This is for Asher, my boy around the world. Ok actually, I have three boys around the world from me at this moment. (pause to weep) This is for my boy in Korea who tends to skim through my blog saying to himself "blah blah homeschool, blah blah food, blah blah…. Hey! 7 Quick Takes!"
(more links at Conversiondiary.com!)
I have to add an 8th take here. I cannot connect to the net reliably to save my life here so I uploaded the pics for this post to Instagram if you'd like to see them. (I can compose these posts on the phone but not add pics) I am starryskykim over there. Come join us! I hope we can fix the net at home, but it may not be meant to be. Solves the whole excess surfing danger!
1.
We got a second car – this one British specs. Which means I am on the other side now.
Can I say to all the people who said this would be easier – you were right. WAY right. We only lost one seatbelt in capacity but it is much smaller making maveuvering the back roads much easier. Visibility is much better over near the center of the road. And yes, after a certain number of weeks habit does kick in. I still hit the windshield (wind screen) wipers occasionally instead of the turn signal. I missed a fairly high percentage of exits on roundabouts today while driving friends to a larger city. But all in all – it's going better.
2.
We visited the ENT/Audiologist to discuss options for Brendan's ear. He was born with a mild microtia and we have been weighing the pro's and con's of surgery. (Still weighing.) But while he was in the audiology clinic I was fascinated by the decibel chart. Did you know that ranked right below the level at which you should not be exposed for more than 15 minutes you have "baby crying"? Ranked right by motorcycle and just below jack hammer and rock concert.
I knew it.
3.
Random British grocery factoid:
Eggs are not refrigerated in this country. They weren't in Germany either. This may totally wig out American friends. No one seems worse for wear however.
4.
Random British grocery bit #2: PG Tips come in cereal box sized packages here. They are not playin'.
5.
While shopping today I saw this awsome art work. It was a series of framed prints, the design created from reducing pages of classic lit and fitting every page of the book into the frame. Colin would love this. (do check this on Instagram because I have no other link. If you know where to find this to buy online please share!)
6.
I mentioned we have made a lot of pie this week. We have eaten a fair amount of pie this week but we also gave some away. Friends were moving into their new home this week as well and I wanted to bring them a meal. Great intention, but often requires more than one take around here. The afternoon of the planned dinner I realized the chicken had been frozen rather than in the fridge. After calculating the window of time I had to make the delivery I knew we weren't going to finish in time. We rainchecked til the next day which always makes me feel bad.
Next day we had the appt for B above. I traded kids back at the house and took others to the Shakespeare class, while moving food into and out of the oven. Then traded them back again for the football practice kids and grabbed the dinner Alannah had helped finish. We pulled it off. By late that evening I was a little tapped but happy. I woke up in the morning to find a neighbor at the door bringing cinnamon rolls. The circle of hospitality continues. It is so good to be part of it both in the blessing and being blessed.
And a PS to my neighbor: when I see you next I hope to have run a comb through my hair, be wearing an outfit with more redeeming attributes besides "4 Way stretch," and maybe even have waved a wand of mascara. No promises though. ; )
7.
On that note, a loaves and fishes story.
The other appts we had this week involved the Red Cross. Alannah has been doing her own discerning and determined that her biggest priority right now was not income but service and experience. All she ever wanted to do was help people. She is getting her chance. She is training with the Red Cross.
This whole thing got me thinking. For so many years I have had my hands more than full at home and physically just wasn't able to push any harder than I was. But God knew my heart. The children did too.
My scope has been necessarily home-based. It was not to remain there however because home is a training ground for future citizens of a bigger world who have now gone out to give back in the unique ways they are gifted. One has worked in a soup kitchen, one is coaching inner city kids, one is serving in the military, one in the Red Cross. Many small hands here with us are shaping pie crusts, making cards, saying prayers, and preparing for bigger things.
Moral of the story. You can multiply your efforts many times over. This is how. You give them your all, they pay it forward. You don't "spend" time with your kids. You invest it. It reaps major dividends.
So a big thank you to my big kids for taking your candle out into the world.
