Getting Geared Up for Puppy

The first weekend in March, we head back to Huntsville to pick up our puppy, and we can hardly wait.  A thick sense of expectation envelops the whole household!  We've already got his bed, crate, and numerous puppy toys, all awaiting their new owner.

The puppies were born in December, and the breeder, Leslie Gene Reed of KeelMtn Kennels, almost immediately set up a "puppycam."  So we've been able to watch the pups grow and change the whole time.  Needless to say, the puppycam is up on our computer from the time we come downstairs in the morning until Leslie and her husband, Bob, turn it off at night.  Here's her website in case you'd like to ooh and aah at photos of the pups; there's a link to the puppycam under the "Our Puppies" link.  Below is a shot I saved from the puppycam a few minutes ago when they were eating their supper.  Our pup is the dark one on the right.  We've named him Jasper, after the faithful spaniel in Daphne du Maurier's fantastic novel, Rebecca.

In the midst of all the excitement is a realization, at least for Himself and for me, of how our lives are going to change.  We've tried to explain to the girls a bit, but I think it's really something you just have to experience, on a deep and personal level.  If you leave your Polly Pocket on the floor, for example, she's going to be decapitated.

Leslie posted something on her website that speaks to this point particularly well.  She said I could share it, so here it is:

Q.  We're choosing a breed.  What kind of puppy will be calm, clean, and quiet?

A.  Ceramic.  Puppies are awful.  Their teeth, when not embedded in your person, are dismantling your property.  Meanwhile, the other end dribbles unspeakable fluids in unforgivable locations.  Nature equips puppies with overwhelming cuteness to keep us from killing them.

Isn't that fabulous?  And it doesn't even mention puppy breath, which I adore.

Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks: Emma

In the afterword of my edition of Jane Austen's Emma, Graham Hough of Christ's College, Cambridge, writes, "Emma has a good claim to be the most perfect of Jane Austen's novels, the one in which comedy and gravity, irony and sympathy, are most completely blended."  While the latter point may be true, I most humbly disagree with the former.

Characterization is crucial in Austen's novels; yet the main characters in Emma are not as developed as in other of her works.  Emma Woodhouse is not as complex or appealing to me as, say, Elizabeth Bennet or Elinor Dashwood.  Mr. Knightley, although likeable, remains static throughout with no great surprises or revelations.  Even the stock character of the young-man-well-thought-of-who-turns-out-to-be-duplicitous is not as dissolute or at the very least as questionable as he is in other of Austen's works.  Moreover, Emma and Mr. Knightley's relationship doesn't seem as real to me.  Austen's recurrent theme of marriage as a satisfactory union of equanimity for both parties fails to ring true in Emma.  Mr. Knightley and Emma never seem as equals to my mind; he is always her superior.

For me, Emma lacks a certain depth that's richly presented in other Austen novels I've read, such as Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion.  In these three works, the protagonist experiences an awakening of sorts, a period of growth that leads to a better understanding of herself and others.  Under Austen's skillful pen, this revelation is not epiphanic, but a slow transformation over the course of the narrative.  I found this element more subdued in Emma, which is disappointing.

Despite all its (to me) drawbacks, I still like Emma.  Reading it for yourself would not be at all a waste of time.  I appreciate both the humorous elements as well as the grave; and I completely enjoy the irony as only Austen can portray it.  But if I were stranded on a desert island, I'd choose to have another Austen novel or two with me.  (Along with a short-wave radio transmitter.  Why does no one ever think to have one of those, too?

Weekly Wrap-Up

This week did not go exactly as I'd planned (and I'm still waiting for one that does, by the way).  We've had some illness: I've had a scratchy throat and congestion, but nothing like this past fall, so I'm thankful for that.  Miss Priss, however, has had a bit of a sore throat and a cough.  It's the cough that worries me most.  She was very ill last winter; we spent several days at home with her hooked up to the nebulizer every three hours and a chest x-ray needed.  As a result, she now takes asthma meds every evening for nine months out of the year.  So when this cough started up, I grew a bit anxious.  For the past three days, she's been using Xopenex and the aero-chamber device.  She's under strict orders to lay low this weekend.  So with that and our mini-van needing to go to the mechanic (cracked manifold), Girl Scouts to get ready for, and a few other interruptions, we did not complete everything on our schedule.

