Frugal Friday Ideas I Really Liked

Frugal Fridays is up at Crystal's blog. There are plenty of great ideas. Here are a few of my favorites (there were 65 links up when I finished with this post, but I won't be looking through any additional ones. Company's coming, Company's coming!!)

Gifts, Crafts, and Cutenesses:

Free Flashdrive with Google Check-out- maybe a couple other freebies, too.

There are a lot of frugal gift ideas here. I like the card-making idea in particular. The dishtowel apron tutorial is very helpful and would be great for a budding seamstress.


Use old calendars to make envelopes (we've done this with magazine and catalog pages, too).

Use a canning lid to make cute picture frames and ornaments for the grandparents (we've done something similar with tiny pinecones and cardboard, but I like the canning jar lids a lot). The Kings Missus has another really neat gift idea for those of you who are good at couponing (I am not).

These little quiet people are adorable. They would make a lovely gift. You can make the wooden ones, or a young seamstress could try the cloth version. I do not think it would be too hard.

This looked like a fun Christmas idea for some circumstances. I don't do Black Friday sales, but I do shop the after Christmas sales. It might be fun to combine after Christmas shopping with this gift- you could write out a cute coupon and hang it on the tree.


Here are some fun Christmas decorating ideas.

Practical around the house stuff:

Coupon Organizer- As I said, I'm not very good with coupons. I've tried, really I have. But the things they issue coupons for are never things I use, I never remember to do mail-in rebates, and I seldom live in areas with double coupon days or other great sales.
But I like this idea because I have used it before for something else.=) I use an old envelope box and old envelopes for storing timeline figures. Instead of using new nevelopes, I like to use the envelopes inside catalogs, from junk mail, and even from bills. Since I don't need the envelope to seal, I just slit them open and reuse them for miniature file storage.

This, like my tomato paste tip, is one of those ideas that I take for granted, but sometimes the simplest things are so simple that we don't think about them, or realize how useful they can be.

Here's some ideas for keeping warm and frugal through the winter. I like the bubble wrapped window idea! Here's a previous post we put up on winterizing, and here's one on frugal winter clothing.

This is one of those tiny little things that really does add up. So is this one.

This idea will cut down on clutter and the 'gimmes' as well.

Recipes:
This is a very pretty dish suitable for serving to company who like their veggies. It does require several steps, but it is really pretty- and it's made with the most frugal of ingredients. I know that it won't look good to some of you, but I have another recipe using cooked potatoes and carrots that are then mashed together, and the sum is much greater than its parts. I do not know what it is- I do not even like cooked carrots, not even a little bit, but I like the flavor of the two vegetables together. We've also combined turnips and potatoes and that was good, too, so I expect this is really quite a delightful dish- and it's so very pretty!

I am not sure how frugal this is, because peanut butter isn't that cheap, but peanut butter balls are one of my favorite Christmas treats, and they do make nice gifts, so I don't care.=)

Here's another recipe for hot cocoa mix that is both more frugal and healthier than ours, and it comes with a nifty (and very easy) tip for making a smoother product.

Three more turkey leftover recipes. We don't have any leftover turkey, but the ramen noodle dish would work with other meats as well. The turkey pizza recipe kind of reminded me of this one we made with chicken.

Here's somebody else making broth from her turkey carcass. I am posting this for the testimonial she got from her family about the differences between her soup with home-made turkey broth and without- plus her ideas for soup through the weekend should be very useful to those looking for frugality and simplicity.

Here's a tutorial with pictures on soup making from a chicken.

This is the kind of idea that I really love- quick, simple, basic, and very, very frugal. We don't usually serve whole chicken breasts, we snip them up and use the meat as a seasoning in an otherwise vegetarian dish, but this way we can get twice as many pieces.=)

This is a frugal dish that's very popular around here, and it is especially tasty in the winter. Sometimes we replace the green beans with sauerkraut- good sauerkraut in a jar. They are not all created equal.

Frugal Philosophy

I like the principles mentioned here. Frugality should be a means to an end, something done thoughtfully- but then, that's how I feel about life, too.

I picked out my favorites, but that doesn't mean there aren't others there that some of you would find more useful or helpful- my favorites reflect my tastes, preferences, and level of frugality. Your mileage may vary.

P.G.Wodehouse quotes

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say "when!"

She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.

Jeeves smiled paternally. Or, rather, he had a kind of paternal muscular spasm about the mouth, which is the nearest thing he ever gets to smiling.

"What ho!" I said.

"What ho!" said Motty.

"What ho! What ho!"

"What ho! What ho! What ho!"After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.

Books Finished in November, 2007

1) Dead Man's Mirrorby Agatha Christie - Listened to as a book on tape whilst commuting to and from school. Not a brilliant story (and containing, again, some of her odd mother/daughter theories) but certainly good for a fun bit of mental diversion.

2) Walking by Faith: The Diary of Angelina Grimke, 1828-1835 - Used for a paper in my History of Women class. This is a fascinating look at Angelina's personal life and development before she became nationally famous as an abolitionist. In this journal she is in anguish over the evils of slavery, prudish in her Quakerism, and torn about her path in life. As a woman with these beliefs living in the opulent conditions of a slave-holding family, she found life very difficult and used her journal as an outlet for the frustration she felt.
The journal ends, interestingly enough, right after her anti-slavery letter to William Lloyd Garrison's paper is published, casting her into the public light. It's as if she no longer needed her journal once she had a public sphere for pleading the abolitionist cause.

3) Secret Ceremonies by Deborah Laake - OK, well, I came across this book while checking books in at the library. It purported to be a story of a woman coming out of the Mormon church. I suppose that's part of what it was about... the rest was disturbing and vulgar. She apparently left the Mormon church, rejected all religion, and then could find nothing satisfactory as a replacement.
While looking up information for this post, I found that Laake committed suicide a few years after the book's success. That's heartbreaking. Mental illness, already present in her book, was not quelled in the same confident way she asserted it was in her work. It's hard to tell where (if anywhere) the effects of mental illness and growing up in such a controlling church diverge from each other.
Not recommended.

4) Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust - Read for History of Women -- and it's a book I actually liked quite a bit. I do not agree with everything Faust says, but she did a phenomenal amount of research and has presented it in a well-written, interesting fashion. Using primarily the letters and journals of upper-class Southern women, Faust helps us peek into the lives, ideals, and expectations of these women. Recommended for anyone with an interest in this time period.

Other reading this month: about half of a biography on Che Guevara, multiple chapters from various books on enlightened despotism, other chapters from other books on the enlightenment, and a set of articles on gender and the California Gold Rush.

The future as predicted in 1901

In the post on being a doctor in 1911, Frances left a comment sharing this link to predictions for the future as posted in 1901 in Ladies' Home Journal. It's pretty interesting stuff.

Some of them were quite prescient. Some- not so much. Some seem obviously contradictory to me here and now, and the lesson to take from that is not that our ancestors were silly, but that the 'obvious' so very often isn't. In particular I refer to the prediction that cars and motorized vehicles of all kinds would displace horses, followed by the prediction that everybody would be able to walk ten miles a day because we'd all be so healthy.
A hundred years from now our descendants will be looking at our own assumptions and wondering how we could have been so shortsighted.

Take a peek and tell us what you found most interesting.

The Doctor and His Bills, Circa 1910, Part II

The first part of this article is here.

"These few remarks are not offered for the benefit of the professional 'dead beat," but for those who intend to pay but keep putting it off with, "Oh, well, the doctor makes lots of money, he can wait."

It is very true that the average doctor, if he has any practice, makes a considerable sum, provided all his patients are not like the above. But my kind reader, did you ever pause to consider the calls which are made upon the doctor's pocketbook?

Did you ever reflect that where you spend one dollar, the physician spends five.

