April's Shower of Photos: Day 7

These brown lumps are some sort of fungus growing on the hedge surrounding our back garden. I rather like the way this photo captured the mossy green tinge of the branches. I tried taking it using both the "ordinary" and "flower" settings (you can tell I'm a technical whizz with a camera. Not.) The general setting came out clearer.

The Experiment Continues

The properties-of-elements experiment with spectacle frames continues. The results now stand at:

Non-titanium frames - two successes for Little Cherub
Titanium frames - one failure for Little Cherub

Fortunately Star was due for a new pair anyway. Her old ones are well and truly snapped.

I Love This Stuff!

Titanium.

Why, you ask?

Put it this way ... have you ever had a pair of glasses with cheap metal frames fall into the clutches of a toddler who thinks it is fun to see how much she can bend them? And have you ever had the same happen to a pair with titanium frames?

I'm pleased to report that despite having to force one arm back from a 210 degree angle, jammed over the front of the lens, the titanium frames are as good as new. That would be the titanium frames I bought (on sale! yay!) after she destroyed the last pair by doing the exact same thing.

And while I am on the subject of elements, how cool is this ... and this. Out of my price range, unfortunately.

April's Shower of Photos: Day 6

Another daffodils photo. Yesterday's rain turned to snow, though it is thawing like Narnia after Aslan's arrival.

A Little Magic

Tevye and I had a kind of random conversation last night about what we could choose if we could pick a small thing that could be done magically - instantly and without any effort on our part. No great life or world-changing wishes, just a little touch of magic. These were our choices.

Me: To be whisked from the sofa to my bed. When I'm tired I want to go to bed now. I don't want to have to go through the whole nightly routine of undressing, throwing clothes in the laundry, putting on pyjamas, washing, tooth cleaning, using inhalers, and general faffing around before I can get into bed. A little wave of a magic wand and ... pouff! sofa to bed! Bliss!

Tevye: Instant unpacking and sorting out when we return from a holiday. Unloading of car, unpacking of bags, washing, ironing and putting away of clothes, checking and answering email backlog, dealing with post, catching up on anything else that has gone undone ... all sorted!

Now I think his is a poor idea as we only go away once or twice a year, whereas I would benefit from mine every night. He thinks getting from sofa to bed is such a small and insignificant process it is a waste of a good magical wish.

What would you choose?

April's Shower of Photos: Day 5

I'm getting inspired by Jennifer and other April Shower participants to think more about what I want to achieve with a photo. Today I decided I wanted to try and capture the rain that had stopped a few minutes earlier. Some of my efforts might charitably have been described as "interesting"; a few were just plain pathetic. I liked this one, with the raindrop on the flower in the centre and the cloudy sky behind. Thank goodness for ImageWell, which allows me to cut out the messy bits round the edge (I could do it in iPhoto, but find ImageWell easier). Is that cheating?

April's Shower of Photos: Days 3 and 4

Some of the rare flowers in our garden ... rare not in the sense of unusual, but because it takes true tenacity to survive my black thumbs and Tevye's conviction that anything that grows must be a weed.

My camera has a "flower" setting. At least, there is a picture of a flower on the dial and it appears to take close ups of flowers when the arrow points at that picture!

Really VERY Old

Overheard in the back of the car, Star to friend:

"My Mum was really old when she had Little Cherub. Now she is very old!"

April's Shower of Photos: Days 1 and 2

Jennifer of S/V Mari-Hal-o-Jen put out a challenge for this month:

If you would like to join me in a month of photos, please drop a comment into the comment box and I'll collect all our info into my seriously outdated sidebar. Set your own goals for the month or focus on a theme that interests you (Spring Flowers, macro photos, portraits, or perhaps the color green?) or simply have uploading one photo a day as your goal! Goodness knows that's all I'll get done some April days!

I hope to make April's Shower of Photos a little Loveliness to look forward to each day, won't you join me?

Photography is not my strong point but I'm going to give it a go, even though it is pushing me right out of my comfort zone. I think I will need a focus to avoid sinking into a paralysed, photo-less confusion, so I'm going to go with a "nature" theme. I only have an pocket-sized entry-level Panasonic digital camera. It takes better photos than the old Kodak I was using until it died last year, but a professional piece of kit it most definitely is not.

I got off to a good start as we took Star and Little Cherub to the zoo today. Plenty of photo opportunities there - though not as many as there would have been if I had remembered to buy spare batteries for the camera, which ran out of juice part way through the day. First, a close up of a lemur nibbling what looked like a piece of twig. The lemurs are in a walk-through enclosure, so it is possible to get up close and personal.


This rhino wasn't as near as he looks and we were firmly on the other side of the fence! He was pretty close, though. I would love to have got a shot of two magpies sitting on the back of an oblivious rhino, but they flew off.


The penguins have always been a zoo favourite of ours. Here are three Humboldt's penguins marching. Judging by his feathers the bird at the back must be a large chick. Behind them was a longer and better procession, but that was the point at which my camera died.


This is a poor quality photo as I had to go heavy on the zoom. My camera has a 3x optical zoom: after that it relies on digital zoom with a corresponding decrease in resolution. This 11 week old baby was such a cutie I had to include him, digital zoom or no.


Tomorrow I hit my first bump in the road. Buy camera batteries!

Eat like Granny

My organic fruit and veg box includes a weekly newsletter from the farm owner. Mostly his news is information about current crops and growing conditions. This week it was a more general piece about food and healthy eating, triggered by a newly imposed requirement to use computer generated nutrition analysis to establish whether school meals cooked by his company are "healthy".

First he quoted four guidelines from Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food, which sound eminently sensible to me:

1. don’t eat anything your great grandmother would not recognise as food
2. don’t buy anything with more than five ingredients
3. only eat at a table; eat slowly and communally
4. distrust any food claiming health benefits

He feels - rightly - that we have lost confidence in our ability to know what is "good" food, and spend too much time listening to scientific "experts" and not enough listening to granny. And he cites one of my personal bugbears:

Even today there is just too much that we do not know. Nothing illustrates this better than the thirty year vilification of butter only to find that the miserable, meal ruining transfats (margarine etc) that have displaced it are in all probability more damaging.

This was his conclusion:

Traditionally cooked whole foods have been elbowed aside in favour of highly processed functional foods designed, manufactured and marketed to solve the problems associated with a Western diet. They don’t seem to be working. Science will not solve a cultural problem; namely a collapse in the willingness, confidence and skills needed to cook and enjoy real food. There is no one healthy diet or silver bullet that can better the knowledge accumulated over generations of how to use predominantly locally sourced ingredients to sustain us through happy and healthy lives. Pollan’s advice is that unless you suffer from a specific dietary illness like diabetes, the best thing to do with a nutritionist’s advice is to ignore it.

You can read the whole newsletter here.

