Do parasites count as science?

Monday threw us a curve ball.

I had been trying since the previous Friday to get a doctor's appointment for a suspected case of poison ivy that was making its way through the family.

So on Monday -- in the midst of what was shaping up to be a smooth morning of home school -- I finally got a phone call about an open appointment.

We had to be there as soon as possible.

To avoid the risk of losing the appointment and waiting till who-knows-when to get some advice on how to nix the itching, I decided to postpone the rest of our school day in favor of a trip to the urgent care clinic -- all of the way across town.

So off we went, and I'm sure you know the general lay of the land when it comes to these types of appointments ...

We waited for more than an hour to see the physician.

We waited at least another 15 minutes in the exam room, where I lined up three beleaguered kiddos on the exam table and put on a circus act for them using latex-glove balloons and tongue-depressor stick puppets, until finally the doctor arrived.

Turns out, it's scabies not poison ivy. Yeah, scabies. In a word: gross.

Following the diagnosis, more waiting (and scratching) in the waiting room for a prescription, then lunch, then two trips to the pharmacy.

When we got home at long last, the day was shot.

We were in no shape to resume the school day, and someone had to make dinner and tackle the problem of sanitizing the mounds and mounds of linens that had potentially been infiltrated by microscopic parasites.

Indeed, life with small children is full of unexpected trips to the doctor's office, even when we're not in the throes of cold and flu season.

But in our new world of school-at-home, it's up to me to make up for the missed learning opportunities that result from uprooting the students and carting them to the doctor.

There's no teacher to catch them up to speed when they return to class. I have to do that, and it's work -- work that interrupts my own free time, and I don't have a lot of that these days.

(Grumble. Sigh.)

But instead of staying up late trying to find a way to work our missed lessons into the rest of the school week, I decided to look at our unexpected day away from the books as a string of unorthodox learning opportunities.

The day hadn't been a total wash, had it? I mean, we had spent the entire day together, tackling some important issues?

For example, there were some fine lessons in historic 1990s pop culture to be learned from the three episodes of "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air" Liliana and Calvin kept glued to in the urgent-care waiting room.

And then, on the car ride home, I muddled through some decent off-the-cuff answers to:

"Mama, how does the gas get into the gas pump?" and "How does that crane pick heavy things up?"

And, hey, we learned what parasitic organisms are and how they use our bodies for food and warmth to survive. Doesn't that loosely fall into this week's science unit on habitats?

Each day may not be full of great learning exercises, but if I can skew my view of school just a little, and look beyond the curriculum I've carefully planned out, I might find a way to be OK with a few unexcused absences.

And maybe, just maybe, these students of mine will have learned something in spite of (or perhaps because of) life's little interruptions.

P.S. Are you feeling itchy yet? I am.