Field Day Preparations

Our Classical Conversations group is having a Field Day soon. 

I'm running the organized games. 

We're planning the three-legged race, potato sack race, tug of war, and the parachute games. 

One of the parachute games is called "scramble the eggs." 

Everyone holds and shakes the parachute, causing ripples, then I add the eggs to the middle and if we shake hard enough, the eggs really fly! 

The colors are awesome! 

Every Easter, I just save the Easter eggs the girls bring home from egg hunts and/or gift baskets or church to replenish the stock. 

But to get the eggs to fly really well, they have to be put together. This makes them "lighter." Otherwise, the separate pieces tend to stick together and get "heavier." 

So it was a labor of love, but we matched all the egg tops and bottoms. 

We also did away with broken pieces and the parts that didn't have mates. 

Our Robin

 It started last spring-summer. 

This robin would flutter up to our front window, hitting its beak on the glass, knock-knock-knocking every morning. 

At first, I'm sure the robin thought he was attacking another bird in its reflection. 

But eventually, since we'd always come running to see the robin and say, "Hello!," we trained the bird to expect us, even want us. 

He'd knock until we'd come to the window, then he'd fly a little ways away into the yard, and forage until we came to another window looking for him. 

This routine was repeated fifty or more times last year. 

Just a few days ago, I heard the same knock-knock-knock on that same window. 

The robin was back! 

Now, daily he comes to say, "Hello!" 

I asked Avril the other day, "Which book was your favorite this year of Challenge A?" 

She said without hesitation, "The Secret Garden."

That makes our robin friend even more special.  

It's like we're in the storybook.  

Looking Back at Old ANIs and Essays

I saved her big sister’s Lost Tools of Writing ANI charts and essays from when Norah, now Challenge 4, was in Challenge A. All year, Avril, in Challenge A, doing her first year of Lost Tools, has been quietly taking them down and reading them as she works through her own issues and essays in all the same books. It’s almost like she’s been time traveling back to talk to Norah when was twelve-thirteen. Sometimes she laughs at her big sister’s thinking and writing. But I warn her that Adele will be reading her ANIs and essays someday, too. This has been a fun, unexpected, sweet, special part of this school year.

Challenge 4 Final Weeks

Today my Challenge 4 class drew a mural on the church chalkboard-wall during their lunch break. I snapped a pic before we headed back to class for the rest of the day.

There are so, so many events coming these final weeks of Challenge 4.  There's Protocol, Blue Book, Thesis Presentation and Defense, and finally, Graduation! There's lots of planning and preparation going on. We all feel a bit anxious about all that's coming, but we're also excited.  

The Lord bless and protect us through the coming weeks!

A Defense of Rote Memorization

A few days after all the Memory Master testing was complete, it was Sunday morning, and the Pastor mentioned the countries in the Bible passage we were reading in church. 

He said something like, "If you are familiar with the Mediterranean..." 

Adele's eyes lit up and twinkled as she looked and me and we shared a moment of recognition. 

She had grown very familiar with the Mediterranean from reviewing geography facts for Memory Masters testing. 

On Wednesday, she ran into the kitchen, breathless. 

She's reading Anne of Green Gables right now. 

"Mom! This book is set in Nova Scotia! Nova Scotia! I know where that is!" she panted. 

She laughed in delight, and I laughed, too. 

She put hundreds of facts to memory and those facts keep coming to life for her. 

But there are leading homeschool voices who continually condemn the rote memorization of hundreds of facts, and they do so earnestly.

But I earnestly have to disagree with them and speak as I actually find after almost ten years of using rote memorization in our homeschool.  

This is not a complete and total Grandgrind situation. 

And that is never the case where the Holy Spirit is involved. 

Dead, dry facts we take real trouble to actually memorize never stay dead or dry or merely fact for long. 

Our healthy, active, imaginative minds go to work on the material we give them, making connections with what we've merely memorized for the moment and what we already know and understand and love. 

What works with poems, Psalms, hymns, and stories, also works with mere facts. 

By memorizing these, we give our minds a term or a phrase or a statement or a series of statements or images or symbols to hold onto. 

Then our minds, naturally, go to work upon this content from all sides. 

Understanding comes gradually usually, but sometime it comes all at once. 

Once understanding comes love grows exponentially. 

Do you know how many times understanding will flood my mind as I stand at the kitchen sink washing dishes, because my mind has made a connection about an abstract math formula stored inside my head?