The book sounds good, and I was glad to find my library has a copy. Only one copy, and three reservations ahead of me, but I have added myself to the queue and can wait patiently!

If in doubt ... do less!

My planning mania struck again before Easter. My train of thought landed on Little Cherub's future schooling, and I found myself starting a list of topics I wanted to cover with her in the early years. I began scribbling down all sorts of great ideas for setting up Montessori-style trays, subject baskets, main lesson books ... then I wondered if I really needed to reinvent the wheel. I took a look at the Preparatory Level of Mater Amabilis and the introductory notes I wrote jumped out and hit me. Time to listen to my own advice!

IF IN DOUBT - DO LESS. Trying to do too much with a young child is worse than doing too little. It is better to start from scratch with a six year old than to find yourself dealing with one who doesn't want to do schoolwork any more. Be sensitive to your child's needs and readiness. If he or she isn't ready, then holding off for a year or so is fine.

Then this from a Parents' Union School Preparatory Class Programme:

Children of five still need plenty of quiet growing-time and as much out-of-door life as possible. Daily lessons should be regular but informal and the time-table regarded only as a flexible guide to a well-assorted arrangement of free play occupations, activities and quiet story times.

From there I took another look at the notes I made on gentle learning for the early years (still a work in progress), and went right back to the drawing board.

I made a list of the things I want to prioritise - outdoor time, nature study, stories, picture books, art and craft. Then, inspired by Donna Simmons' suggestions for three to six year olds, I worked out a routine that would allow me to include them all on a more or less daily basis.

• 8.00 Housework
• 8.30 Prayers, Bible or saint story, songs, poems (a sort of Circle Time, if it is possible to have Circle Time with just two of us)
  
• 9.00 Out and about - this could include any combination of Mass, trips to the park, outdoor play, walks, visits to the woods or lake, library trips, errands, visits to friends or Grandma, and other outside activities. Plenty of outdoor time should allow nature study to happen naturally.
  
• 12.00 Lunch
• 12.30 Story time
• 1.00 Rest (quiet play or look at books)
  
• 2.00 Craft activity - interpreted widely, to include crafts, handwork, painting, cookery and gardening
  
• 3.00 Picture books
• 3.30 Play time
• 6.00 Dinner

This is meant as a loose structure for our day, not a rigid timetable - something I simply don't have the self-discipline for. Writing it out means I can see what it is realistic to fit into a leisurely day. I know my own weaknesses, and know that I find it easy to miss out outdoor activities and crafts. They take effort, and if I don't have a plan of sorts, they won't happen. I also want Cherub to have a sense of order in her day. Boiled down to its simplest, the essence of the plan is "mornings for out and about stuff, afternoons for reading, quiet play and hands-on activities".

The timings are dictated in part by the older girls' school day - they leave at eight and get home soon after four. Going out in the morning works better for us as it gives as a clear block of time without any time pressure. It also means I won't get "behind" on my day and end up not getting out at all. I don't imagine that we will spend three hours out of the house every day, but if I think of the morning as "outdoor time" it will makes planning easy. Any morning time we spend indoors will be "free" time.

I am not going to plan any formal learning, but if Little Cherub is anything like her sisters, she will probably learn the basics of letters and numbers without needing formal instruction. Poor Angel got it whether she needed it or not, with Star I was more laid back, and this time round I'm just going to relax and let it happen when it happens. I will have letter and number activities available to do for fun if she wants, but I will follow her lead.

ImageWell

I know I have a few readers who are Mac users, so I thought I'd pass on a recommendation for some image editing software I have been using: ImageWell. The basic software is free, with the option to pay for an upgraded version with extra features.

I haven't tried any other image editing software, so I can't make any comparisons, and all I use it for is prettying up pictures for my blog, but it does that very nicely. My header pictures here and at First Heralds, and the Tolkien quote in my sidebar were all done using ImageWell. I got a bit carried away with electronic doodling, and have already made a rather nifty header picture for May. The software will easily adjust the size of pictures and makes it possible to superimpose text. Other options include cropping, making pictures opaque and adding coloured borders. There may be more but that is as far as I have got with my experiments.

ImageWell has also solved a minor technical issue that bugged me. For some reason photos taken with my camera held vertical come out sideways on this blog, even though they appear the right way up in iPhoto. Dropping them into ImageWell and saving them there solves the problem.

First Heralds

I have been thinking for a while about starting a new blog to post specifically about teaching the Catholic faith to toddlers and preschoolers. I finally did it, and a number of very kind people with little ones of their own have agreed to contribute. I think it is going to be good! Take a look at the list of contributors in the sidebar and I'm sure you will agree.

You can find the blog here, at First Heralds. If you wonder about the title, it was inspired by this section in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Through the grace of the sacrament of marriage, parents receive the responsibility and privilege of evangelizing their children. Parents should initiate their children at an early age into the mysteries of the faith of which they are the "first heralds" for their children. They should associate them from their tenderest years with the life of the Church. (CCC 2225)

The Turin Shroud

I have been using iPlayer to catch up with various TV programmes I missed over Easter. One was a new BBC documentary about the Shroud of Turin, the cloth impregnated with markings indicating it was the burial cloth of a crucified man, and long believed to be the burial cloth of Christ. It was pretty interesting, so I thought I'd share the programme's findings.

You may know that back in the 1980s radio carbon dating seemed to identify the Shroud as a medieval fake, dating the fabric to the early fourteenth century. This programme pursued mainly historical rather than scientific evidence, which convincingly dates the Shroud much earlier. Here is the gist of the evidence ...

• Documentary evidence shows that there was a Shroud believed to be the Shroud of Jesus in Constantinople in the twelfth century. It disappeared during the sack of Constinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The Shroud of Turin is known to have appeared in the mid fourteenth century in a French village. The knight who owned the Shroud was the descendent of a crusader who took part in the Fourth Crusade.
• The Shroud of Turin can be shown to have fold marks consistent with being kept in a display mechanism that would tally with the way in which the Constantinople Shroud was displayed.
  
• Scientific evidence shows that the Shroud bears real blood stains, of blood shed in both life and death. These blood stains are Group AB, the rarest of the main blood types.
  
• There is another relic believed to have covered the face of Christ after the Crucifixion: the Sudarium of Oviedo. The blood stains on this cloth are also Group AB, and when placed alongside the Shroud, the stains in the head area can be matched up. The evidence strongly indicates that the two cloths were used to wrap the same body. (There is an article on this here.) The Sudarium is definitely known to have been brought to Spain from the Holy Land in the 600s.
• The markings on the Shroud indicate that the nails used during the crucifixion where placed in the man's wrists and heels. Archaeological evidence shows this was the method used by the Romans. However, medieval art always shows the nails in palms and feet. A forger would presumably have followed the convention of his time, and would have had no means of knowing that this was inaccurate.

Why does the historical evidence and the radio carbon dating clash? Nobody knows, but the suspicion is now that there must be some error in the scientific dating. The scientists who carried out the test are now reviewing their methods to see if they are flawed.