Do you know that while you were selling ribbon or sugar, or mining stocks, the doctor was spending four hard years of his life fitting himself to look after your ailing body and was not amassing one penny. Do you know that the average doctor, after he leaves college with his diploma tucked under his arm, spends from three to five years in which he hardly makes enough to keep up appearances?

Do you know that the medical profession is changing so fast these days that the new medical book of today is obsolete tomorrow?

Do you realize that his instruments and appliances cost far in excess of the same things in other walks of life?

If you do not know these things it is well that you should be enlightened. Personally I think that you should be enlightened with a hickory pick-handle or some other equally effective weapon.

Physicians are proverbially poor collectors. People like you owe them from year's end to year's end and never think to pay. Sometime, when the Dark Angel is hovering near, you may remember and hand out a five or ten, just about as grudgingly as you give a quarter to a tramp.

Do you think that pleases your medial adviser? If you do, allow me to disabuse your mind.

The average physician, while he may be a poor business man, is possessed of a fair degree of gray matter and can see as far into a mill-stone as the next man. Do not imagine when you rush in with, "Here Doc, is a little on my account. I am sorry it is not more. Won't you please run up to the house, the old woman is not feeling well today?"

"Doc" [perdition strike the man that calls his physician Doc] obediently accepts the charity and obligingly "goes up the house."

Now, I may be a hard-hearted wretch, devoid of every charitable instinct, but I'm hanged if under those conditions, I "go up to the house."

Out here in the west where there is such a profusion of fine mountain scenery and such a plethora of good air there are lots of people who imagine that the physician can live on those elements alone.

I hasten to inform you that such is not the case. The hard-working physician needs a certain quantity of beefsteak and pork and beans at regular intervals, to sustain life so that he can minister to your needs.

Try to see if you cannot get around at least once very month and contribute toward that end. I assure you that it make the physician much more cheerful when you come in and ask him to 'run up to the house.' He would go about his work with a great deal better grace. He would give all his skill and learning to his task rather than subconsciously witholding a part of it, thinking all the time about the unpaid bill due him. Try it once, just for luck, and see how much better it makes you feel. The sensation will doubtless be new and new sensations often delight one."

Part two of Pay Up- Keep Paid, by Charles S. Moody, published in The Backbone Monthly in 1910
Part three will be posted here at the Common Room on Monday.

Houseguests coming for the weekend!

Baking with Whole Wheat Flour

This is one of those posts I thought I would never write here, because, while I do like having a grain mill and baking most of our own bread, I do not think you have to bake your own bread to be a good mom, and it's definitely not a requirement for being a good home-schooler. We all have to make choices about what we can and can't do. There have been times when all of our bread products except tortillas were home-made, and other seasons in our lives when almost none of them were.

Before my first child was born I baked a lot of bread. I sold most of it. Once she was born I think it was years before I baked another loaf. Then there was a period of time where I was able to bake all our bread again, and then... I wasn't. The bread baking at our house has see-sawed along with life.

There have been a few periods of time in our lives when breadbaking brought in a little income, but mostly it has been a way of reducing our outgoing funds. I do not want to be a bread czar, imposing the task of baking bread on mothers who don't have time or inclination for it- or a guilt trip on those who know they don't have the time or inclination but are ashamed that they are not baking.

However, there are one or two bits of information about our bread-baking that we've mentioned in passing here without explanation, assuming this is something that everybody knows. It occurred to me this morning that probably not everybody does know this.

When we bake with whole wheat flour, we are baking with whole wheat flour we grind in our grain mill. We do not buy whole wheat flour off the shelves at the grocery store. If you do, you won't get the same results we do. That's not me being a bread snob, it's just the nature of the beast. Before I had a grain mill I tried baking 100 percent whole wheat products and they were almost always bitter. When they weren't bitter, I thought I'd done something right, but I never could figure out what that was so I could repeat it.

The germ of the wheat kernel includes the fat that will be needed to sprout and support the growing seedling before it has a good root system. It's good, healthy stuff, not scary fat. But because it's a good, healthy, nourishing fat, when that fat is broken down along with the wheat germ itself and spread through-out the flour, it reduces the shelf-life of that flour. Most fats will go rancid after a period of time. They have a limited shelf value. Whole wheat flour includes that center of the wheat kernel, and it's often bitter because the fat content has gone rancid.

If your storebought whole wheat flour is bitter unless you cut it with white flour, it's rancid. Freshly ground flour needs to be refrigerated. The shelf life of white flour is probably forever (I don't know, but it's a long time). The shelf life of freshly ground, preservative free whole wheat flour is about a week, and ideally it should be used as soon as possible after grinding.

And I share that here not to be a bread boss, a guru, an overseer with a whip and chain shouting, "Grind that wheat! Bake that bread!!" Not at all. But if you've tried to duplicate our recipes at home and we said we used whole wheat flour, so you did too, but you product turned out slightly bitter- that's not your fault. IT'ts the flour. You can substitute white flour, or half white and half whole wheat, and it should still turn out. If you're baking with whole wheat because you're concerned about your family eating healthy food, you should know that this rancid flour may be putting free radicals into your blood stream. It may be healthier to eat white flour than old wheat flour.

For those interested, you can read more about the wheat berry and its nutritional make-up here. (short article, cool graphic). This is where we bought our grain mill 15 years ago.

There are other differences between whole wheat flours as well. We usually bake yeast breads with hard wheat and quick breads with soft wheat. Soft wheat is also known as pastry flour. It has a lower gluten content. That means it does not work well for yeast flours- gluten is the stuff that makes your bread stretchy and firm enough so it rises well. But because it has less gluten, soft or pastry wheat makes for a more tender quick bread where rising doesn't matter- muffins, cookies, biscuits, doughnuts.

In addition to choosing between pastry or soft wheat and hard wheat berries, there's spring wheat and winter wheat. According to this helpful website:

Hard Winter Wheat -planted in the fall, usually dry-land wheat grown without irrigation. Tends to be lower in protein than hard spring wheat.

Hard Spring Wheat - planted in the spring. It is not irrigated thus yielding a high protein and low moisture content wheat kernel. This wheat tends to be more expensive because of the high protein content and makes the lightest whole wheat bread.

Pastry Flour - Has lower protein/gluten and is milled from Soft wheat. Used for baked goods that contain baking powder.

Soft Spring Wheat - Usually this wheat is irrigated. It has a larger yield than hard wheat but is lower in protein. It is used for making cake,s cookies, muffins, pancakes, pie crust, pastries and baked goods that use baking powder. Be sure to pack this flour into a measuring cup if it is freshly milled to get accurate measurements

.

I have been buying winter wheat because I can't get the sort of wheat berries I prefer in spring wheat through my co-op. IF I was baking bread to sell on a regular basis, I might buy the spring wheat. But I'm not sure if that would really be better than the wheat berry I prefer, which us brings us to the next option to choose from when pursuing the 'simple life' by baking bread from your own wheat berries.=)

You can choose white or red wheat. This white isn't the same thing as white bread, it's white wheat berries. White wheat berries are lighter, both in color, flavor, and texture. People who think they don't like whole wheat will usually like products made with white wheat berries. Most whole wheat products off the shelf are made with red berries (unless they say otherwise, I think you can assume this). I like the red berries, too, but they are heavier, have that heartier, more rugged whole wheat flavor that those with less refined palates refer to as 'bark.'

So we buy organic hard white winter wheat berries in a fifty pound bag for .73 a pound from our co-op and use this for yeast breads- and for quick breads when we're out of soft wheat flour. This lasts us about two months.

We buy organic soft white winter wheat berries (or pastry berries) in a 25 pound bag for about .65 cents a pound from the co-op. The difference in size is just because that's what's available. This lasts us two or three months- depending on how much baking we do. Keep in mind that there are nine of us, plus several extra people usually eating with us for at least one meal a week.