That's the negative report.  But there are some positives as well (thank you, Lord!).  Most of our incomplete items are our family readings, which we can catch up on over the weekend.  And even though Miss Priss felt like staying on the couch more than usual, she was reading.  Admittedly, it was her free read she reached for mostly, but since I'm pleased with her choice, I felt okay about it.  Tiny Girl, who has typically only read the exact amount required, took off like a rocket this week.  She is now reading Ballet Shoes, she finished The Water Horse, and read in one day the Moonsilver #2 (which arrived from Paperbackswap.com)!  I was just the slightest bit skeptical about that last item, so I asked for some narration (which I don't do on free reads), and her answers satisfied my mind.

The girls' medieval notebooks are coming along a bit slower than I'd hoped, but that's okay.  They were all we worked on in history this past week.

Miss Priss made more progress in Latin.  I broke out the flash cards that came with the program (Latina Christiana) and also worked with her on verb personal endings.  Prior to this, we'd just been relying on the DVD instruction, but I realized that she needs a bit more study in addition to the DVD.  As I've said before, it's not her favorite subject, but after our lesson together, she felt more competent.  She enjoys feelings of accomplishment in her work, so it was a positive thing.

We're also making progress in math.  Tiny Girl is more natually adept at mathematics and enjoys her lessons.  This week in MEP, she was focusing on geometry, and actually caught on to the symmetrical patterns activities faster than I did! Miss Priss and I work more slowly through her math.  She gets frustrated easily, and I discovered the hard way that it's best to do less per day.  That way, we can focus on her "getting" the material and thus end the lesson on a high note.

This morning, I am more congested than I have been, alas.  I'm off to put the kettle on!

How CM Is Your Homeschool?

Like many of you (I'm just taking a wild guess here), I'm a member of several homeschooling Yahoo groups, some of which pose Questions of the Week.  Last week, a moderator asked, "How CM is your homeschool?"  (CM stands for both Charlotte Mason, a British educator, and also for the eponynmous educational philosophy she espoused.)  Since I describe myself as "CM-ish," this question got me to thinking.

To be honest, there are many aspects of CM that we just don't do or do a bit differently.  But I thought I'd look at what we actually do and see how it fits into the CM scheme.

For example, we enjoy and use living books and biographies, and I try to incorporate this into every subject.  They fit more naturally into some subjects, like history, than others, like math. We have enjoyed the Sir Cumference series for math, and I know there are other math-related literature resources.

My daughters narrate anything that can be narrated.  When they were younger, we did drawn narrations or little plays, but we don't any longer.  Aesop's fables were particularly good fodder for plays.  At the beginning of this school year, I would type up one of their history narrations per week, but I've gotten really slack about that.

The girls do copywork everyday from their literature selections. Sometimes I use AO's copywork (we're in Yr 3) and sometimes they select their own.  We also started English for the Thoughtful Child 1 this year, and we use spelling workbooks, which is not very CM. Every once in a while, we do studied dictation.  The girls enjoy it, but it seems to take a long time. We study the AO suggested poet for each term.

We do artist study on Friday, and we choose whomever we like.  Right now, we're on Van Gogh.  I'm more loose about composer study.  We listen to classical music in the car.  In the past, I've been more deliberate about this.

For Bible, they each have their own individual devotion and we have a family prayer time.

We do a bit of memory work.  Right now, they have each memorized a poem by Sara Teasdale.  At church, one child is memorizing the Apostles' Creed and the other Psalm 23 with their Sunday school classes.

For Shakespeare, I downloaded Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by Edith Nesbit on Librivox, and we listen to this in the car.  We really enjoy it.  They do not narrate Shakespeare at this point.  Even I have trouble with all the characters' names!

For foreign language, We started Rosetta Stone French 1 this year and it is superb.  My youngest likes it the least; she has trouble with the pronunciations and often gets frustrated.  Also, neither can do the writing part, so I do it for them.  They listen to the speaker and then tell me what to type.  Miss Priss and I began Latina Christiana this year. She doesn't LOVE it, but she likes that she is learning Latin, if that makes any sense.  She memorized the Table Blessing, and then taught it to Tiny Girl.

We use MEP for math, and I supplement with times table worksheets and quizzes.  Since I try to keep the lessons on the short side (a la CM), we often don't finish a full MEP lesson.  If I think the uncovered material is crucial, we just continue with it the next day.  Sometimes, we simply move on to the next lesson.