Interesting stuff!

Yellow Music

I promised you trivia, and it doesn't get much more trivial than this. Yellow music to go with yesterday's yellow list ...

• Big Yellow Taxi
  
• Mellow Yellow
• Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
• Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree
• Yellow Submarine
  
• Yellow River

And to raise the tone a little (and date me less), some classics for spring ...

• Four Seasons: Spring (Vivaldi)
• The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky)
• Appalachian Spring (Copland)
• Spring Symphony (Britten)
• Songs Without Words: Spring Song (Mendelssohn)

Reader's Block

Am I the only person who suffers from reader's block?

There I am, reading away happily for a while, when wham! Along comes the wrong book at the wrong time (or is it the right book at the wrong time?) and suddenly I'm stuck. Reader's block. I can't get to the end of the book, but neither can I bring myself to let go of it.

My latest reader's block has been caused by Eamon Duffy's Saints and Sinners: a History of the Popes. I got maybe a quarter of the way through and ground to a halt. I don't want to give up. Duffy is a top notch historian and the book is a subject that interests me ... but it is a fairly dense read. A big, big subject, and small print, which doesn't help. I have to be in the right mood to pick it up, and mostly I'm not. And there are an awful lot of pages to go. But neither can I quite bring myself to put it aside. It means that for the last month I have read little other than knitting books.

Right, Bookworm. Move on! You have permission to stop reading that book. Or, rather, to stop not reading it.

In a similar vein, I have been short on ideas for blog posts lately (is it a Lenten thing?), but since Easter I'm bubbling over with ideas. Whatever writer's block I had seems to have vanished. Lots to write about ... Little Cherub snippets, interesting conversations going on elsewhere, plans, thoughts and just plain trivia. Now I just need to make time to do the writing!

Thursday Thirteen: Seeing Yellow

I haven't done one of these for a while, so here, for spring, are thirteen yellow things I like ...

1. Daffodils - my favourite flowers
2. Buttercups - another favourite. Maybe because I also like ...
3. Butter - yes, the real, comes-in-a-block, saturated fat stuff. I justify only ever buying the real thing on the grounds that a little butter is better than a lot of low-fat spread. In fact, according to Tevye's biochemist cousin, a little butter is better than even a little margarine, which he wouldn't have in his house. (I'll gloss over the fact that he has since moved on to only using olive oil.)
4. Sunshine - at least I think I do. Can someone remind me what it looks like?
5. Sunflowers - big, yellow and beautiful
6. Smiley faces - because they brighten up dull text much more than :) and ;)
7. Bananas - yellow superfood
8. Lemons - lemon sorbet, lemon mousse, lemon cake, lemon chicken, lemonade, lemon squeezed on pancakes ...
   
9. Little Cherub's cute duvet cover - now I just need to paint her room yellow to match
10. Yellow cars - supposedly the safest colour, because they are most visible. I was once the proud owner of a yellow car, until it died of old age.
11. Golden lion tamarins - aren't these the cutest monkeys? One of my favourites at the zoo.
12. The yellow brick road - can't you just see me dancing down it, off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz .. dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum ...
    
13. Winnie the Pooh - the original, not the Disney version

Easter Display

For the last few months I have been using this space on top of a storage unit in the sitting room for a liturgical / seasonal display. I'm rather pleased with the way my Easter one came out. I bought the little egg tree on impulse from Tesco - though I think it could be quite a fun craft to make something similar. Maybe another year? The picture is one I found online, printed and laminated. The wooden candlestick I found forgotten in a drawer. The cloth is just a square of white felt - I also have green and purple squares to use for Advent, Lent and Ordinary Time. Very cheap and simple, but t make it easy to incorporate the liturgical colours. In front is Little Cherub's liturgical year book, and the three knitted eggs (one is hidden behind the candlestick) are there because I had an urge to knit them and then had no idea what to do with them!

Leaving Home

Getting ready (note carefully applied back-to-front hat)


Time to go! What do you mean, I can't go for a walk if I'm not dressed? What's wrong with my sleepsuit?


Mind you. I'm not sure that I want to go if there is any of that odd white stuff about!

An Easter Reflection

Not from me - I'm not feeling particularly reflective this year - but from Jennifer at Et Tu?, who reflects on her experience of the Eucharist since becoming a Catholic at the Easter Vigil last year.

Her initial response before her conversion was bemused disbelief ...

There was a part of me that kept hoping I'd find that it was all a misunderstanding, that Catholics were only required to believe that the consecration of the Eucharist was a really, really, really important symbolic event, that all that crazy talk about drinking blood and eating flesh was just some old fashioned superstition that us enlightened modern folks weren't required to believe. I was a lifelong atheist, after all. It was enough of a feat that I even came to believe in God in the first place. It was enough of a leap of faith for me to believe that some miracles might have happened a few times throughout history. But to ask a former militant atheist to believe that a miracle happens at every single Catholic Mass, that bread and wine are actually changed into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ despite the fact that they look exactly the same...it seemed too much to ask.

Then she moved on to intellectual acceptance ...

When I received my first Communion at Easter Vigil last year I had come to accept that the teaching on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is true. Or, perhaps more accurately, I was willing to accept on faith that it was not false. I was undoubtedly being led to the Catholic Church, and found its defense of this teaching to be solid and compelling, so I trusted that it was true in some mysterious way, even though I didn't really get it.

And now, after a year of experiencing the Eucharist ...

This belief in and love of the Eucharist is the most surprising thing that's ever happened to me. Never in my dreams would I have thought that I could believe such an incredible, outlandish claim. On some occasions I have even taken a step back to look at it all as objectively as possible, to set everything aside and honestly ask myself if this is all in my head, if perhaps I am eating bread and drinking wine at the Mass, but that its great symbolic value has led me to put myself in a different state of mind. And all I can come up with is this:

If this is a symbol, then I am insane.

It's not Tolkien, but that's about the best I can do. The way this Sacrament has slowly transformed my soul and given me a connection to God that I never knew before, the way I could easily move myself to tears at the thought of not being able to receive it, the strength I have drawn from having this direct communion with God...if these things are not real, then nothing is.

Go and read the whole post here.

And I'm very glad she linked to the Tolkien quote, which I had forgotten about (and in any case, had never found a source for). I added part of it to my sidebar.

What Narnian Are You?

And you can add consistent to those qualities. I did the same quiz two years ago and got the same result.

HT: Theresa at LaPaz Home Learning

Glimpses from Holy Week

Palm Sunday
Woefully unprepared for Holy Week. Also woefully unprepared for Star and best-friend-F. I find myself in the sad position of finding it less stressful taking a 21 month old to Mass than taking a 9 year old. F's mother read them the riot act beforehand, with dire warnings of what would happen if there was a repeat of last year's sword fighting with palm crosses during Mass. Neither of us thought to warn them not to be palm trees. Waving, rustling, noisy palm trees.