We store the berries in five gallon buckets we got free by asking at a the bakery section of our grocery store. They use the buckets for doughnut fillings, frostings, and other such goodies, so they're made for food storage. This works especially well for us as we have a large family, we have guests for dinner frequently, and I would not have the space to store enough ready ground flour (which needs to be kept cool) for months at a time. If we didn't grind our flour, I would have to be running to the store to get it far too often.

You don't have to bake your own breads. But if you do, and you're trying to use whole wheat flour, try to use a better grade of flour if you've not been happy with the results. Before I got my grain mill, I really liked King Arthur brand. Store your whole wheat in the freezer or refrigerator for better results (sealed, either in a ziplock bag, jar, or plastic container). Try to buy whole wheat flour from someplace that stores it properly, or at least sells it often enough that it's not sitting on the shelf for too long. If your whole wheat products have a bitter taste, you're baking with rancid oils, which completely defeats the purpose of using whole wheat in the first place.

You don't need an expensive grain mill to begin grinding your own wheat, either. You can't grind wheat berries directly in the blender, but you can use Sue Gregg's Breakfast cookbook- the only one of that set that I think is really necessary to have.

I posted a recipe for blender pancake batter using whole grains here.
She also has recipes for muffins, I believe, using the blender grinding method, as well as waffles, and the pancake recipe could be thinned and used for crepes.

So if you've been trying some of the baking recipes we've posted and they've had a bitter taste to you- it's not your cooking!

Filled Donut Recipe

Here is the recipe for the filled donuts that Jenny posted about us making here.

1 Package yeast
1/4 c. warm water
1/3 c. sugar
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1/3 c. shortening
2 eggs
3/4 c. warm milk
1 tbs. vanilla
5 c. flour

Dissolve the yeast in the water and set aside. Dry yeast should be allowed to stand for ten minutes before it is added to the dough.
Place the sugar, salt, and shortening in the mixing bowl and mix them to a smooth paste. Add the eggs one at a time, blending well before the next addition.
Add the milk and vanilla and stir them in slightly.
Sift the flour and put about 1/2 cup of flour aside to be used if the dough is too soft. Place the rest of the flour in the bowl and stir the mixture for a few turns. Add the yeast solution and mix the dough until it is smooth and does not stick to the sides of the bowl. The dough should be of medium consistency. If the dough feels soft and sticky, add the 1/2 cup of flour you set aside.
Remove the dough to a floured part of the work table. Knead the dough with the palms of your hands until the flour is worked into the dough, and the dough is round and smooth.
Brush the mixing bowl with a little oil or melted fat and return the dough to the mixing bowl. Cover the dough with a cloth and place it in a warm place to rise.
When the dough has risen to about twice its original size and feels soft and gassy to the touch (about 1 to 1 1/2 hours), take it from the bowl and place it on a lightly floured part of the worktable. Gently flatten it with the palms of your hands to remove the large air pockets. Roll the dough up into a tight roll about 1 inch in diameter. Measure and mark off the dough into 16 or 20 units. Shape the donuts by rounding each piece of dough with your fingers. Place the rounded pieces of dough on a flour dusted pan, spacing them about 1 1/2 inches apart. Cover them with a cloth and place them in a warm place to rise. Let them rise until they are not quite double in size but feel light and gassy to the gentle touch.
While they are rising, prepare the oil. An electric fryer and basket, like that used for french fried potatoes, is ideal; but a wide bottomed saucepan, an iron skillet, or a deep frying pan may be used in place of the electric fryer. Fill the pan you use with about 2 inches of melted shortening, vegetable oil, or equal amounts of each. (We used coconut oil, YUM!) Heat the oil to 375. If you are not using an electric fryer and do not have a frying thermometer, place one drop of water into the hot fat with a spoon. If there is a quick crackling sound, you may consider the fat ready for frying. You can also test the temperature of the frying fat by putting on uncooked doughnut into it and checking the time it takes to develop a golden-brown color on each side. If the donut takes from 1 1/2 minutes to turn a golden brown color on each side, the fat is ready for frying. If the crust turns dark very quickly, or if the fat starts to smoke even before you fry the test donut, lower the flam and add more fat or oil to the hot fat.
Place 4 to 6 donuts very gently one at a time in the skillet with a slotted spoon. Let them brown gently on each side until they are a nice golden brown color on each side. Try to take them out in the order you put them in, as this will control their crust color. Drain them slightly before you take them out and place them on absorbent paper (we used brown paper bags).
Make sure the donuts are completely cool before you fill them. Mix the jelly or jam in a bowl until it is smooth and has no lumps. The recipe said to use a pastry bag and nib to squeeze it into the donut, but Jenny and I just used a zip lock bag with a frosting decorating nib attached to the end of it. (Alright, so Jenny was the one who did that part...)
Fill the bag with the smooth jelly. Pick up a donut and stick the point of the nib or tube into the center lien of the donut. this line runs around the middle of the side of the donut where the crust colors of the top and bottom meet. Jenny and I found it easier to puncture the donut with another skinny sharp instrument first. Gently squeeze the bag so that you force jelly into the donut. When you have inserted enough jelly, stop squeezing and remove the point from the donut. Do not squeeze too hard, this will force too much jelly into the donut and cause it to run out. With a little experience you will quickly learn to control the amount of jelly you squeeze into the donuts.
Set the donuts on a pan next to each other with the hole made for the jelly tilted slightly upward. This will keep the jelly from running out until it sets.
Jenny and I used jelly for about a third of the donuts, and thick vanilla pudding for the rest of them. The ones with jelly were more like a breakfast, and the ones with pudding tasted definitely of dessert.

Recipe taken from Elementary Baking, by William J. Sullivan

The Doctor And His Bills, Circa 1910, Part I

Rick Saenz has been reading a book about the transition in how we view doctors and medicine, and blogging about it.

A few weeks ago I came across an interesting article written by a doctor in 1910, and while it's a bit long, that has never stopped me before, and I think it might be interesting to at least a few of us.=) It's from a little magazine called The Backbone Monthly that was published in 1910. The editor and publisher were doctors themselves, and they went on to form a pharmaceutical company still running today.
W.C. Abbott, President, and Alfred S. Burdick, editor and secretary, worked together on this magazine and several other ventures. Dr. Wallace Calvin Abbott worked widely in the medical field and was the founder of Abbott, a medical (Pharmaceutical?) company still around today.

Dr. Alfred S. Burdick became president of Abbott in 1921 after the death of Dr. Abbott. Dr. Burdock and Dr. Abbott began working together in 1904 when Dr. Abbott hired him as associate editor of Abbott's publication, Alkaloidal Clinic. Dr. Burdick''s taught school for two years after graduating from college, and then studied medicine in Chicago. He also taught medicine at Illinois Medical College and edited the Medical Standard.

This article is called "Pay up- Keep Paid, and it is by Charles S. Moody

"A few days ago I saw where some pseudo-philosopher said that the practice of medicine was a profession and not a business.

Now, that entirely depends.

If that fellow cut his baby teeth on a twenty-dollar gold piece, took his matuinal bath in rose water, and rolled through life in the lap of luxury, then to him medicine might be purely a profession; but to us who were compelled to erupt our dentition on the remnant of a cast-off rubber shoe, take our bath in the family wash tub and eat when there was anything to eat, the practice s purely a business, and I may add, sometimes a might poor one at that.

I stand just as firmly on my Esculapian dignity as any man and at the same time the requirements of my growing family and my good lady who loves the good things of life as well as the next, make me hustle around and look after the business side of the thing.

I opine that this constant preaching of "profession" has done a great deal toward educating the people up to that standard where they remember to pay the doctor after all other obligations have been settled.

Just the other day an incident occurred that impressed me very forcibly along these lines. A man came in with the request that I go and see his wife. During our conversation he remarked that he owed Dr. M (one of my colleagues) a large bill and that the lawyer had taken judgment against him. He concluded with "Now, I will pay Dr. M sometime, but his is the last account I intend to pay."

"No, " I replied, "the last earthly account you will pay is only the anteroom to an account that will spend eternity in settling if what the Bible says is true."