Where I fail at CM is in these areas: we do not do hymn/folk song study.  I'm not so fabulous at handicrafts, but am better at life skills.  The girls have a chore rotation that changes each week.  And, while they play outside a lot, I am really lax about nature walks and nature study.  I tried to do this in the beginning, and we all had nature notebooks and nice, new colored pencils, etc.  But it didn't seem to work for us.  So now our nature study mostly involves our backyard birding, which we really enjoy. (They also take a biology class at Timothy Ministry on Fridays with other homeschoolers at a local church.)  I don't concentrate on habit training, per se, but our chore chart helps in this area.

In considering this, I came to the conclusion that I am more of a "literary education" person than a strict CM homeschooler.  I rely heavily on AO, Catherine Levinson's books, and Gladys Hunt's books, sprinkled with suggestions from the Tanglewood curriculum, TWTM, other homeschoolers, Jenny Sockey's book, etc., to make our selections.  Basically, we read a lot.  But we also take time to do some other things.  This week, as are working on a medieval lapbook of a sort.

Regardless of my CM shortcomings, our homeschool truly reflects one of Charlotte Mason's basic tenets.  For us, education is not a particular set of guidelines or schedule; education is a life.

Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks (Week 4): Cry, the Beloved Country

I'd heard about this book for years but had never read it.  I even bought it for my dh, based on Gladys Hunt's review in her excellent book Honey for a Woman's Heart, wherein she cites this as one of her favorite novels.  Dh read it and liked it, and still I read other things.  Until last week.

Published in 1948, Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country was "like a shot heard round the world" (Hunt, p.53).  The story of two South African fathers, black pastor Reverend Stephen Kumalo and white farmer Mr. Jarvis, whose sons -- their only children -- die, this novel explores how we are all victims of racial injustice.

I was amazed at how successfully Paton, a white South African, depicted each father's story.  The introductory material explained how Paton, of British descent, worked as supervisor at Deipkloof, a large reform "school" for black boys aged nine to twenty-one and transformed this prison into a successful school and true reformatory.  He also worked for the liberal cause and wrote many articles, just like Arthur Jarvis in the novel, pointing to the disappearance of tribal and traditional family bonds within the native population as the underlying cause of crime in South Africa.  Paton's experience working in both communities enabled him to give honest voice to all his characters.

Two things bothered me about the novel, one of which was technical:  Paton utilized the introductory dash to mark dialogue, as opposed to quotation marks.  If the dialogue occurs within a paragraph, it is often difficult to distinguish from narrative comment.  Many times, I had to re-read portions to make sure what I'd read was, in fact, dialogue.  Since I am a fast reader, I found this distracting and irritating.  But it in no way dimmed my overall deep appreciation of the novel.  In fact, it may have slowed me down, made me consider more deeply, introduced an impediment to my reading speed in such a way that I paid more attention than I may have done otherwise.  Secondly, I wished that Paton had begun the story earlier in time, when Absolom Kumalo leaves his native village for the metropolis of Johannesburg, the first step in his path to destruction.  As it is, the story begins in medias res -- "in the middle of affairs" -- just like Greek and Roman epic poetry.  This is fitting, since some of Paton's writing reads like poetry.

Gladys Hunt deems Cry, the Beloved Country a "heart-breaking story of grace and forgiveness," and I concur.  This is a story that will stay with me for a long time.

Weekly Wrap-Up

We did things a bit differently this week.  Previously, I just kept a weekly schedule arranged by subject, not by day, i.e., all readings, assignments, etc., to be completed that week.  I was afraid that if I had a daily schedule, I'd feel like a failure if we didn't get EVERYTHING done for that day, so I stuck with a weekly schedule.  For some reason, though, this week I decided to print out a daily/weekly schedule for each of my daughters and for me.  And, shock of all shocks, it worked nicely.  We kept on task a bit more, and the girls had more "ownership" over their assignments.  Also, I discovered that certain subjects that tend to get overlooked or pushed aside ("we just don't have time this week for that"), like Latin or artist study, were scheduled AND studied.  We'll keep this going and see what happens.