Monday
Took Little Cherub to Mass, where she behaved beautifully. Joined two homeschooling friends for a Stations of the Cross afternoon. The children made plaques out of clay, with a scene of their choice, then we placed them round the garden and prayed the Stations. Cherub enjoyed herself with salt dough and a doll's house. I enjoyed a sociable afternoon and reconnecting with homeschooling life.

Tuesday
Nothing memorable.

Wednesday
Went to Mass again. I was tired and found the walk hard going (30 minutes there, a bit more back as it is uphill). Castigated myself for bemoaning a 30 minutes walk ... after all, who wouldn't walk for 30 minutes if they knew God was waiting at the end of it? Cherub untypically cross and agitated during Mass, for some reason I couldn't fathom. Realised afterwards that it was because the step-counter she had attached herself to had got left in her pushchair and she was not best pleased!

Thursday
Woke up with a headache and general malaise, which doubtless explained why Wednesday's walk was such hard work. Mass of the Last Supper, which never fails to move me, this year included despite feeling limp. Struck particularly by the stark change of mood during the Eucharistic Prayer, when the bells rung during the Gloria were replaced by wooden clappers. No Cherub. No Star. Only Angel and she was serving, meaning I was child-free and able to focus (not that Angel on her own would be a distraction). Worked on putting together Cherub's Way of Light box.

Friday
Headache persisted. Good Friday liturgy, with Star and Cherub. Both well behaved, apart from a little service sheet chewing by Cherub once she got bored of "reading" it. I dithered over whether to take Cherub, but decided I would risk it as she responds quite strongly to things at Church being different - Ash Wednesday was good for two or three weeks of interest in black splodges on foreheads, and this week there has been much signing of "all gone!" over the purple covered statues. Despite a little restlessness during the reading of the Passion, she was very engaged by the veneration of the Cross. She wanted to "kiss Jesus", but was overcome by nerves at the last minute and decided against. I was thankful all over again for her Stations of the Cross box, which has kept her interest through the whole of Lent and meant that in her own small way she had some idea of what was going on.

Saturday
Confessions in the morning. (Quote: "Star, if you don't stop that you will have to add being noisy in the Confession queue to your list!") Finished off Cherub's Way of Light box, more or less, and did some baking for Easter Sunday. Attended Easter Vigil with Angel and Star, who had been given the choice of coming with us the Vigil or going to Mass on Sunday morning. Twenty minute wait beforehand almost too much for her - much whinging about being tired and having a headache. Fortunately she was distracted by the interest of fire and candles and forgot her woes until the Vigil was nearly over. By this time I was struggling with aching head, aching chest (usually I love incense, but it just isn't good for coughs) and tiredness of my own. Some years the Triduum is an intensely spiritual experience; others, like this one, it is a case of being present and participating as best I can amongst the distractions.

Easter Sunday
Celebrated! Chilled (literally, as the snow fell). Coughed. Ate chocolate. Ate breakfast. Organised a chocolate egg hunt for the girls. Coughed. Ate more chocolate. Grandma and my brother arrived. With chocolate. Ate very large lunch. Ate more chocolate. Chilled (now not so literally, as the snow had melted). Coughed. Ate tea. Relaxed with a nice, medicinal glass of wine. And chocolate. Enjoyed a couple of treats from the BBC: the last episode of Lark Rise to Candleford, and a dramatisation of The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency.

Happy Easter

This is a first for me .... a WHITE Easter. At least the Daffodils match my spring theme!

May you have a happy and blessed Easter season.

Holy Week

Palm Sunday tomorrow and the beginning of Holy Week. I am not planning to blog any more until Easter. I am planning to pray rather more than I have during Lent. (Why am I always so full of good intentions, and so incapable of putting them into practice?)

Introvert / Extrovert

This post by Amy Welborn on introverted parents of extroverted children got Melanie thinking about parenting her extroverted toddler, which in turn set my mental wheels in motion.

I have always registered as an extrovert (in the sense that being with others charges my batteries) on Myers-Briggs type tests. However over time the degree of extroversion has narrowed, and now only just tips the scales into extrovert rather than introvert - 53% according to the MyPersonality.info badge in my sidebar. Oddly, I've never before considered how this relates to my children.

Angel is an extreme extrovert. Sending her to school was like plugging her in to a high performance battery charger. Stamina? After a day at school, she is up for anything! Her need for company is intense, which at least means she is not likely to be prone to the teenage phase of lurking in her bedroom alone. Homeschooling an extreme extrovert can be a challenge. We were lucky in that a combination of neighbour children and after school activities provided enough social time to keep her going. In our earlier homeschooling years, I had the energy and enthusiasm to take her out and about regularly to a mix of organised activities and informal socialising. Now, with my own need for that social charge lessening, I'm not sure I could meet those needs so well.

Star is an introvert, though I have only now realised this. She comes home from school tired, which initially I assumed was just a matter of not having developed the stamina to cope with a long and busy day, but now I think it is the introvert's reaction to a long period with others. When she gets in, all she wants to do is slump in front of the TV ... and this seems to be the result of a real internal drive, not just inertia. Thinking in terms of personality types, I can now see it is her way of shutting out the world and giving herself the chance to recharge - a classic introverted response. If she was a book lover, this is where she would disappear into a book. As she is not, TV provides an alternative outlet. I suspect half the time she is not taking in what she is supposedly watching, it is just there as a block.

Whereas Angel will never miss out on any opportunity to socialise, it is not uncommon for Star to refuse the option of a get together with a friend. She often does enjoy being with others and has many friends, so I think we have fallen into the trap of not realising that social interaction drains her. She very much wants our company, but she wants it on her own terms - maybe this is because fitting in with someone elses preferences also drains her. Looking back on our homeschooling years, Star was often on the edge of, or outside, a group by her own choice. I put it down to her away-with-the-fairies personality, and had never twigged that people tire her. I wish I had realised this earlier, as there are things I would have done differently. Too often I assumed that what was good for Angel would also be good for Star. As it is, I think will help me respond better to her needs in future.

I'm not sure about Little Cherub. I think she is somewhere in the middle. She is certainly not another extreme extrovert. I can remember Angel getting the same buzz as a toddler from people - any people! anywhere! - that Melanie describes in Bella. That isn't Cherub. On the other hand, neither is she happy in her own world the way Star was as a toddler. She sits back and observes where Angel would have wanted to be in the centre of things. Star - again with hindsight - showed some sign of discomfort in group situations, but Cherub does not. Cherub is used to a much busier household and more people around than was the case with the other two, and I wonder how much difference this makes - my guess is that it may make her appear more extroverted. I'm going to watch with interest. My hunch is that she and I may currently be in much the same place - needing a few social outlets, but also happy with a lot of time at home or out and about by ourselves.

