Special Helper

It's Election Day -- if you're in the U.S., have you voted?

Since our county uses schools for polling places, they give the kids the day off.  But of course we don't get the day off from work, so I've got Penny with me at work today.  (Or as I said in the weekly meeting, "my special helper".)

At least daycare is still open.  Next week for Veteran's Day, both schools are closed, so Matt's going to have to take the day off to watch them.

Penny loves to come to work with me.  I have to assume it's the novelty of it, since there really isn't anything fun to do here.  She usually sits on the far side of my desk and draws pictures on printer paper with my highlighters.  This time, I said something about bringing her homework with us so she could finish it, and she got it into her head that she needed to replicate an entire day of schoolwork, so she brought paper to write on and her notebooks and everything.  Sounds great to me!

Except of course that we got here and pulled out her notebook for her to work on her vocabulary sentences, and I realized we left the piece of paper with the words on it at home.  So we don't know what words she's supposed to be working on.  Sigh.

(I threw out a quick email to her teacher -- maybe, since they're working today, she'll get it and can send the words back to me.  If not, I'm planning to run out at lunchtime anyway to get my allergy shot, so maybe we can swing by the house on our way back and find the list.)

Right now, she is doing "writing work", which means that I give her a topic, and she writes a sentence about it.  She also brought several books to read, and I packed a worksheet I found that she hadn't finished.  If I'd thought about it, I might have brought some other workbooks we have.  Oh, well, something to remember for next time -- there's a ridiculous number of student holidays, so this is hardly the last time this year Penny will be coming to work with me.

And when doing "school" work palls, I've got some movies on my iPod... and there's always the old printer paper and highlighters standby.

(Still, I don't expect to get much work done today.)