Happy 4th of July!

Any celebrating we do will be low-key, since at least one of us will be exhausted. (And I don’t just mean me, even though I was up til after 1:30 reading Mansfield Park and then woke up around 6:45 and couldn’t go back to sleep.)

We pick up our girl from the bus today, and in her honor I have made potato salad (her favorite — tiny potatoes from the farmers market, so small they don’t have to be cut), and I may make — gasp! — jello. My girls have expressed an interest in jello, which I never make for some reason.

We are unlike to make it to fireworks, so please enjoy some on our behalf.

Recent Reading

Mostly I have been visiting the Sen Lin Hu website, thinking, post another damn picture of my daughter will you!

Of course she has been too busy to write, so I have no idea how she is or what she’s doing, except that if she were injured or having an asthma attack they would have contacted us.

We see her tomorrow afternoon — one downside of letting her take the bus home is that we don’t learn quite so much about what she’s been doing, how her learning was going, etc. All part of letting go, I suppose.

I finished Animal Vegetable Miracle a while ago, which I mostly enjoyed , so I decided to pick up The Poisonwood Bible, which everyone else read a long time ago. Especially in the end, you can see Kingsolver’s interest in food and nutrition and farming. At points it seems a little too strong, but perhaps that is only because I had just read AVM and could connect the dots a little too clearly.

I am learning about myself as a reader: as with so many things, I like a level of understatedness that is maybe unreasonable to expect. (Except when I like things crazy and in your face, of course.)

So in The Poisonwood Bible I got a little tired of Adah, the mute genius sister, and her palindromes and writing backwards and (what came to feel) affected profundity.

Still, it was a page turner (and I don’t mean that in the condescending way of, say, a Dan Brown novel), and on the last day of reading it I must have given over at least 4 hours, staying up til 1:30 am to finish it. Also, although the Adah thing became wearying — actually, the Rachel voice also seemed to become to heavily “Rachel” too — Kingsolver is a very good writer, as in prose stylist. Reminded me slightly of reading Virginia Woolf and thinking, “Dear God, I can never be a writer — look at how every word is so carefully chosen. Who can take that much time, let alone have that deep of a well of words? Serious envy. But that’s Virginia Woolf — who somehow can do crazy effects with her writing and never make me feel hit over the head. But we can’t all be Virginia Woolf — and we can’t expect every novel to be Mrs. Dalloway. (Thus perfectionism threatens to kill so many joys.)

Here is a nice tidbit from the Catholic priest gone slightly native, who is something of a foil to the Christian missionary whose family is the center of the book. He is talking about the difficulties of bringing the Bible to the Congo, and what gets lost in translation even into English. He says to one of the daughters:

Och, I shouldn’t be messing about with your thinking this way, with your father out in the garden. But I’ll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.

Now I’m reading Mansfield Park, the most controversial of Austen novels. It is so hard to keep an open mind, after reading it a few times earlier and just really finding Fanny to be total weenie, and Edmund — oh man. This time around, I like Fanny better but I’m a little more grossed out by the tutor-pupil relationship and Edmund’s desire to make Fanny think just like him. Like Emma and Mr. Knightly, but with no fun.

No no — open mind. Open mind.

My little girl

Always Violet has seemed so big to me. She was a long baby, and then she was off the charts with her growth for many years. She is still quite tall for her age, though not as prone to towering over her peers as she used to be. Obviously she towers over her younger sister.

And then there is the whole gifted thing, with the young child who speaks like an adult, has many adult-like interests, spells better than most adults, etc.

Still, she is a child, despite all the red herrings. Last year when she participated in piano contest, we got her a lovely gown, and she looked so grown-up to me.

Until the concert, when I got to compare her to 15-16 year-olds, some of whom looked like glamorous college grads.

I had a similar feeling when I found this recent update on the Sen Lin Hu site, my little 10yo tromping around with a group of high school boys. Lordy she is still a baby!

That’s her in the gray t-shirt and black track pants. (The gray shirt, BTW, was supposed to be a Nightshirt Only, per agreement when we were packing.)

I do look forward to seeing her soon, but I am so happy to give this to her. I hope that Sen Lin Hu will be a favorite childhood memory for her.

And I am so happy for this reminder of how young she really is, how much more time we have for childhood. than I sometimes feel, when we’re already looking at high school and college curriculum.

Wonders of the Internets

Hurry for the internet, which allows us to peek in on our little camper, even if she forgets to use the stationery and stamps we supplied her.

This is the camp she attends.

And here is a photo of her I found — do you think she is excited to be there?

In other online news, I am on twitter, so feel free to call yourself to my attention so I have someone to follow.

My young one is requiring my attention — being the only child in the house right now — so I will direct you to one other internet location, my friend’s cool new homeschooling site: Homeschool Recess.

Start of Summer

How do we know summer has started?

First, our “summer vacation” has traditionally been marked by sending Violet off to camp. And she is off again, for her 3rd year at Sen Lin Hu. She was so excited, though it is hard for Victoria to be without her constant companion (and sparring partner), and hard for us to wonder where she is and what she is doing at any given time.

The other sign is that I was begging my husband to put the air conditioners in. (No, I am not strong enough, nor are my arms long enough.) Here is a photo Victoria took of a hot exhausted bum during our park trip after dropping off Violet.