I memorize formulas by rote with my kids. 

And this is just as dreadful and awful as it sounds... but only at first.  

Experience keeps demonstrating that memorizing a fact means I can think about it at leisure, because I carry it with me everywhere, because it is stored in my mind. 

I can consider the relationships of variables in a formula and even rearrange the variables... 

And understanding comes gradually sometimes, but sometimes all at once! 

And understanding is followed by wonder, awe, and worship. 

And I find that I begin to truly love math. 

This may actually be because now that I have memorized enough math, I can study math artifacts in my mind at my leisure.  

Putting dry, dead facts into an already living, active mind does not snuff out a mind's fire. 

On the contrary, I find it is more like strategically throwing aged wood on a fire already burning.

It only burns hotter and brighter!  

The person who memorizes hundreds of facts in every subject and grows in constant understanding of those facts can care about even more in the end of their education than they ever would otherwise. 

Why can't a faculty of memorization be built deliberately? 

Why can't human beings strategically furnish their minds with all manner of beautiful artifacts, not just Scripture or poetry, but also history dates and timelines?

My oldest daughter loves translating Virgil, but she could not have gotten to the point of so much love of Latin without actually memorizing those meaningless (at first) noun endings. 

She hated Latin because of all the drilling, all that dry, boring, tedious memorization of facts.  

She was exactly like CS Lewis's schoolboy learning Greek grammar in The Weight of Glory.

She hated it at first and only worked because she was compelled to do so. 

But, slowly, joy crept in on the "mere drudgery" of her Latin studies, and just as Lewis describes, "poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience." 

Now I do not have to make her study Latin. 

She plans her own translation projects, builds her own language, makes her own plans to learn Greek. 

Adults know from experience that reading the same poem every morning for a month may seem, at first, routine, rote, meaningless, and they read the poem on purpose to memorize it. 

They know that gradually or even in a flash, the content will come alive for them. 

A phrase jumps out or comes to them as they pray or as they speak with a friend or as they behold a landscape. 

It is the same with hundreds of mere facts. 

No facts stay lifeless long in this world where the Holy Spirit is constantly at work. 

God breaths Spirit into the form of the words or symbols and the words, even the words of merest fact, come alive and we behold God's glory!   

Memory Master Cycle 1

Adele passed her tutor and director proofs! She's an official Memory Master for Cycle 1! 

You can see the cards her friends made and her director gave her on the morning of the final tests. 

I'm very thankful for the people who helped us make this possible, especially our children's pastor Greg, who gave Adele her second proof.

  

Easter 2022

We went to church early. Our gracious neighbors always include us in their family's annual Easter egg hunt, and we stayed for a dinner with them of homemade authentic Italian foods including lasagna and eggplant rollatini. I brought over my parachute and lead the grandkids in some games.  The girls came home with an abundance of candy- and even cash! (We have the best neighbors.) We are very humbled and thankful that they would include us in their family celebrations.  

Annual Spring Clean-Up

We always pick a Saturday and work together to clean out the flower beds and put down new mulch in spring. Doing this with kids was rough at first, but we've gotten better each year. This year, the kids actually worked cheerfully and without complaint. The forget-me-nots we planted when we buried our pet button quail after she died have multiplied and now, they are literally covering the front yard. The grape hyacinths are blooming, along with the first dandelions, so Adele made the first bouquet of the season. The tiny oreganos that line our flower beds are also coming back to life now, so as we racked the beds, their fragrances filled the warm air around us. It's still too early to plant any annuals besides pansies, so we usually wait until Mother's Day at least, if not all the way till Memorial Day, to choose flowers for the pots on the decks. 

21st Anniversary

Dwayne and I celebrated our 21st Anniversary last week. Now we’ve been married as long as we were alive before we we’re married. The last few years are not Instagram worthy. God knows the unfiltered truth; and we are no longer under any delusions about ourselves, which is a grace in itself. Turns out we are just average, maybe even wicked. We’re no exceptions; we need God’s grace, maybe even desperately. But marriage is a good, it is a constant, unrelenting grace, maybe especially when it isn’t easy. In the words of Andrew Peterson, “When I lose my way, find me. When I loose loves chains, bind me. At the end of all my faith, till the end of all my days, when I forget my name, remind me.”