I could not attend that man's family. It was purely a matter of business. Had I permitted sentiment to influence my judgment I should have grabbed my little old brown bag and strained a tendon getting out to that house.

That man is not poor. His credit with the butcher and baker is first class. I have seen his wife behind her span of bays, robed in Worth gowns, speeding up the street, the envy of half the women in town.

I have seen Dr. M's wife with her bairns by her side, strolling along the lake shore, her dress of the very plainest. I remember these things, and when he told me that Dr. M was unable to collect his account and was compelled to sue for it, I reasoned that when he gotten in my debt several dollars, I too, would have to sue, only to find all his property in his wife's name or else exempt under the law from execution.

Dear Sir or Madam, do you blame me for not going?

If you do, then perhaps you too are one of the ones who manage to make a big splash in the social pool at the expense of the man to whom you turn in your hour of need- the doctor."

That's a bit of a different world, doesn't it seem to you? Incidentally, if you don't know what a Worth gown is, you might google. Luscious.

Part II tomorrow

Originality

Latin American history professor this morning -- Do you believe it is possible to be truly original?

A couple students say yes. I can't resist bringing up a favorite quote of Dad's (I think it's from Swindoll)* that the key to originality is hiding your sources. The professor loves it. He turns to the students who are advocating complete originality: You must be very young.. You must be 19 or 20.** That is OK. When you are young you can believe everything is original. Later on in life you'll realize how unoriginal creativity really is.

~ ~

* Footnote 1 - yes, I realize how ironic it is to not remember the source for quote like that.

** Footnote 2 - He was right. The student who was particularly passionate about the existence of pure originality is 20. She used as her example Leonardo da Vinci and his construction of flying machines. But he looked at birds, so that wasn't original on his part (although it was vastly creative and brilliant).

Side trek in my mind after class... God is the sole author of what is completely original. We may copy well, but we are always just copying. <-- Idea expressed better and many times over by people older and wiser than myself.

Healthy Vs Kneejerk Skepticism

Those who have left a cult or some other rigid way of thinking they now believe to have been false, often run the risk of looking at everything through the damaged lenses of their bad experiences.

Importantly, a search for truth is not the same thing as the attempt to ensure that one never holds any false beliefs. Some philosophers have made this mistake. For example, the nineteenth-century philosopher W. K. Clifford, in a famous essay titled “The Ethics of Belief,” declares that “it is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” The misguided attempt to avoid at all costs holding any false beliefs was the downfall of the renegade dwarfs in The Last Battle. The dwarfs had been fooled into thinking that a donkey dressed up in a lion suit was actually Aslan. In time, the dwarfs discover the trickery and vow never to be taken in by anyone again. When King Tirian later appeals to them to join Aslan’s forces, they reply: “You must think we’re blooming soft in the head, that you must. . . . We’ve been taken in once and now you expect us to be taken in again the next minute. We’ve no more use for stories about Aslan, see!” Tirian explains that he’s talking about the real Aslan. But the dwarfs simply respond, “Where’s he? Who’s he? Show him to us!” (LB, Ch. 7, p. 707)

In demanding absolute proof, the dwarfs are not seeking to ensure that they have the facts about Aslan. Rather, their ultimate goal is to make sure they aren’t fooled again. This becomes clear when they eventually do come face to face with Aslan, who prepares a great feast for them. But the dwarfs are so closed off to the possibility that Aslan is actually before them that they don’t recognize him or the goodness of his gifts. Aslan explains that the dwarfs “have chosen cunning instead of belief” (LB, Ch. 13, p. 748).

As anyone who has channel-surfed through late-night infomercials knows, sometimes people develop false beliefs by being too naïve. Yet, it’s equally true that a person can fail to acquire true beliefs by being too cynical. The dwarfs’ problem is that they don’t value truth for its own sake. Instead, they seek to understand the world around them only so far as this is consistent with their ultimate goal of never holding false beliefs.

There are those who make up their minds by following a basic principle of disbelief- not a healthy sense of investigation, but a policy of predetermined disbelief. By 'open-minded' they mean a predisposition to accept whatever a group of contrarians they consider sophisticated happen to believe.

They are dwarves in their thinking.=)

Above quotes taken from here.

The Politics of Art

Modern Art, Left or Right Wing

It's a really interesting article. She points out the limited use of labels, taking her examples from politics and academia. Then she notes an interesting

Accusing all modern art of being left-wing probably doesn’t get us very far. What might be more useful is to ask whether there is a dominant consensus when it comes to political attitudes in modern art today. Is art good at presenting alternative perspectives and shaking our worldviews, or does much of it congratulate us on our prejudices? If we’re honest, most of us would probably have to say ‘yes’, in as much as wider contemporary society can be dominated by bland consensus and conformity.

And of course, the non-conformists among us can be such of the most rigid conformists there are:

There are some rather obvious gaps. For instance, there’s plenty of anti-war art out there (think of Mark Wallinger’s State Britain, which is the recreation of Brian Haw’s eccentric protest on Parliament Square, or the spate of anti-war plays produced, like David Hare’s Stuff Happens, or the verbatim plays at the Tricycle Theatre), but where’s the pro-war art? It’s a minority view, but it’s intriguing that for all its spirit of experimentation and shock, no one in the arts is prepared to explore this argument further. And with all this concern for community art, there are a few communities that never seem to get much airtime. In the 1980s there were lots of agitprop plays about the impact of mine closures on working-class communities, so where are the plays about the end of foxhunting in the countryside? Most obviously, where is the satire about radical Islam or the ultimate attack on political correctness? When an issue so dominates in the media (and has, potentially, so much comedy value), why hasn’t anyone really touched it?

Although the political compass is changing, so-called radical artists usually stick to what’s comfortable. It’s very easy to be anti-Bush these days, but try being anti-recycling. You’ll be branded a heretic and lose your friends in high places very quickly. Indeed, there is hardly any artistic critique or satire about environmentalism, even though the majority of people in surveys feel deeply ambivalent about being hectored about flying, carbon footprints and so on.

I'm somewhat reminded of those experiments in group think I've blogged about here before.

She also points out some of the problems with state funding of the arts:

...with state subsidy the way it is, there is also an enormous pressure to be socially useful, in terms of measurable targets and transforming society....
troubled artistic search for truth is dismissed as ‘a bit dodgy’ and state-funded artists are happily recruited to produce propaganda for the latest war against social exclusion. This marks a shift in post-Cold War politics, certainly. During the 1950s, the free world’s strategy was to associate liberal democracy with artistic autonomy from the state and politics. The CIA – through various agencies – clandestinely funded abstract expressionist artists in Europe and America. Its purpose was to undermine the appeal of socialist realism which was seen as overtly political, but also to make the point (without irony) that free market governments don’t tell their artists what to paint, unlike in the Soviet Union. It’s hard to conclude that this principle still has the same support in contemporary state subsidy.

It's a very interesting read, by an interesting young writer.

Pro-life Hypocrites

I was looking up some information on a pro-life related question, and again and again I came across pro-abortion blogs where the vitriolic comment threads were full of pro-aborts comfortably and self-righteously asserting that the pro-life crowd was full of hypocrites who did not care about children once they were born, who never lifted a finger to help the poor, to support starving children, to care for children born after their mothers were convinced not to abort.

I am sure such demonization of those they disagreed with makes for a nice, comfortable sense of superiority, but I would like to know exactly how many pro-life people they actually know. It cannot be many. The assertion that those of us in the pro-life community are hypocrites because we are unwilling to adopt those children who are not aborted has zero connection with reality on a number of levels.

I once stopped a car theft in progress because I was up with a sick child in the middle of the night, heard glass breaking and looked out my window to see two thieves attempting to break into a car. They saw me and I called the police, and that was the end of my involvement. Was I a hypocrite because I sought to further involvement in the lives of either the car thieves or their victims? Of course not.