Eventually Victoria got so hot she had to join the lazy woman on the park bench.

Next stop, happy neighborhood coffee shop for a muffin (her) and iced tea (me).

Really, would you move away from a city with friendly neighborhood coffeeshops and tall, shady trees for a suburban plot with few more square feet of garden space?

Not a Writing Day

This was supposed to be a writing day — a writing-for-work day. I am writing about Pierre de la Ramee, aka Peter Ramus, who was a rhetorician and pedagogue back in the 16th century in France. I have worked on a few rhetoricians and pedagogues recently, which is a good opportunity to reflect on some of my favorite subjects: education, and how we know what we think we know.

Yet every time I sit at the computer to start writing a short summary of his life and work, I stall out and start reading. Facebook and The Daily Dish are good bets for frequently updated content, plus I get a lot of e-mails, so it’s not hard to keep the not-writing up for hours on end. Except that after hours of not-writing on end I feel so frazzled. Hence the beer at my right elbow!

Taking a cue from the book The Artist’s Way, which I read back when I was a fairly new mother and everyone was reading it, I figured I needed to cease the input and get some output, any output.

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Thoughts from the week:

– I’ve been intrigued by comments about neuroticism and women on the previous post. It’s not something I’ve thought a lot about. I’m familiar with the concept of feminine behavior being pathologized, but while observing it in history and literature from the past, I have tended to gloss over more modern versions of same. It also seems that some masculine behavior is now pathologized, at least in school-age boys. I think we can’t get past the belief that things like cultural identity of any sort are some kind of unnatural accretion, and that underneath there is something pure and true. If we scrub off the cultural things — like gender or class — our true selves will shine.

To quote John McLoughlin: Wrong!

This reminds me to take it easier on myself and steer clear of Platonic ideals for psychological health. I look forward to Cher Mere getting around to her research on the subject!

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– I have been faithfully watching The Colbert Report this week and loving it. Video recap of the week in Iraq is here. I love that he discussed DADT, I laughed at the Tom Hanks bit — heck, I even though W.’s brief appearance was pretty funny and good sport-ish. Mostly I just really like Stephen Colbert, and I liked the way that going to Iraq seemed to bring out a little of the person under the character, like at this moment:

I love that photo. (If you haven’t seen/heard, Colbert got a super-buzz in solidarity (of sorts) with the troops.)

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– So far so good: I am “doing history” with the girls together. I never thought this work out, but really I decided that Victoria’s history stuff (based on the Sonlight Core 1) was so much more lively than Violet’s more workbook-based stuff (based on Sonlight Core 5) that I just read it with the two of them.

Violet seems to enjoy some read-aloud time, and since Victoria has a little edge in the Middle East geography department (she has been learning about this region a little longer), she likes knowing something Violet doesn’t. She was positively gloating when Violet wasn’t sure about finding Egypt on a map.

I will fill in with some more reading for Violet, but mainly it is nice to spend the time together as a threesome. The togetherness seems to stoke their curiosity somehow. Plus it is practice for being together without fighting.

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I have been reading a lot of things I don’t normally read, and continue to be plagued by the question, Why Write? I remember that Ben Jonson had a strong antitheatrical bent yet was of course a brilliant playwright. I am hardly a brilliant writer of anything, yet I am developing this suspicion of writing and writers that Jonson would be proud of.

Open-Minded Neurotics Unite

I was not surprised to read this:

We examined whether the Big Five personality traits predicted blogging. The results of two studies indicate that people who are high in openness to new experience and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers. Additionally, neuroticism was moderated by gender indicating that women who are high in neuroticism are more likely to be bloggers… The results indicate that personality factors impact the likelihood of being a blogger and have implications for understanding those who blog.

More here.

What do you say, friends?

Rainy day here — kind of nice to have an excuse to stay inside, although we have two back-to-back piano recitals (one for each kids) this afternoon. If your child (or husband) is like mine, someone in your house may have been counting down the days til the release of Sims 3. It’s a perfect day for a few hours of playing god in front of the computer. Now I just have to pump myself up for feigning interest.

A May Review, in Pictures

Turning 10 with friends:

Getting a first stripe on her belt (yes, she was posing herself):

The end of co-op (this is “science career day,” in which kids pretended to be employed in a particular science-related careers — Violet chose “special effects.” cutest question from the audience: how did they make Mr. Incredible fly in The Incredibles?)

Getting our neighborhood amusement park passes:

Dancing in the studio recital:

Going a little crazy:

A Brief Review of Up

Go see it

We cried, we laughed. We talked about aspects of the movie for the rest of the day.

The hero is a 78-year-old man — that alone charmed me — and the lovely story of how ordinary life becomes our big adventure can’t be lost on any adult who has put aside a dream or two in the pursuit of mundane human happiness.

Also, talking dogs.

Our viewing party ranged from ages 6 to 79, and all were pleased.

But bring Kleenex.

Oh, and . . .

Oh, I really wanted to thank everyone who took the time to comment on the “Learning by Doing” post. Your support was much needed and I am very grateful for it! Life has been rather full — husband was away, then the week of dance recitals and games and visiting family — so I have not had the chance to respond properly, but your kind words really meant a lot! Hurray for homeschool bloggers, making the journey seem a little more possible!