Light it up. Love you. : )
…the photographic journey is about discovering your vision, allowing it to evolve, change, and find expression…. It is not something that you find and come to terms with once and for all; it is something that changes and grows with you….
It is about what you - unique among billions – find beautiful, ugly, right, wrong, or harmonious in this world. And as you experience life your vision changes. The stories you want to tell, the things that resonate with you – they change and so does your vision.
– Within the Frame, David du Chemin
A similar message in Aliki's Marianthe this afternoon: "Some stories are told with words, and others with pictures."
It all has me thinking about purpose, clarity, focus, and articulation.
And I often think better in pictures.
I have told this story, I'm sure, that I didn't expect to have boys. Maybe one. Someday. After girls. Surely girls would be first. I knew girls. Colin was born before sonograms could accurately predict gender and the military hospital forbid technicians from hazarding a guess. We were told not to even ask. We didn't. I knew anyway. It was a girl. It had to be.
I knew girls.
The male species was another story. There weren't a lot of them in my early life and I had a hard time picturing what it was you were supposed to do with them. I had cared for a few little boys as a babysitter, but I wasn't involved with footballs and bugs and wrestling. Loooooong (and loud) discussions about sports statistics and cars were completely foreign to me. Me, with my collection of Victoriana, my fondness for classical music and coordinating table linens. Maybe I wasn't sure where I would fit in there.
That anxiety fell away as the first blue blanket filled my arms. And then another. And another. Six all said, in two groups of three's. A mighty band of brothers who have run circles around me for a lot of years. They are loud. They are messy. Left five minutes in the same room, they are inevitably tumbling over the edge of the sofa or playing keepaway. They eat. A lot. I know this because I find apple cores and pop cans behind beds and on the bathroom windowsill.
They also send me music for my ipod when they hear something they think I might like. They suggest books or movies because the heroine "is just like you, Mom." They fix my phone app's and tell me how to figure out my computer. In a given day I have discussed how to know you are love, how we to decide how to vote, how to find the area of a triangle, and how to tie a shoe – all with equal gusto and sincerity – with one or another of them.
So I don't have to wonder anymore about how I fit into their world. They showed me.
Right in the middle. : )
You don't raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they'll turn out to be heroes, even if it's just in your own eyes.
~Walter M. Schirra, Sr.
To resume our history of the decline: the beginning of the end of the formal study of the Greeks arrived in the 1960's. Classics – lonely amo, amas, amat in the carrel, Demosthenes' hokey sermons on courage and sacrifice, Livy's advice to fight the good war – became worse than irrelevant. The entire package was viewed as part of the reactionary establishment. It had to be jettisoned. Classics was ancient, it was dominated by 'old' white males, it was time-consuming and difficult. So much page-turning, so many "no's" and "don'ts", and "stop-its." Absolutes, standards, memorization, and traditional values had no place on a campus where modernity, relevance, and ideology were the new mantras; to say as much publicly brought self-affirmation and a sense of revolutionary commitment.
University administrators caved in to the complaints of young often self-righteous students. Curricular 'reform' followed, resulting in the virtual abandonment of core courses – important, basic classes which required students to gain at least some familiarity with the literature, grammar, philosophy, history, and language of Classical study. (Even the Vatican gave in, dumping latin as the Church's universal language.) Professional 'educators' and social scientists leaped into the vacuum, spreading therapeutics through the university, metastasizing their "I'm growing" and "Tell us about yourself" like cancer cells in a weakened system. The seeds of the "feel-good" curriculum were planted, the crops of which we are harvesting in today's pressing concern for institutionally imposed self-esteem. This new, ultra-sensitive curriculum… ran directly counter to Greek wisdom.
Students of this new age, no longer either compelled to memorize irregular comparative adjectives or eager to soak up the corny wisdom of Sophoclean tragedy, now needed to be enticed back into the traditional classroom. Scholars were forced to win back their students and to convert the now preoccupied public to their own particular enclaves.