More Liturgical Boxes

Following a brainstorming session at the 4 Real Learning bulletin boards, I have put together a web page with suggestions for making a Rosary Box similar to the Stations of the Cross Box I have been using with Little Cherub.

I have also finished another page with a set of cards and box ideas for a Stations of the Resurrection Box to use during the Easter season.

Here they are:

• Rosary
• Stations of the Resurrection

Little Cherub's Book Choice: Ten Seeds

We have been on a roll with good picture books lately. Ten Seeds by Ruth Brown is a reverse counting book with a difference, combining the number aspect with the life cycle of a plant. Starting with ten seeds, it counts down to one big sunflower ... then the sunflower dies and sheds ten seeds, ready to start again.

What makes the book is the quality of the rich and detailed illustrations. On each page one of the seeds or small plants is lost - to an ant, a pigeon, a mouse, a slimy slug, a mole, a cat, and so on. For a toddler these are the main interest, but Little Cherub also now likes to point out the roots growing out of the seeds, and the little shoots. Like many good picture books, this is one that we can revisit later at another level.

Google Calendar Glee

My love affair with Google Calendar deepens. I have made two new discoveries.

1. Google Calendars can easily be imported into iCal. That means I can then synchronise my calendars with my iPod Touch. As they are read-only in iCal I can't add to or amend them on my iPod if it is offline, but I can at least check my diary. If it is online, then I can add to the Calendars directly through Google Mobile.

2. I can set my menu plan up as a Google Calendar. This means:

• I can adjust my menu plan as necessary according to what is on the calendar. We are going to be out one evening? Bump dinner to another night at the touch of a button.
• I can see my menu plan at a glance on either computer or my iPod.
• I no longer have to print out my menu plan and / or remember which computer I used to compile it.

Who would have thought a mere calendar could be the cause of such delight?

Mothering Style

Your type is: ENTP —The “Independence” Mother

“When I held my babies, I always faced them outward so they could take in the world.”

• Full of energy and confident in her own self-sufficiency and competence, the ENTP mother encourages her children—as a role model and as a teacher—to be independent and confident on their own in the world.
• A “big picture” person, she points out options and possibilities along the way. Objective and logical as well, the ENTP wants her children to evaluate their choices and learn from the consequences of their own decisions.
• The ENTP mother is resourceful and action-oriented. She likes going places and doing things with her children, exploring all that life has to offer. She is less concerned with rules, routines, and schedules. Introducing her children to new concepts and activities, challenging them, and stimulating their intellectual development are top priorities.

I put my ability to be relaxed about throwing my children out the door (well OK, not quite literally!) and letting them get on with things down to my years at boarding school, but it seems I am just naturally made that way. Or is my personality a function of those years at boarding school? Now I'm confusing myself ...

You can find your mothering style here.

Cattern's Day

A snippet I discovered at the museum yesterday, where there is a section on the history of Buckinghamshire lace ...

Saint Catherine is the patron saint of spinners and lacemakers. Her feast of November 25th was known as Cattern's Day, and marked the point of the year at which lacemakers in Buckinghamshire began to work by candlelight. The day was celebrated with "Cattern cakes" and the custom of jumping over a lighted candlestick. This was the origin of the rhyme:

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack jump over the candlestick

The candlestick on display in the museum was considerably higher than I would want to jump over, particularly wearing long skirts!

I love the way saints' days continued to influence the calendar of ordinary people in England long, long after the Reformation. There is lots more about the lacemaker's year here.

It seems to me that St. Catherine would also make a good patron saint for knitters, who are pretty close on the spectrum to spinners and lacemakers. I can't find anything definitive about a knitting patron - a quick Google suggested St. Clare (patron of embroiderers), St. Fiacre (patron of cap makers and associated with a knitting guild in sixteenth century Paris), St. Dymphna (why??) and an unofficial patron, St. Rafqa of Lebanon. I'm rather fond of St. Rafqa, so I'm happy with this choice, but as St. Catherine is my name saint I have a definite bias towards adding her.

Prayer Request

Please say a prayer or two for Melanie, in labour with her second baby. Her waters have broken but contractions have stalled. Pray that they will kick in again and baby Sophia will make her appearance sooner rather than later.

At least Melanie and husband Dom have a laptop with them and the hospital has WiFi. (When Tevye reads this I can guarantee he will be horrified!)

Edited to add: I see Melanie just commented on my previous post. Must be the first (and probably last!) time anyone has read my blog while in a labour ward!

History for Toddlers

Little Cherub and I finally took last week's postponed trip to the Buckinghamshire County Museum. She had a ball! We went by bus, which she considers a treat, and since I last visited the museum has become one of the most child-friendly I've been to. We stayed for two hours and she would happily have stayed longer. The Museum has a Roald Dahl Gallery with even more hands-on things to explore, but we didn't make it that far. That section has an entry charge (the main museum is free), so I decided I would see how much there was that would interest her in the rest of the museum first. Lots, as it turned out! Victorian toys to play with, a large wooden train with goods and drivers to slot in, drawers to open and close (and point in admiration at the contents, even though she had no idea what they were!), peep holes to peep through ...

Here she is testing out a Victorian hip-bath ...

And dressing Tudor girls ...


The main building looks Georgian from the outside, but inside it is a hotch-potch built round a Tudor core. This was only discovered in the late 20th century, and the upstairs rooms have been restored to show the Tudor features. The original Tudor building dates from the later fifteenth century, and was built not as a house but as a community facility for the Fraternity of the Virgin Mary, a lay society attached to the nearby Church of St. Mary. After the Fraternity was dissolved at the Reformation the building passed into private hands.

Here is one of the beamed Tudor rooms (though with a Georgian window, to fit with the facade). The Museum website suggests that this part of the building may have been living accommodation for a priest, reached by an external staircase.

After our museum visit we took lunch to the park (sadly, one of the most underwhelming town centre parks I've seen, with a few sorry looking flower beds, threadbare grass, a disintegrating hard surface that was once tennis courts and a row of trees pollarded within an inch of their lives). Then Cherub fell asleep in her pushchair and I pottered around the shops until it was time for our bus home.

New Picture Books

I've just had a mid-Lent online shopping splurge. Two batches of yarn from eBay to make these sweaters, and a book order from Amazon. I decided our picture books could use a top up.

On their way for little cherub are ...

• The Hat (Jan Brett)
• Annie and the Wild Animals (Jan Brett)
• Skip Through the Seasons (Stella Blackstone)
• Seven Ways to Catch the Moon (M.P.Robertson)
• Pascual and the Kitchen Angels (Tomie de Paola)
• My First Passover Board Book (DK)
• Benjamin's Box: the Story of the Resurrection Eggs (Melody Carlson)

Also in my shopping basket were Wholly Irresponsible Experiments (Sean Connolly), to put away for Star's birthday, and the DVD Stardust for Angel's birthday.