Abortion is murder. You may disagree, you may think that's insane, you may think it's foolish- but no criticisms of pro-lifers and our actions will hold any intellectual water if you cannot at least acknowledge and understand that this is what we believe. You must take that fundamental belief into account when you are assessing the motives and actions of those who believe it, or you simply are guilty of prejudicial thinking. I am not saying you need to agree (well, you do, but that's a different issue). I am saying that in order to understand accurately somebody else's position you have to at least acknowledge what it is and recognize what a foundational assumption means.

Logically, of course, if you believe a crime is being committed and you are seeking to stop that crime, you are not being a hypocrite if you do not follow up on that act of crime prevention with further involvement. If you believe that abortion is murder, it is not being a hypocrite to make stopping the murder of the unborn your primary and foremost goal.

But the pro-aborts who argue that pro-lifers are hypocrites who do not care about children outside the womb (or their mothers) have more serious errors in their claims than logical fallacies. The facts simply put the lie to such accusations. The fact is that pro-life Christians are actually adoptive parents and foster parents in disproportionate numbers. A few years back Baby Doe was starved to death in Indiana for the crime of being born with Down Syndrome and a swallowing problem easily correctable by surgery. What the media did not report was that several families stepped forward and begged to be allowed to adopt that child. Baby Doe's 'parents' thought a death by starvation preferable to life, and refused all such requests. That this could happen is is a surprise to nobody in the prolife community.

There are several agencies devoted to putting adoptive parents and the hardest to place children- those with disabilities, in touch with each other. CHASK is one of them.

Here are some other facts:
95% of all abortions are chosen as a method of birth control. The remaining 5% are performed as a result of sexual crimes, health problems, or fetal abnormality. (United States)

4% of non-marital births are placed for adoption. In the U.S. this is about 50,000 non-related adoptions a year compared to 1,500,000 babies aborted.

There are about two million couples waiting. Furthermore, each of these couples would want two or three, if available. Many will take hard-to-place children with special needs. Bachrach et al., "On the Path to Adoption"

There is a long waiting list for Downs Syndrome babies. There is a national organization of parents of Spina Bifida babies. At this writing, over 100 couples are on the waiting list to adopt such a baby, no matter how severe their problem.


90% of all pregnancies on girls under 18 involve relationships with men over 18- half of those are men over 20. That statistic, by the way, is not from a pro-life friendly source. On the contrary, it is from a pro-abortion source that claims that pro-lifers actually want to protect these predators and punish the underage girls. This calumny is despicable. This is statutory rape, and Planned Parenthood has been caught repeatedly violating the laws mandating that such crimes be reported.

If pro-aborts were really so much more compassionate about the women, then why do they want to ignore the research indicating a connection between breast cancer and abortion? But there's enough data there that we should all be at least informed about it, rather than having those who allegedly have the best interests of women at heart protecting our ignorant little heads by trying to sweep it under the rug. It's a particularly nasty form of paternalism that seeks to keep this kind of information from getting out to the women it affects the most.

Here is a list of other complications and risks that women should learn about before they have an abortion, not afterwards. Looking over that list, imagine the mindset of those who believe that under-age girls should be able to keep from their parents the knowledge that they are going to have a medical procedure which carries it with the risk of:
A lacerated uterus
a perforated uterus
a blood transfusion
increased risks of future miscarriages

How compassionate is it really to insist that abortion is such a risk free procedure that minors who can't get their ears pierced without parental permission can risk getting their uterus' pierced without even letting their parents know? How compassionate is it to insist that it's 'patronizing' to insist that women should at least be told of these risks? How patronizing and hypocritical is it to prefer that women and girls should have medical procedures from doctors who won't tell them the risks?


Do all pro-lifers do everything they could or should? Undoubtedly, no, we don't. I'm not aware of any movement which doesn't have some loud mouthed jerks in it. Most of us can always do more. So far as I know, this makes us as human as the rest of the population, neither more or less hypocritical (I'm not arguing that this bar is high, it's just egalitarian). Are there hypocrites in our midst? Certainly there are. I just do not think they are representative of the movement as a whole, and given the fact that the single demographic group most in favour of unrestricted abortion is single young men, I think it's a little disingenuous for that group to go around tossing the hypocrite label.

Try a little exercise in intellectual honesty. If you're one of those who believes that pro-life folks are hypocrites who never lift a finger to help a woman or child after a baby has been born, ask yourself how you think you know this. What's your evidence? What pro-life people do you know on a personal level? Call a crisis pregnancy center and ask them what services they provide for women after they are born. Call your local Christian home-school group and tell them you're talking a poll- how many of their members are pro-life, and how many have adopted.

And if you are a pro-life Christian, keep in mind that even the ugliest and most ill thought out criticism is an opportunity to examine ourselves and think about how our actions match up with our words and beliefs.

We have an obligation towards those innocents being put to death:
Proverbs 24:11, 12
Rescue those being led away to death;
hold back those staggering toward slaughter.
If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,”
does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?
Does not he who guards your life know it?
Will he not repay each person
according to what he has done?
~ New International Version ~

However, we have more than one obligation:
Blessed is he that considereth the poor: the LORD will deliver him in time of trouble (Psalms 41:1)

“He who despises his neighbor sins, but blessed is he who is kind to the needy” (Proverbs 14:21).

“If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered” (Proverbs 21:13).

“I know that the Lord secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy” (Psalm 140:12).


Isaiah chapter 58 is also very instructive. It's pretty long, but I like it so much, I think I'll repost it elsewhere.

No matter what we do, that won't stop the louder and more obnoxious (and unfounded) accusations from the pro-abortion community, because their accusations are not founded on reality, but on hate. We need to be clear about that, very clear. Any accusation is an opportunity for self-reflection, no matter how unfounded in reality that accusation is- and we must ever keep in mind the possibility that some accusations may have a better foundation than we would wish. Think of it as a reminder- just as the bells tolled the hours to call people to prayer at regular hours in the middle ages, criticism can be just such a bell. We need to examine lives and hearts and actions and compare them with scripture because that regular self-examination is part of the Christian walk.

Most of us could always do better in some area. If it isn't in rescuing the innocent, or caring for the poor it will just be something else. We're not perfect, just forgiven, and those who have been forgiven much, love much.

New Shelves from Old

Bookcases from an old ladder.

Or hang a bookshelf on the wall from that old ladder.

That is just cool.

Yep, definitely shows his personality.

Donoman, getting his neck rubbed. He really loves it. :)

Attention, attention!

Pipsqueak and I have made something that our Mother hasn't!!

Filled Donuts




We filled one bunch with a thick Vanilla pudding and the rest with Raspberry jam!
They are sooooo good! :)

Civics Quiz

When I was in high school one summer I took a course called Civics and Free Enterprise. WE moved my senior year (oh, yeah, that was a real picnic). At my new high school there was a course called Government and Economics (unless it was the other way around). They used the exact same text book. And my new high school did not want to accept my credits for that course. They made me take it again. Yes, it was just as boring as you can imagine. It was years later before I learned that economics is a fascinating course of study, as is government, and I've made all my Progeny read more than one economics book. Which is maybe why I enjoyed this quiz so much even though I didn't do as well as I would have liked.


This is a quiz that takes a lot more thought than most internet quizzes.
I only answered 47 out of 60 correctly, for a score of 78.33% I would feel much worse about that except that the mean score for Harvard seniors was only 69.56 %

These colleges have a “sticker price” greater than $30,000 but rank among the bottom 10 for civic knowledge gained by students:
University of Pennsylvania
Duke
Yale
Princeton

These colleges have a “sticker price” less than $15,000 but rank among the top 10 for civic knowledge gained by students. Look very closely at the top two schools in this list and think about what assumptions most of us would make in comparing a Mississippi grad with a Princeton Grad:

University of Mississippi
Mississippi State University
St. Cloud State University
Murray State University
Eastern Connecticut University
Illinois State University

We'd be wrong, wouldn't we? Rah for Mississippi. I have done you wrong, and I apologize. I really should have known better.