Memory Master 2nd Adult Proof

One of our beloved friends and children's pastors, Pastor Flower, agreed to give Adele her second adult proof for Memory Masters. So my husband took Adele and they all met up for breakfast at Mothership, a bakery and cafe also owned by another dear friend from church. They had breakfast and then Pastor Flower sat aside with Adele and gave her her second Memory Masters proof/ test. This is the one after the parent proof, but before the tutor and director proofs. Adele passed! Dwayne bought home handmade treats from Mothership, and we cut them into bite sized portions and shared them in celebration. 

Composition Notebooks

Avril: Mom, how many composition notebooks do you think I can buy with my birthday money?

Me: How much do you have?

Avril: Thirty dollars

Me: They're available at the Dollar Store, so you could certainly get more than twenty. 

Avril: Will you take all my birthday money and buy me composition notebooks? I'd like the write stories in them. 

Me: Sure!  

Nature Sketching

We took another walk around Putnam Park the other day. 

This time, we took our sketchpads and found a picnic table to sit and sketch. It's not easy! 

My Sewing Tin

In December, I started hand-sewing binding on a lap quilt I had made some years before. 

To store my thread, needle, pins, etc., I took up one of the decorative Christmas tins we had out with all the other Christmas decor. 

I never liked this tin much, honestly. 

It was given by a friend, held a gift from that dear friend, so in a way, the tin was also a gift from that dear friend. 

I'm desperately sentimental, so I have a difficult time ridding myself of anything given to me in love. 

So I kept the tin out of obligation even though I had an almost visceral response to it's ugliness, at least at first. 

But this last Christmas, I found this tin was just the right size for my hand-sewing supplies. 

After Christmas, I just left my sewing supplies in there beside my chair for convenience sake. 

Months went by. The quilt is still "in-process," so the sewing supplies remain there. 

The other day, one daughter shouts from the kitchen where we both are to another daughter in the living room, "Will you bring me the 'Ho-Ho-Ho' tin?!"

The other daughter shouts back from the living room, "Sure!!"

A few moments later, the other daughter comes in and hands this to the one daughter who asked for it. 

The one daughter proceeds to take out what she needs for the project she's working on like nothing significant had even happened. 

I laughed out loud.  

I had inadvertently created a sewing kit! 

And I made it out of an old tin! 

I'm just like every other old lady sense the dawn of time!  

Only I have to say, my sewing kit is not a generic "cookie tin" or "Mom's sewing kit."

No. No. No. 

It is called the "'Ho-Ho-Ho' tin." 

All three Ho's are spoken out in turn.  

That's a kind of perfection you can't even plan! 

You've just got to live your way into it. 

I love my daughters! 

I love what they call this tin! 

And now I love this tin! 

Yards of Moss

My yard has yards and yards of mosses. 

I'm always commenting on this, I know.

But that's because I'm always looking at it and glorying over it. 

Large swaths of green mosses grow out over the rocky hillside our home is built on. 

Each morning looks like a bunch of green cloths, quilts, and comforters were just left pilled up on the ground around the rocks after some wood nymphs and driads fell into a stupor after dancing or something. 

Also, the tiniest and most delicate clumps of contrasting greens and textures grow in, on, and over all the rocks coming right up to our front door. 

I get to live in a fairy garden, basically. 

I don't even have to leave my house to study it's details throughout the day; I just have to walk up to any front window and look while I sip coffee. 

It's a gift from The Almighty, truly, a garden tended for me by the natural processes at work all around my house. 

Moss may be my greatest consolation for having to live in New England, something I am sure is God's will, but something that remains a hardship even after decades, because of the climate and the culture, and something that remains a mystery, because of the hardships. 

Nevertheless, "Where else could so much moss grow?" I ask myself. 

One hardly ever gets "too hot" even in the fullest sun here. Thus the moss everywhere...

So a body can sit for hours with the cool, green moss under her, with the golden sun shining down on her, and the bright blue sky above her...

And I confess, it's a particular glory all it's own.

  

Memory Master Review/ Nature Walk

Adele and I took another nature walk, reciting her Foundations Memory Work as we stepped. Adele is still practicing so she can try to pass the second proof (test) for Memory Masters, which is coming up. It's actually lovely to have something to sing and talk and even laugh about as we walk. 

We saw how the same things along the path have changed since last time we passed. And it's lovely to get distracted at least a hundred times by beautiful things along the way. Her eyes are so much better than mine! 