My Personality Profile

ENTP, Originator, Intellectual, Linguistic, Logical

That's me, according to MyPersonality.info

HT: Romany

February Blues

The February Blues are a pretty common experience among homeschoolers. Guess what? I've discovered you don't have to be homeschooling to get them.

This month has definitely been a blue one. I haven't had to deal with schooling doldrums, but I have spent almost the entire month (and much of January) struggling with coughs and colds that triggered another bout the chronic asthma I had while pregnant with Little Cherub. Three inhalers later and it's finally back under control. Add in feeling generally run down and tired, and the keynote for the month has been inertia. I am way behind on my Eowyn Challenge.

Damp, grey February weather and a couple of cold snaps haven't helped. Or at least, that was my perception. According to yesterday's TV news this has been the sunniest February on record. It seems I must have been projecting my own greyness onto the climate! Damp and cold made my chest feel worse - and, I'm afraid, fit with my mood - so while everyone else was having a sunny February I was wallowing in my own cloudy one. I did notice a couple of warm, sunny, spring-like spells but I spent the best of them holed up indoors with a cold and they only impinged on the edges of my self-pitying consciousness.

This week I am finally feeling better. No longer coughing and puffing, and the tiredness has lifted. I have some energy back. Today we see the back of February (whose idea was it to add an extra day to my least favourite month?). Tomorrow is March. Spring is coming. Easter will soon be here.

Onwards and upwards!

Humpty Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty may be better known for falling off walls, but it seems he can also get into a jam.

Little Cherub finally achieved that inevitable toddler rite of passage ... getting something stuck in the VCR. Did she think that if she posted a book of nursery rhymes in there it would play them to her?

Not as creative as Star, who got a spanner into the works. Literally. (Blue. Plastic. From a Meccano set.) More creative, but easier to remove. The book was well and truly jammed. I finally managed to poke it out with a knitting needle.

Box!

I mentioned at the beginning of Lent that I had put together a Stations of the Cross box for Little Cherub, using a set of laminated cards of the Stations that I made and the items listed here. It has been an enormous success. Cherub adores it! At least once or twice every day she rushes over to the drawer where the box lives pointing and repeating insistently "bo'! bo'!" Today it was three times.

We sit down with her "box", tip out the contents and set out the cards one by one, matching the items as we go.

The first station ... "look, Jesus is having his hands tied with rope. What do we need?" ... "ro'!" She finds the piece of string and puts it carefully on the picture.

The second station ... "look, Jesus had to carry a heavy cross. Can you find a cross?" ... some dithering between the small crucifix (The Twelfth Station) and the little wooden cross, then she puts the cross on the picture.

And so on. Every station now has its own point of interest to her. The fourth station ... "Ma'!" (Mary) as she points at the picture of Our Lady. The eighth ... "Baby!" ("Yes, that is the women of Jerusalem with their babies. They are sad. They are crying because Jesus is going to die"). The tenth ... tugs at her dress to show me that Jesus' clothes were taken away. The eleventh ... much demonstration with a plastic nail (useful find in a magic set belonging to Star!) poked at her hands and feet, my hands and feet, and any other hands and feet in the vicinity.

The pictures on their own would never have held her interest in the way these little objects do. They make the story real and tangible for her. Many thanks to Irene and her husband for sharing their idea. It has made one little girl (and her Mum) very happy.

Next stop, Resurrection Eggs.

Reprise: The Best Laid Plans

... have gone pear-shaped again.

Plan A ... sleep until 7am, potter gently through a restful day at home with Little Cherub, taking a nice long walk to rack up some miles on the way to Rivendell at some point.

Cherub wakes up at 5.30. I am very much not an early morning person. Scrub Plan A.

Plan B ... blunder through the day feeling tired, ratty and disgruntled.

Decide Plan B is not desirable and realise that my energy levels are quite good, despite the woken-up-too-early tiredness.

Plan C ... cheer myself up by taking the bus to a nearby town. Potter. Visit County Museum. Use store card reward points to treat myself to a Boots Meal Deal for lunch. Enjoy a relaxed trip out with Cherub snoozing in her pushchair.

Star wakes up complaining of headache and dizziness. Dose her with Nurofen. Tell her she will feel better once she gets to school. Star complains she really, really doesn't feel well and really, really wants to stay home. Grudgingly allow her to take the day off. Feel extreme disgruntlement over loss of Plan C. Just about manage to suppress weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth (mine).

Plan D ... sulk. Spend the day at home feeling tired and sorry for myself with an overtired toddler and a whinging nine year old. (Star, when off-colour, has a track record of turning whinging into an art form.)

Think of the excellent blog post I read this morning (I was up at 5.30, remember!) by Jen at Et Tu? about the difference between God's will and our own. Decide Plan D is a severe case of clinging on to my own will. Manage to put aside the desire to weep, wail and gnash teeth. Take hold of myself, grit teeth, smile and sympathise with Star. Make pancakes for breakfast at her request. Star happy. Cherub happy (she has developed a taste for pancakes since Shrove Tuesday). Feel, if not exactly happy, much better for managing to set aside my resentment and crossness.

Plan E ... make the best of the situation. Revert to Plan A, minus the sleep until 7am and the walk bits. Resolve to pamper Star and snooze when Little Cherub does. Postpone Plan C until later in the week.

Enough blogging. Time for that snooze ...

What Punctuation Mark Are You?

You Are a Comma

You are open minded and extremely optimistic. You enjoy almost all facets of life. You can find the good in almost anything. You keep yourself busy with tons of friends, activities, and interests. You find it hard to turn down an opportunity, even if you are pressed for time. Your friends find you fascinating, charming, and easy to talk to. (But with so many competing interests, you friends do feel like you hardly have time for them.) You excel in: Inspiring people You get along best with: The Question Mark

What Punctuation Mark Are You?

HT: Lissa, my question mark friend

What have I done?

I promised to take Star on this in May, along with a friend and his sons.


It's high. It's scary. And it is officially on the calendar.

I must have taken leave of my senses. Unlike Tevye and our friend's wife, who are planning to stay firmly on the ground.

The Sistine Chapel

... in Goring-by-Sea, Sussex.

Take a look at this extraordinary labour of love.

HT: Auntie Joanna

LOAFing Again

My attempts to become an ethically-responsible consumer have plateaued since the last update on my LOAF plan. I'm still doing a lot better than I used to, but also have some way to go to reach the level I would like to achieve. Reading Small is Still Beautiful has given me a nudge which I hope will tip me further in the OA direction - organic and animal-friendly. Schumacher-Pearce (where does one stop and the other begin?) waxes eloquent on the evils of industrial scale farming ... animals produced in "factories", genetically modified crops, oversized fields, narrow base of breeds and plant varieties, mechanically intensive, dehumanising, unhealthy ... the list goes on.