Yale, U-Penn, Duke, Princeton, Cornell- these bottom performing colleges were also among the bottom 10 for civic knowledge gained by students while also receiving an above-average total sum in government grants to freshmen. We're not getting our money's worth, and it seems neither are the students.


Thanks to Carmon, who found it through The Crimson Wife Carmon wants to know how folks do, and what their education level is, and I am curious about that, too.

Homeschool Blog Awards Reminder

Just a reminder (No ulterior motive, we promise. There's nothing ulterior about our motives!) that the nominees in are in for the 2007 Homeschool Blog Awards. Our kind readers and friends have nominated us in two categories- Best Variety and Best Family or Group Blog.

We are in fine company, because there are many, many very cool blogs and bloggers listed here. Voting begins December 3, but it's never to early to start browsing around, discover a new blog, support an old blog, and start thinking about your choices.

The folks doing the blog awards have put in a lot of hard work and organizational skills collecting nominations, organizing them, planning categories, counting up nominations. Voting is one way of letting them know their hard work is appreciated.

Voting for the right blogs is one way to let them know their hard work is appreciated by people of good taste and judgment.

Kidding, kidding!! Voting for any of the blogs nominated of course indicates you have good taste and judgment.

Parental Influence

From the American Scholar comes an interesting (and somewhat controversial) article on nature vs nurture, and I.Q. I found it mildly interesting (in the last fifty years the collective I.Q. of Americans has gone up nearly fifty points on questions like 'how are dogs and rabbits the same,' but only 4 points in vocabulary and 2 points in math) until I got to the following section, at which point I found it riveting:

Chinese-American entrants to Berkeley in 1966 had an IQ threshold seven points below their Caucasian classmates. This held true whether the students were born in the United States or in China. Yet by 1980 55 percent of the Chinese members of the 1966 class occupied managerial, professional, or technical occupations compared to only 34 percent of their Caucasian classmates. Flynn attributes this unexpected result (in terms of their lower IQ scores) to a parentally instilled passion for intellectual achievement. He noted that “Chinese Americans are an ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high IQ rather than the reverse.”

Not surprisingly Chinese Americans in the highly successful class of 1966 provided their own children with an even more enriched cognitive environment than they themselves had enjoyed. Their children, as a result, by age six had a mean IQ nine points above Caucasian students. But as the children matured further, a surprising finding emerged. By age 10 the IQ differential had fallen four points. By age 18 IQ had declined further to only a three-point advantage. The reason for this IQ drop? According to Flynn, 'Much of their advantage was lost when school began to dilute parental influence.' "

Emphasis mine. Don't you wonder if he's one of those who insists that what we need to do help kids succeed in school is get parents more involved?

I talked to one of those parents at the library this week. I had never met her before that afternoon, but the HG who works at the library says she and her little girl spend a lot of time at the library and she has really admired them- they are close. The mother is involved, attached, sweet to her child, and they clearly have a warm relationship. She is not one who drops off her small child and leaves for hours- she comes into the library with her and they do things together. They check out books. The FYG has participated in an afternoon club at the library and she remembers the little girl as particularly sweet and nice. Jenny used to help with that club and she also tells me the little girl was one of her favorites of the children who came. She was polite, cooperative, interested, and friendly. This may be the reason she's having trouble in school.

She has a mom who wants to be more involved with her daughter's school. She's frustrated because she cannot just walk into her child's school any time she wants and see what she's doing in the classroom. She has only been able to meet with the teacher once this school year, and she's not impressed. She wants to be more involved and feels that the teachers are holding her at arm's length. Her daughter is being bullied (she's in the third grade and last week another child choked her), and the school officials are not getting involved (the mother tells me the bullying child is the daughter of 'somebody' in our small fishpond). Her daughter is making top grades, reads well ahead of her peers, and so her mother asked if there wasn't a gifted or accelerated program. The teacher, oddly, said, "Well, yes. But we don't really talk about it." When her mother asked if she could be placed in advanced classes or the gifted program, her teacher said she didn't think so, but offered no reasons why. When pressed, she mumbled something about socialization, because obviously, a child being beaten up by her peers in the third grade needs to work on that socialization issue and spend more time with those bullies, not less.

The mother told the teacher she was thinking of homeschooling and the teacher said, "I do not recommend that," but also gave no coherent explanation for why. The mother was just supposed to accept her pronouncement as authoritative, because she said so. I am not one who thinks 'because I said so' has no place in the vocabulary. It is, at times, an appropriate response from a parent to a child, from a boss to an employee, from a babysitter to charge. It is not an appropriate attitude for a teacher to have towards a parents.

This is not a teacher who welcomes involved parents. When she asks for 'involved parents,' what she means is parents who jump at her beck and call, who volunteer to cut out bulletin board decorations when asked, who volunteer to be chaperones on field trips when asked, who donate supplies when told what supplies to donate, and who do not do anything other than exactly what they are told. This seems to be part of the school culture in the area. Among themselves and to other teachers they complain the lack of parental involvement, but when a parent actually wants to be involved as an equal rather than as an assistant, their reactions tell a different story.

I heard from another mother recently who, by court order, had to place her step-child in public school kindergarten and the kindergarten teacher told her she needed to stop teaching the child at home because he was too far advanced for his class. She was also told not to let him read any books but those the teacher sent home (which are far beneath his ability) because he was getting too far ahead. The boy's stepmother asked his teacher what she was supposed to do when he asked her questions (what does this word say, how do you spell that word, how much is 125 plus 32...), just tell the boy, "no." The teacher suggested she should tell him, "You'll learn about that in school." How many teachers complaining about parents who won't get involved also complain about 'interfering' parents? These are not teachers who want 'involved parents,' they want a free and unencumbered hand with the children and the only involvement they want from parents is to do what they are told, no more and no less. "Involvement" is entirely on their terms, not the parents'. That's not really 'involvement, is it?

The young mother I met at the library last week had had enough. On Monday her little girl was crying because she did not want to go to school. She had a head-ache, a stomach-ache, and she said she was afraid the little girl who choked her was going to go after her again since she'd gotten away with it before. So her mother decided to give her a day off. They went to a bookstore and spent the day there browsing, picking a few books the little girl wanted to read, talking about what subjects she was interested in.

The child has perfect attendance, which is why the mother was so surprised when she learned on Tuesday that this absence would be counted as 'unexcused' because the parent does not have the authority to take a child out of school for the day and have it count as an excused absence. She needs a note from an authority the school actually recognizes, and that is not the parent. If school officials actually want involved parents, they would recognize the parents' authority and not require that they get a note from their doctor (which costs most parents money) in order for the school to grant them permission to have the kids not come to school that day.

What the mother at the library wanted me to tell her was whether or not she could legally just keep her child home from school and start homeschooling her on Wednesday. The answer here is yes, although that is not what the educators she talked with were telling her.

She is tired of her parental involvement being diluted.

I wrote out this post several days ago, saving it for a busy day. Yesterday while perusing the Homeschooling Carnival I read this post which ties into it very nicely.
There you can read the story of the advanced child who was not allowed to start kindergarten because the six week age gap between her and the rest of the class would hinder her socialization. One wonders if the teahcers ever actually thought about this. Were not other children in the class nine months apart in age? Why could they socialize well with each other, but a child six weeks younger would be unable to handle it? It boggles the mind. You can read this link to a report that says (in part),

"America’s schools routinely avoid academic acceleration, the easiest and most effective way to help highly capable students. While the popular perception is that a child who skips a grade will be socially stunted, fifty years of research shows that moving bright students ahead often makes them happy."