She found an owlet pellet and we took little sticks and pulled it apart right there on the path. Then she found an empty acorn top to use as a bowl for carrying the bones home. 

This bowl of bones is downstairs now with all the other items in our nature collection. We've got a few shelves in the basement for these "treasures." We've got rocks, shells, birds nests, feathers, etc. And we get more everyday. Sometimes I wonder how much outside can come inside before there's no more outside to bring inside. 

Earlier this year in Foundations, Adele dissected an owl pellet in class. And she and her sister did it at least once a few years before that, too, since CC cycles through the same material in the early years. So Adele could already identify what sort of bones they were. "That's a jaw bone!" she exclaimed, etc. 

I'm enjoying these spring moments with my youngest scholar and naturalist. 

 

Graduation Announcements

We sent out graduation announcements today! For practice driving, I made Norah drive to the post office for the stamps and mailing. I didn't scream or cringe once while she drove us. So either she's getting better at driving, or I am getting better at dealing with her driving. Maybe it's both. On the way home, we went through Dunkin's drive-through for coffee, of course. One must to learn to navigate through a Dunkin drive through for life. And we also went to the new Christian book store in town, where I got her a cross pin for her book bag. Note: Maybe it's not actually a new book store, but we'd only just heard about it. I'm enjoying these moments with my sweetheart before she takes off to college with that old book bag and all its pins in the fall. 

Beautiful Patchwork

The oldest had a tear in her favorite flannel, so she created a beautiful patch with cross stitch fabric and embroidery thread. She's self-taught, basically, using cross-stitch and needlework books and You Tube videos and years of practice on other projects and trial and error. Now it's an even more beloved flannel! 

Reading To Each Other

My middle daughter has read aloud to her little sister for years. They share a room with bunk beds, so the middle reads to the youngest from the top bunk every morning and night. If it's a leisurely day, they will keep on reading on the couch through the day. But today I came in the room to find the youngest reading to the middle! They rediscovered the little book The Gods Must Be Angry, an old Sonlight core book from many, many, many years ago, as they organized their shelves today, so the youngest decided to read it during her daily quiet reading time. But as it started getting good, the youngest narrated a bit of it to her sister, then the middle one asked her to just read it aloud while she did her geography drawings for Challenge A. These moments just happen naturally living and learning together. 

Processing Beeswax

I'm still processing all the beeswax left over from our beehive. (Sadly, our bees died this last winter.)

I'd call processing wax a labor of love, but the only thing I am experiencing right now is the labor. 

I have decided to forgo beekeeping this summer.

I'm a little heartsick and discouraged that our bees died. 

Even so, it will be a real loss not to try again right away, because we get so much joy and wonder upon opening the hive and admiring the bees and their labors. 

But this summer's calendar is already filled up with travel, even more than last summer. 

And I know from my difficulties with traveling and managing hive checks last summer that it will be even harder to do it all this summer.  

We are planning more camping trips, the regular trips to Dwayne's parents and my Mom's, and we need more travel time, especially, to move and settle a beloved daughter in another state. She starts college in the fall. 

So putting beekeeping on hold is probably the wisest thing to do.  

We'll still attend beekeeping club meetings when the times work for us. 

We'll keep learning.

I'm planning to clean and sell my Layens hive. 

I'll also sell some of my excess equipment. 

I may take the time to put a fresh coat of paint on my Langstroth and I'll burn it out, so it's good and ready for the next spring. 

Maybe I'll be ready to order a new batch of bees in one year's time. 

Diagon Ally in Legos

One girl has a birthday in late March; the other has a birthday in early April, so they combined their Lego allowances this year and went in on a much larger Lego set than either would have been allowed on her own. 

Their dad and I were proud of their creative deal-making. 

They explained at dinner last night that they have built approximately one-half of the set since Avril's birthday. Now they will build the second half after Adele's birthday. 

I love their sweet thoughtfulnesses of one another, making deliberate efforts to keep the situation equitable. 

And praise God, they seem to already comprehend the reality that sharing joys makes joy more full for all. 

The Orchardman's Daughter

I met the orchardman's daughter.

A young woman in her twenties;

Her father had been steward forty years!

So, naturally, she'd been there 

All her life. We spoke at length.

She said more than she knew, 

And knew so much more than she could say.

The Holy Spirit urged me to ask her then, 

Hinted that He'd sent her for the purpose,

So I merely mentioned the apple blossoms 

Then she took on most reverent tones, 

Severe, even. She warned: 

No one can enter the orchard then! 