All my instincts agree. As the daughter of an old-style farmer, my personal experience of farming is grazing animals, traditional field rotations (crops ... grazing ... hay meadows), natural fertilizers (as a child I spent a lot of time up to my ankles in noxious substances!) and everything on a human scale. I know, on a deep level, that this is how farming should be. But these days, the only way such human, animal and environmentally friendly methods are economical is when they are used on organic farms that can charge a premium for their produce.

There is the rub. The price premium and the lure of cheap food. My heart and my conscience wants to buy organic. My budget doesn't. Which is why I have prevaricated. Yes, I get my organic fruit and veg boxes, and the occasional organic beefburgers or minced beef if they are on offer as a token nod in the direction of organic meat. But chicken? Ugh! The price of free range chicken is scary, and the price of organic chicken is enough to make me stick my head in the shopping trolley and sob!

How to square the circle? Budget more carefully, and eat less meat. This Lent I am eating vegetarian, and I am gradually increasing the number of vegetarian recipes in my repetoire.
While I don't intend to stay vegetarian after Easter, I can cut down the amount of meat I eat quite easily - if the budget will only run to organic meat for two-and-a-bit, I can eat a vegetarian option with Star. Also I have found a couple for new veggie recipes that Tevye enjoys, which I can use to cut down our meat requirements without leaving him feeling a deprived carnivore. Then squeezing out waste elsewhere will allow me to increase my meat budget. Hopefully between the two that circle can be squared.

Small is Still Beautiful

I recently finished reading Small is Still Beautiful by Joseph Pearce. This is based on Small is Beautiful: a Study of Economics as if People Mattered by E.F.Schumacher, originally published in 1973, and is quite a departure from his usual literary biographies. I found it an odd book as parts are taken verbatim from Schumacher's book (with the blessing of his daughter), parts are Pearce's own, and the rest is a mish-mash of the two. The mixture of the two voices isn't particularly successful and the result feels bitty. It also still seems out-dated in parts, despite Pearce's additions.

Despites its weaknesses, I found the book worth reading. Although I think some of the arguments are simplistic, it does show the absurdity of economic systems that depend for success on never-ending growth and over-consumerism. It makes the very important point that economics should not be solely about economic utility, but should also encompass philosophy - essentially, economics should take into account other aspects of human well-being besides simply material ones. The part I liked best was the last section, which did a good job of setting out the argument against industrial scale farming and demonstrated how public demand for organic food is helping to buck that trend. There was enough here to convince me that I should be going further down that road. It also reminded me that I have been intending for a while to do some reading on "Catholic economics" - relevant papal encyclicals, Belloc and Chesterton on distributism, and any more recent books on the subject I can get my hands on. Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy by Philip Booth and Catholicism, Protestantism and Catholicism by Amintore Fanfani both sound interesting.

Three Sisters

... posing in front of the webcam. The colours are a bit odd, and somehow Angel manages to look younger than she does in real life while Star looks older, but it is such a nice picture I couldn't resist posting. And no, Little Cherub will not keep that cute hairband on for more than two minutes.

Happy Valentine's Day

For yesterday. Or tomorrow.

There are times when I am very slow on the uptake. And I'm not always the best at keeping track of time. Yesterday was a case in point.

I confess that being the unromantic souls that we are (or rather, I am - Tevye has a more romantic soul that is sadly wasted on my prosaic one) our customary way of celebrating Valentine's Day is to do ... absolutely nothing. We do, however, usually apologise to each other for doing nothing. Yesterday Tevye graciously apologised to me. How thoughtful, I thought, to remember in advance that he is doing nothing and to remind me to do nothing. I can cross "remember to forget Valentine's Day" off my to-do list for the next couple of days. For I had, amazingly, remembered that it was Valentine's Day in two days time. Or so I thought.

As the day went on, my inbox and blog reader took on an increasingly Valentine-ish hue. How prompt people were, how efficiently ahead of the calendar.

Sometime around six in the evening I finally put six and six together and made a dozen red roses.

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. Not tomorrow.

So I hope you had a lovely day.

The Best Laid Plans

... of mice and men go oft awry.

Plan 1: Take Star for an evening trip to Borders, with hot chocolate in the in-store Starbucks as a treat.

Plan 2: Buy a new mouse mat.

The oft awry bit?

Plan 1: Discover Borders now shuts at 8pm instead of 10pm (since yesterday), with Starbucks shutting at 7pm instead of 9pm. Discover this at 7.25pm.

Plan 2: Fail to spot the small print on the mouse mat wrapper saying "not suitable for use with an optical mouse". Discover this when attempting to use said mouse mat with an optical mouse. The wrapper was right. It didn't work. Discover this only after failing to see that the packaging opened at the bottom and hacking at it with scissors, thereby making it impossible to return the mouse mat.

Damage limitation ...

Plan 1: Go to the adjacent McDonald's for chips (fries) and hot chocolate for Star, coffee and doughnut for me.

Plan 2: Donate very cute black and white, glossy, polka-dot mouse mat to Tevye to use at the office. Possibly destroy Tevye's street cred. (Does Tevye have any street cred?)

Cautionary note to any readers with optical mice: Do not buy shiny mouse mats, even if they are cute.

Music for Lent

I have been browsing iTunes looking for choral and sacred music to listen to during Lent. Here are my downloads so far (linked to Amazon so that you don't have to have iTunes to hear samples) ...

(1) Allegri's Miserere, sung by the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. This famous setting of the penitential Psalm 51 ("Have mercy on me, O God, in your kindness, in your compassion blot out my offence ...") has to be the ultimate Lenten music.

(2) Nunc Dimittis by Geoffrey Burgon, from the same album as the Miserere. This was originally written as part of the soundtrack for a TV series (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), but don't let that put you off. The music is utterly haunting. The words are the Canticle of Simeon, part of the Night Prayer of the Divine Office.

(3) Litany to the Holy Spirit by Peter Hurford, sung by Emily Gray, a former choirgirl of the year. Another haunting modern piece, with the solo voice balanced by an organ accompaniment. The words are the first few verses of a by the 17th century poet Robert Herrick ...

IN the hour of my distress,
When temptations me oppress,
And when I my sins confess,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

If I had a bigger budget for music I would have downloaded the entire CD, Passiontide by Emily Gray and the Manchester Cathedral Choir.

(4) Totus Tuus by Henryk Gorecki, from Agnus Dei: Music for Inner Harmony by the Choir of New College, Oxford (Track 8). This hymn to Our Lady was written by the Polish Catholic composer for a visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland. From a description I found at Liturgica.com ...

Totus Tuus (Totally Yours) was a phrase used by Pope Jean-Paul to describe his absolute devotion to the Virgin Mary. Totus Tuus, a hymn to the Virgin Mary, was composed in 1987 by Henryk Gorecki in honor of Pope John Paul II's third visit to his homeland of Poland. The choral text is taken from a poem written by Maria Boguslawska. The music is based on chants of the Polish Catholic Church and reflects Gorecki's deep love for the Holy Father; and for his country and its musical traditions.