And in the comments there is this appalling but eye-opening story of another little girl who had been eagerly reading since she was three years old. When it was time to begin kindergarten, her mother asked if the child could begin first grade instead. The mother was told no, because kindergarten "was an essential step for socialization for kids and should not be skipped for any reason." Then they wanted to know if the child who was reading so well knew her letter sounds. The mother said yes, she was, and that she was concerned being forced to go to kindergarten would make school a negative experience for her, as she had found preschool stultifying (remember, this is a child who was already reading at three). School officials perked up their ears at that, and told the mother that it "sounded like she might have something called sensory integration disorder and possibly could use an evaluation-" not, as the mother had hoped, to place her in a classroom suited to her abilities, but for a disorder.

But go read the whole thing.

I'm not O.K. and Neither are you

Five years ago a football player, Ricky Williams, appeared on the Oprah show and confessed that he had always been shy.

The pharmaceutical corporation GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), through its public relations firm, Cohn & Wolfe, was paying him a still undisclosed sum, not to tout its antidepressant Paxil but simply to declare, to both Oprah and the press, "I've always been a shy person."

Why would they do that? To create a need for something they are selling.

...drug makers earn their enormous profits from a very few market-leading products for which new applications are continually sought. If those uses don't turn up through experimentation or serendipity, they can be conjured by means of "condition branding"—that is, coaching the masses to believe that one of their usual if stressful states actually partakes of a disorder requiring medication. A closely related term is more poetical: "astroturfing," or the priming of a faux-grassroots movement from which a spontaneous-looking demand for the company's miracle cure will emanate.

Just like the toy sales and kitchen sales on Black Friday (or any other day), the first step is to foster some discontentment, to create a perceived need. The next step is to sell you the cure.

The corporate giants popularly known as Big Pharma spend annually, worldwide, some $25 billion on marketing, and they employ more Washington lobbyists than there are legislators.

You don't spend 25 billion dollars on something that doesn't show any return. Those of us who have read Brave New World will recognize the uncanny prescience Huxley demonstrated with his entire world, characterized by mindless shopping and consumerism, the pursuit of sports, and Soma, the powerful drug administered by the government to help its citizens overcome, well, just about every emotional and mental state known to man except lust. Lust was acceptable, even encouraged:

"And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-that's what soma is." From Brave New World

Sounds depressingly familiar, doesn't it? Maybe I should take a pill to overcome that sinking sensation I get when I think about the similarities between our culture and the culture of Brave New World..

For the past half-century, first with tranquilizers like Miltown and Valium and more recently with the "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors" (SSRIs), Americans have required little prodding to believe that a medication can neutralize their social handicaps and supply them with a better personality than the one they were dealt by an inconsiderate fate. The vintage and recent advertisements reproduced in Christopher Lane's polemical Shyness, which features the manipulations that promoted social anxiety disorder to a national emergency, reflect Madison Avenue's grasp of this yearning to be born again without the nuisance of subscribing to a creed.

Better living through chemicals, indeed.

And we as a society are always finding more personalities that are inferior and need to be improved the easy way, through drugs. To see one way of tracking this, you need to know about the DSM. The DSM is the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

Its four editions (plus interim revisions) thus far from 1952 through 1994 specify the psychological ailments that the whole mental health system has agreed to deem authentic.
...Human nature has not metamorphosed several times since 1952, but each DSM has included more disorders than the last. The third edition of 1980 alone, liberally subdividing earlier categories, purported to have unearthed 112 more of them than the second edition of 1968, and by the fourth edition of 1994 there were over 350, marked by such dubiously pathognomonic symptoms as feeling low, worrying, bearing grudges, and smoking. Those stigmata, furthermore, are presented in a user-friendly checklist form that awards equal value to each symptom within a disorder's entry. In Bingo style, for example, a patient who fits five out of the nine listed criteria for depression is tagged with the disorder.

There is, as this very interesting article notes, a financial incentive for continuing to make diagnosis of a mental disorder easy, and treating it with drugs easier still. This is not necessarily due to greater wickedness and greed among the medical profession than elsewhere. It is merely human nature:

"As Horwitz and Wakefield [authors of The Loss of Sadness] themselves observe:

'The DSM provides flawed criteria...; the clinician, who cannot be faulted for applying officially sanctioned DSM diagnostic criteria, knowingly or unknowingly misclassifies some normal individuals as disordered; and these two errors lead to the patient receiving desired treatment for which the therapist is reimbursed.'

What motive would the APA, as a practitioners' union, have for bringing that arrangement to an end? And wouldn't the drug makers, whose power to shape psychiatric opinion should never be discounted, add their weight on the side of continued diagnostic liberality?"

If you think about the amount of money the pharmaceutical industries spend on lobbying and marketing, and the fact that in 2005 1/4 of Americans met the criteria for being 'mentally ill' things begin to make a depressing and disturbing amount of sense.


Some of you may also remember a previous post here where I opined that eventually all of us would have a medical diagnosis and there would be no category for 'normal.' I still think that is where we are headed.

Note: It is the nature of the beast that is the internet that somebody reading this- most likely a woman who will post anonymously (which is not the same as under a known pseudonym) - will take issue, attack me, and accuse me of denying that there are people who do suffer serious depression, or of arrogantly dismissing the concerns of those who suffer from serious depression, or of pride, or of mean spiritedness, of being judgmental, or of believing that nobody should ever take medicine for anything, etc, etc, etc. If you are one of those readers so inclined- please. Don't. Get off the internet and walk away. Take a break. Go for a walk. Get out a game and play with your kids. Get out an improving book and read a chapter. Eat some chocolate. Get some perspective. Do not anonymously loose your venom on me and accuse me of things I never said.

Mysterious and Inexplicable

From this website comes a great deal of information that is either over my head or beyond my attention span and this delicious little extract:

One of the mysteries of the universe is why it should speak the language of mathematics. Numbers and the relationships between them are, after all, just abstract reasoning. Yet mathematics has shown itself to be particularly adept at describing both the contents of the universe and the forces that act on them.

And really, how odd. I can't imagine any possible explanation, can you?

Tomato Paste

This is one of those little tips that I assume everybody knows, and then one day I'll read some Woman's Magazine at the doctor's office and see that somebody got 25 dollars for submitting this tip that everybody knows, so just on the off chance that maybe somebody does not know it:

To get tomato paste out of the can open one side with the can opener, discard lid (watch the sharp edges, now), and hold it upside over your bowl or pan (sometimes, rarely, but still sometimes, it leaks a wee bit of tomato oil or juice)- then use your can opener to open the other side, the 'bottom' of the can. Push the tomato paste out by gently pushing down on that bottom end until all the past slides out into your container. Voila- no waste. There will be almost no tomato paste left in the edges of the pan, and it takes less time than scraping it all out with a spoon or knife. You can carefully pick up the lid (which will probably have fallen out with the last of the paste), gently wipe it clean on the side of your bowl and throw it all away.

Works for me, although I'm still not getting 25.00 for the tip.
I could really use it, too.

A woodpecker.

Not the best picture, by my cousin and I saw this lovely woodpecker as we were going for a walk yesterday afternoon. It stayed quite near us for a while, but it was fluttering around too much for me to get a really good picture.

Inside my brain during a typical day on campus

It's a dingy building on campus. I've only had one class in it since it's really a science building and I'm a history person. The class was in the basement, so in an even dingier place. I once saw a huge cockroach on the hall floor (I have always wondered if that was a science experiment MIA or a serious indication of how run-down the building really is).

The classroom is possibly the only one I've had on that campus without windows. It is a large, greyish, totally unappealing room. The type that, when I was at the community college, made me think of penitentiaries rather than places of higher learning.

I've never stepped foot in the building again after that class was over. I pass it frequently while walking to my car, though, and every time I see it I feel a surge of delight.

Why? It was in that ugly basement classroom that I had my first real history class. I soaked up lectures on Aztecs, on the Spanish conquests, on the Spanish colonial period (fascinating stuff!), on independence movements, on Bourbon politics. I discussed books on bread riots, on Aztec accounts of the conquest, on colonial officials. I took so many notes that I couldn't bear to throw them away after the class ended. I have them in a folder in my room and have actually used them for another class.