– Who Killed Homer? Victor Hanson and John Heath
An upside to moving an imposing volume of books all over the planet is to unearth hidden gems in your home library. I have acquired a good many more books than I've had time to read in the past couple decades. It is a great pleasure to dig into them now, with not much more time perhaps, but a somewhat clearer head. Sleeping through the night – at least more often – does that for you. ; D
I will confess I do not read latin and Greek in the original, however as the university went, so went the lower schools. The same fallout seems to have been experienced in trickle down fashion right through the grades which I do deal with daily. This book coincided with Colin, Alannah, and I watching Men Who Stare at Goats, which was equal parts hysterical and tragic to watch as a child of the 70's. They combined to leave me with a perpetual head shake and occasional grumble to myself this past week.
While the answer is not a joyless 'cracking down' I do feel that viewing absolutes and rigor differently is in order. Re-establishing a truth and rigor-based (versus an emotions-based) curriculum right here at home is a goal worthy of consideration lest we, too, find ourselves in a position of needing to entice our own students as we head 'back to school' shortly.
The bigger issue is the long term effect of relaxation of standards in our self-esteem. I thought of that over and over while reading Emma.
"Emma was sorry… to be always doing more than she wished, and less than she ought! Why she did not like Jane Fairfax might be a difficult question to answer; Mr. Knightley had once told her it was because she saw in her the really accomplished young woman, which she wanted to be thought herself, and though the accusation had been eagerly refuted at the time, there were moments of self-examination in which her conscience could not quite acquit her."
How many of us are like Emma today it seems: clever and just well-read enough to appreciate education, but not disciplined enough to have truly acquired academic excellence. We are articulate, versus substantial. We like to think about thinking much as we like to think about exercise, nutrition, theology, teaching, homemaking, or any number of other topics far better than actually digging into the doing of them, which is always conserably less romantic.
These are the things I have been chewing on lately, particularly as we prepare for another year of learning. (and travel and sports and arts…) It is always daunting initially, looking at the year ahead and all we hope to accomplish, all we really must fit in. Step by step and day by day we proceed and, by the grace of God, succeed more often than not. Having these reminders helps.
It's been an eclectic summer of Grace Livingston Hill, Beverly Cleary, and Jane Austen on one hand. Hanson, Raymond Moore, and a handful of social science titles on the other.
Brain is full. : )
That best describes our past month largely unplugged.We have a few more days until our regular internet connection is established. Meanwhile we have been using a mobile broadband stick which has allowed us a few minutes each to check mail, look up train/plane schedules, google maps, and to check in with our son in Korea. It has been a mixed blessing.
My Flickr and photography networks are sorely missed. Sorely missed. I have used up a few of my minutes downloading more tutorials to work through offline which greatly inspires and stretches my imagination, hones some skills. On the flipside there were also some deeply embittered bloggers, right where we left them weeks ago, having found new subjects to attack, fixate, and expound upon. I don't miss that. As Jane Eyre says,
“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
"Saying nothing at all might be the kindest thing you can do." – Andrew Schultz
I still haven't had a moment to figure out a new link share but this article is worth a read if you are a blogger. We tend to greatly overestimate our own opinions as well as others' need to hear them. ; )
"What is a brad?" Kieran was reading the directions in his craft book and puzzled over the unfamiliar word. I explained it was a little brass fastener that would make the paper doll's joints bend. "Do we have any?" he wanted to know. We did. That was all he wanted to know. He had spotted this project and he was sure his little sisters would love it.
He was right.
I remember standing in the driveway chatting with the neighbors many years ago. We had just learned we were expecting our fourth child. The beautiful blonde nurse across the street was flabbergasted. "Don't you want the best things for your kids?" she asked rhetorically feeling, as she did, that there would not have been a third much less a fourth if we did.
In fact I wanted the very best. I wanted them to have trusted friends. I wanted them to have good advice and a helping hand. I wanted them to have a sympathetic comrade, one so familiar he knew exactly what would make your day – and then set out to do just that.
Watching Kieran invest hours in his younger brothers and sisters – as his older brothers and sisters have done for him – I feel pretty sure they've got that.
I, who have no sisters or brothers, look with some degree of innocent envy on those who may be said to be born to friends.
James Boswell
Starry Sky Journal 