Enjoy!

Knitting Frenzy Meets Economy Drive

I've found myself contemplating crocheting Swiffer cloths.

Seriously.

Is this whole knitting-crochet thing getting out of hand?

Stations of the Cross: Three Part Cards

I made a set of Montessori style three part cards for the Stations of the Cross to go along with the Rosary cards I made last year.

You can download them as a .pdf file here.

Mother Hen

What type of Mother Hen Are You?
by Montessorimom.com: Educational Resource

HT: The artistic Margaret in Minnesota

Simply Lent

I am aiming to keep things simple this Lent, with very few specific plans.

Myself
Abstain from meat
Say morning and evening prayer daily
Read Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth

Angel and Star
Angel - abstain from crisps (potato chips)
Star - abstain from biscuits (cookies)
Some form of extra devotion, but I haven't talked to them to decide what yet.

Little Cherub
Stations of the Cross box using this idea generously shared by Irene on the 4Real Learning forums. I have also added a set of Stations of the Cross cards.

Other than that, I'll be aiming to keep things simple and "less" - eat less, buy less, reduce computer time and so on, though with no specific goals that I would only fail to achieve.

Note: My simple Lenten blog design is necessarily minimalist, because the background still insists on overriding everything on top of it. White background means white blog. Why????

E for Excellent

Meredith of Sweetness and Light has kindly granted me an Excellent Blog Award. Given how long it has taken me to acknowledge her kindness and get around to passing on the award, it was obviously sadly undeserved. As I am trying to put my affairs in order for Lent, I'm finally catching up.

The Rules

By accepting this Excellent Blog Award, you have to award it to ten more people whose blogs you find Excellent Award worthy. You can give it to as many people as you want - even those that have received it already, but please award at least ten people.

My Nominations

Ten blogs picked from my Bloglines for more or less entirely random reasons ... but they are all excellent blogs!

• As Cozy as Spring for recommending the perfect book for knitting Harry Potter enthusiasts. Oops! No! That should that be knitters who are HP enthusiasts - I don't think a knitted HP enthusiast would work well.
• By Hand, With Heart for teaching me how to knit socks.
  
• Fine Old Famly for decluttering inspiration
• Frabjous Days for having a gorgeous new Candlemas baby. (What do you mean, that has nothing to do with blogging?)
  
• Gladdest Hours for making me laugh. About placentas.
  
• Homefront for loving G.K.Chesterton
• Karen Edmisten for having the most articulate five year old in Blogland. (I'll overlook the fact that she also has the most unoriginal blog name.)
• LaPaz Home Learning for the beautiful photo in the blog header and inspiring Montessori ideas.
  
• The Wine Dark Sea for blogging about Bella, the second cutest toddler I know.
  
• You Did What for being the only family I know that can combine a birthday party with cat-flea spraying

One, Two, Three ... Jump!

I mentioned in my Slow Time post that Little Cherub is most definitely not a risk taker. To put it bluntly, she's a wimp. She is now working on a new skill in true Little Cherub style.

She likes to stand on the windowsill in her bedroom so that she can watch the squirrels and birds in the garden. The windowsill is all of ... oooh ... ten inches high? I have been encouraging her to jump down from the window.

Me: "Are you going to jump?"

Cherub: Big grin and show of excitement. Starts to count ... "Wuh ..."

Me: "One ... two ... three ... JUMP!"

Cherub: Stretches out both hands for me to hold, leans on my hands for security and steps down from the windowsill, one cautious leg at a time. Stands safely on terra firma looking exceedingly pleased with herself.

Creative Writing

Today I have two very different exercises in creative writing for your delectation and delight.

1: Ocular Athletics

Inspired by G.K.Chesterton, my good friend Shari has a new approach to getting her sons to write. Participating in ocular athletics sounds so much more fun than a run-of-the-mill writing assignment. Enjoy the "tremendous trifles" they produced this week here.

2: Journalism - How Not to Do It

If you want an object lesson for your children in why they shouldn't believe everything they read in the newpaper, this article in today's Daily Record about Pope Benedict's preference for orange Fanta would serve the purpose beautifully.

Here is the apparent source of the story ... an entry on Fr. Tim Finigan's blog, The Hermeneutic of Continuity.

And here are Fr. Tim's comments on the article, which takes "creative" writing rather too far.

Slow Time

I often find that different seasons interact... the chronological seasons, the liturgical seasons and my own life seasons. I always tend to lose momentum in the doldrums of winter - the February slump is a well known feature of homeschooling, and one of which I have plenty of experience. At the same time the Church is in an interval of Ordinary Time between the celebrations of Christmas and the spiritual astringency of Lent. But this year everything about my life has slowed ... right ... down. I am now in the middle of what I can only describe as Slow Time.

With the big girls in school, I am able to take life at toddler pace. Little Cherub is the least intrepid of small people and it has taken a long time for her to decide it is safe to walk outside. The first couple of times she tried she fell over, found the ground was hard and hurt, and it took another three months or so before she plucked up the courage to try again. (This is par for Little Cherub's course - she has only just decided it is safe to manouevre herself on and off a child size chair. She does not do climbing.) Last week, however, she decided she would like to walk to Grandma's - less than ten minutes on adult legs - and ... wow! ... she made it! Slowly. Very slowly.

I think this is the first time in my life that I have had both the time and the patience to go at this speed. Even when I have had the time, I haven't been ready to relax and allow myself to slow down. Now I am. Over the last few years the pace of life has varied from busy to hectic. Homeschooling is a hard option - good, and a route I'm glad I took, but hard - and the last couple of years had a series of added physical and emotional demands. Now here I am in my late forties at home with just a small toddler and not only slowed right down but enjoying it. Life is no longer a series of missed deadlines, many of them self-imposed and impossible. If it takes me forty minutes instead of ten to do a job because Cherub is helping, or because we stop in the middle to sing songs or watch squirrels, it doesn't matter. If she wants to walk and we go at a snail's pace, stopping to check out bricks, stones, puddles and leaves, that's fine. I'm in no rush.

After eight years of homeschooling this gentler, quieter, slower life is still very new. I am like a train that takes a mile to stop after the brakes are applied, and it is probably only in the last month that I have fully adjusted to the new pace. Over the last two or three weeks, slow has almost become stop thanks to coughs, colds and sore throats which have attacked me in various combinations. (Currently it is cough and cold. Sniffle.) But you know, it doesn't matter. It is winter; it is Ordinary Time; it is Slow Time. We can just hole up and take it easy until the coughs and sniffles go away.

Next week Lent begins. Easter and Spring will be just round the corner. What will happen to my Slow Time then? What is growing below the surface, I wonder? What new shoots will appear in the spring? For once I am not planning, just watching and waiting. What will my next season be?