If the blooms are disturbed, 

Even by a strong enough breeze, 

All fruit is lost, even hope of fruit. 

We guard the orchard night and day.

I knew she'd say this, 

And in just that way, 

So I sent a quiet kiss Heavenward. 

For I am an Orchardman's daughter, too. 

This home is His high-walled garden,  

These daughters are His trees. 

I merely steward the place.

There will be glory and beauty for Him, 

And fruit enough for the masses.

See! Already they bloom!  

Only wait, He tells me,

And for now, guard them diligently. 

Adele's 10th Birthday

It's her tenth birthday, but Adele made us the cards. Her big sisters helped with spelling.

After a quick breakfast, Dwayne and I started the day with grocery shopping. We needed the spaghetti noodles for Adele's birthday dinner, among other things. 

When we got home from grocery shopping, we honked from inside the garage, something we always do, and the girls always come running down to help unload. They like to see what we've bought. 

Norah and her dad went back out a little later. She has to practice driving in preparation for taking her driving test.  So they took the truck and got several bags of mulch. It's that time of year. 

After cleaning while also doing laundry while also listening to some of The Literary Life's Annual Conference, Adele and I went out for a walk. We took her Foundations Memory Work (on little flashcards and one trivium table.) We walked 2.5 miles down our street and around our nearby Putnam Park, drilling her memory work to the rhythm of our steps. We sat on a picnic table by the pond to do the geography and work with the maps. 

We let ourselves get properly distracted at least one hundred times by all the lovely things around us. The pictures show three views of the same tree as I got closer and closer and closer. 

Our very long driveway is lined with rocks and mosses.  Honestly, it's one of my favorite places in the entire world. The girls like to pretend there's a throne in the middle of this particular group of rocks. Do you see it? 

Adele and I picked this dead branch up off the road and the beauty of it flamed out at me like "shining from hook fool" in the words of Hopkins. Isn't it gorgeous covered in various fungi and mold? I really need to get my field guides out and start learning how to identify these beautiful, tiny things. 

I love walking with Adele, because her young eyes see tiny blooms I'd never see otherwise. 

We said these flowers look like they are still wrapped up in their winter fleeces. It is lovely to come out and bask in the spring sunshine, but it is definitely still a bit chilly. We, too, had to have our fleeces on. 

We admired a blue bird on one of the trees along our driveway for a long time. We gazed up at him, and naturally, couldn't help but sing His praises. The blue on his head matched the sky behind him, the white on his face and belly matched the puffy clouds blowing by in the sky, and the brown on his neck matched all the tree branches under and around him; He made a perfect picture. We've never had a blue bird in our yard, so we asked him outright and out loud to stay. 

With the flowers are braving the still-cold to come out into the sun, and birds flitting and singing all around us, and smells of thawing ground everywhere, it all goes right along with CS Lewis's "Love's as warm as tears" that was in today's reading for Malcolm Guite's Waiting on the Word:

Love's as fresh as spring,

    Love is spring:

Bird-song in the air, 

Cool smells in a wood, 

Whispering 'Dare! Dare!'

To sap, to blood, 

Telling, 'Ease, safety, rest,

Are good; not best.'

The daffodils in our yard are blooming. I'm always so thankful that the previous owner took the trouble to plant them along the front walkways. 

For her birthday meal, Adele wanted spaghetti; It's her favorite. And she asked to help make it. She's my "kitchen helper," and I just love working with her in the kitchen.  

Dwayne made the cookies we needed for Adele's special birthday dessert. 

The girls spent some of their free time cross-stitching, drawing, and watching a "how-to croquet" video. Avril came upstairs after attempting to croquet and said, "I admit defeat," throwing a ball of yarn and her hooks down on the kitchen table. We shared a laugh. 

Adele wanted Smores on chocolate chip cookies instead of graham crackers, so Dwayne made a fire with the last of our wood for the season, and we put down an old quilt to protect my rug on the floor from embers and melted chocolate. We toasted marshmallows right in the fire place. (We never, ever eat in the living room!) But it felt properly celebratory to throw off propriety in order to Adele's vision happen. 

Adele got the idea for this special dessert from a book she picked up at the annual library book sale. She's actually got several desserts in this book marked, and I find her studying this book intently often, which just makes me laugh to myself. So it was rewarding to finally let her make one of the desserts in it.