We are wrapping up our study of the middle ages.  Although lapbooking/notebooking and others of that ilk deeply frighten me, each child is putting together a sort of medieval notebook.  We've only begun, but they are having a fun time with this project.  Since we don't do many hands-on projects (they give me hives), it's fun to shake things up a bit.  More on this later, because I'd like to share some of the resources we're using, in case anyone is interested.

We began English for the Thoughtful Child 1 this week.  We're only doing one lesson per week, but so far so good.  I also added in a parts of speech study.  I inherited a lot of books from my mother when she retired as a classroom teacher, such as a series of fun books relating to the parts of speech.  This week, the girls read Kites Fly High: A Book of Verbs.  They also each made a small verbs poster by cutting out verbs from some magazines.  (Hey, another project!  I guess I'm on a roll.)  We've studied nouns, verbs, and pronouns before, but it's good to reinforce.  We own the Schoolhouse Rock videos (multiplication and grammar), and they are not only educational but also a blast from my past.

Memory work is an area I have tended to overlook.  This week, though, the girls each selected a Sara Teasdale poem to memorize.  Also, Miss Priss is working on memorizing the Apostles' Creed for Sunday school recitation, and Tiny Girl is working on Psalm 23.  They have both memorized the Table Blessing in Latin, part of the Latina Christiana curriculum.

I'm finding that Miss Priss is open to reading some more materials on her own.  This is wonderful, since she will be in Ambleside Online Year 4 next year, which is quite a jump up from Year 3.  In fact, I am looking at Year 3.5 for Tiny Girl because I am wondering how she will do with Year 4.  I must say, though, it's so much easier with them in the same year!

Backyard Birding Bonanza

(Yes, I am well aware that's a silly title, but I liked the alliterations, and it's my blog, anyway.  Right?)

We have had lots of bird action at our feeders in the last few days!  I wasn't able to get good photos of many of our visitors, so I've only a few to share.  But what I have, I pass on for your viewing pleasure.

These Eastern bluebirds, which I adore, only visited for one day.  I don't have a bluebird house, so they don't hang around.  (I really need to get one!)  The vivid one on the right is, of course, the male, and there are two females as well.  I didn't notice the downy woodpecker in the upper left hand corner until after I uploaded the photo to my computer.  I couldn't have taken that shot on purpose in a million years!

Here's a closer shot of one of the females.  The male didn't stay long at all, so I was thankful to get a photo of him.

The downy woodpeckers love our homemade suet and eat it exclusively.  This is a female; males have a red splotch on the backs of their heads.  Downies and hairy woodpeckers look remarkably alike, but downies are 5 inches and hairies are 7 inches.  We get downies far more often than hairies.

 

We've had a lot of goldfinch action over the last several weeks.  They eat a bit of the black oil sunflower seeds, but prefer nyjer.  The males are starting to get their warm weather feathers in, that bright gold we associate with goldfinches.  Their numbers will increase as we inch toward spring.

I was really excited to get a passable photo of this brown thrasher, the state bird of Georgia.  Thrashers are typically quite shy and also groundfeeders, but this one (I'm assuming it's the one -- for all I know there are several who come!) visits at least once a day.  It likes the black oil sunflower seeds and my homemade suet.

I took about a zillion photos of this guy, and this is the only one that came close to sharing. But at least I have the one!  This is a male house finch.  He came alone for about two days, then his missus joined him.  I didn't get a photo of her.  Females are a grayish-brown and white, with a streaked breast and belly.  He ate a bit of nyjer seed, but they both preferred the black oil sunflower seed.

As usual, we had our share of titmice, Carolina wrens, male and female Eastern cardinals, American robins, Carolina chickadees.  But we also had a cute little brown-headed nuthatch, which was so fast I was never able to photograph it, and our first yellow-rumped warbler of the season.  Also, a female Eastern towhee has been munching on our black oil sunflower seed.  They are groundfeeders, and the male never ventures up to our tray feeder; but she has several times!  I've yet to get a decent photo of either of them.

As we get closer to spring, our feeders will become like fast food joints, and we'll be refilling them at least twice a week (sometimes more).  I'm looking forward to seeing the male goldfinches burst into color, and the arrival of the cedar waxwings, who stripped our holly tree of its berries in a matter of three days.

Backyard birding is one of our family's joys and is a great way to sneak in nature study with your children.  If you haven't done so before, have a go at the Great Backyard Bird Count this February (click on button at right for more info).  You may get hooked!