came music class.

"I want to make a flute."

"A flute?"

"A flute. I like flutes."

"Okay. Let's look it up." So onto the computer we went. And there they were, instructions for making a flute out of a cardboard tube. There was one problem. The instructions were in centimeters. Our rulers are all in inches. So it was back to math class as we learned about how to convert from centimeters to inches. Our flute didn't work, but we had fun making it.

"Maybe next time we can make one we can play."

"Maybe we can."

We ended our day of hard work with a movie (A Night at the Museum), complete with popcorn.

"Mommy, was Attila the Hun a real person?"

"Yes, he was."

"Can you tell me about him?"

"Well, let me see..."

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