So the classroom was hideous, but I have spent some of my happiest hours on campus there. :-)

A quote :)

"Faith, for those that have it, is the most certain form of knowledge, not a tentative opinion." How to Read a Book

Rambling

What do these things have in common:
Boys; silly people, unreliable people; A Bargain For Francis; dead rabbits; discernment; rickets; bone density; exercise; futons; day beds; Star Wars and jam tarts.


I read a story in an old magazine (1910) about a preacher who introduced his sermon thusly:
Brethren, my seromn is divided into three parts.

One is the text.
The second is where I leave the text.
The third part is where I never get back to it.

Far too many political speeches sound like that.

For that matter, I suspect that I can hit a little closer to home, too. Far too many of my little forays into lecture-land consist primarily of the third part, where I have left the text never to return.

All those things listed above? What they have in common is the topics of conversation during a language arts lesson.

Autumn Sausage

I like this picture because you can still see the steam rising off the top of the food. I liked the food because it was tasty and flavorful. "Flavor" is not something JennyanyDots like to have in her food, but I thought it was delicious. The sausage was a mite spicy, even though it was supposed to be mild. But still, it was quite good.

Autumn Sausage Skillet
Four cooked sweet potatoes, diced into bite sized pieces- set aside.

1 1/2 pounds of mildly spiced Italian sausage, cut into bite sized pieces- fry these with one diced onion and a cup of chopped celery. (you can make meatballs with your sausage, which is what the original recipe called for, but I didn't bother)

When sausage is mostly done, add 5 or six medium apples, peeled and diced. Add the sweet potatoes, 2 cups of orange juice, 6 tablespoons of brown sugar, 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, , a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and stir while it all heats through.

Serve over rice or noodles (we had it with orzo).

Serves 10- if you need it to serve more, increase the vegetables and/or make it more like a stew.
For stew: Add about 1/2 a cup or more of water or broth to the pan. In a separate bowl mix 1/2 cup of water with 3 tablespoons of cornstarch. When the cornstarch is mixed well, add the water and cornstarch mixture to the saucepan of sausage and sweet potatoes and cook over medium heat until it's thick and bubbly and the cornstarch has cleared.

Reading Labels

"Look at this great new snack," an acquaintance who is entirely supported by government programs said to me last week. "It's YOGURT! I am buying these for treats for my little boy, and he gets this instead of candy, so it's healthier!"

Here are the ingredients:

INGREDIENTS: SUGAR, COATING (SUGAR, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED PALM KERNEL AND PALM OIL, CALCIUM CARBONATE, NONFAT YOGURT POWDER [CULTURED WHEY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, CULTURED SKIM MILK, YOGURT CULTURES; HEAT - TREATED AFTER CULTURING], NONFAT MILK, REDUCED MINERAL WHEY, COLOR ADDED, SOY LECITHIN, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, SALT), CORN SYRUP, MODIFIED CORN STARCH, APPLE PUREE CONCENTRATE, CONTAINS TWO PERCENT OR LESS OF WATER, PECTIN, CORNSTARCH, ASCORBIC ACID (VITAMIN C), CITRIC ACID, SODIUM CITRATE, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, MALIC ACID, COLOR ADDED, CARNAUBA WAX, BLUE NO. 2 LAKE, CARMINE COLOR, RED NO. 40, BLUE NO. 1, RED NO. 40 LAKE

Each serving has 90 calories, 15 from fat (which children actually NEED) and 72 from carbs in the form of sugar, sugar, and corn syrup.
Each serving has 30 percent of the daily recommended allowance for sugars, 10 percent of the daily calcium requirement, and 100 percent of vitamin C.

She urged me to try them, and I thought they were nasty, but I realize personal taste varies. I don't mean to be a food snob, and my children (and I) do eat more junk food than we should. But it troubles me greatly when an adult who actually does have a high school diploma thinks this is a reasonable substitute for candy. It's really not much different from candy because it actually is candy.

She's on food stamps, and I know what she buys with those food stamps. It's not impressive. I also know it's not socially acceptable to look askance at what people buy with those food stamps. We're not supposed to 'pass judgement' of any sort on what people do with what is essentially other people's money. I have to wonder why not. Another word for judgment is discernment. All choices are really not created equal.

Homeschooling Carnivals

The 100th edition of the Homeschooling Carnival is up here.

The sixth Charlotte Mason Carnival is up over at Cindy's place, and it's a great one.

Johnny Still Can't Read

Here's a surprise; it's another National Endowment for the Arts study showing that kids aren't reading well these days, and the more time they spend in school, they worse they read.

There are a few other 'surprising' findings as well:

"...students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.

The study also examined results from reading tests administered to adults and found a similar trend: The percentage of adults who are proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined."

Americans are reading less. The less we read for fun, the more poorly we do on reading tests. So while schools are trying to boost their their students' reading levels through tests, vocabulary drills, and reading comprehension exercises, what the kids really need is some free time to sit around and read books.
This is from the report released last week from:

"...the National Endowment for the Arts, based on an analysis of data from about two dozen studies from the federal Education and Labor Departments and the Census Bureau as well as other academic, foundation and business surveys. After its 2004 report, “Reading at Risk,” which found that fewer than half of Americans over 18 read novels, short stories, plays or poetry, the endowment sought to collect more comprehensive data to build a picture of the role of all reading, including nonfiction.

In his preface to the new 99-page report Dana Gioia, chairman of the endowment, described the data as “simple, consistent and alarming.”

Those whose business it is (by which I mean it is their field of income producing work) to make sure kids learn how to read like to excuse themselves from any responsibility when those kids fail to read by saying that it's not their fault, it's all the parents' out there who don't read and who don't encourage their kids to read.

I am more than willing to acknowledge that this is ultimately the responsibility of parents. I just think that if it can't be the educators' fault when a child fails to read well after years under their care, why do they get the credit when a child learns to read? And why are we paying them if they cannot actually fix poor parenting and sad backgrounds? Why not use the money for something that might actually work?

But that's an old rant you've heard here before. Here's something very interesting. It is also common in certain circles (the college = education, no college = ignorance and lack of education crowd, in particular) to say that educated parents produce educated kids, and uneducated parents produce uneducated kids. I have no beef with that, but I do object to the way 'education' is redefined as 'college,' when that ain't necessarily so:

"...students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books."

There you have it. You can be college educated and still be a book-free ignoramus, and you can lack any college experience and still provide an educationally rich home-life.

The decline of reading is pretty obvious when we look around. You can compare the literary vocabulary of books published today with those published a hundred or even fifty years ago. You can try using a word like crepuscular around your friends and neighbors and watch the reaction. You can work at the library and see how many books are checked out versus movies. Or you can cover your ears and pretend things are still good:

Timothy Shanahan, past president of the International Reading Association and a professor of urban education and reading at the University of Illinois at Chicago, suggested that the endowment’s report was not nuanced enough. “I don’t disagree with the N.E.A.’s notion that reading is important, but I’m not as quick to discount the reading that I think young people are really doing,” he said, referring to reading on the Internet.

I'd be willing to grant the Internet if I could be sure people were reading blogs like this one (:D) or books like The Age of Chivalry, The Oxford Book of English Verse, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or even books like Understood Betsy. Instead I am sadly afraid that what they are doing online is reading and sending messages like these:

i ttly cant wait 2 c u!!! yayayaya o and i gots 2 go so reply i got 2 minutes!!
----

yall im bored and im at my house alone and i keep hearing things hitting my front door and my cat is flipping out for no reason! n-e ways well uhhhh yeah cant wait till thanks giving yummy food and bunches of cool stuff like that! well bye!

I FORGOT TO TELL YALL SOMETHIN I GOT MY DRIVERS PERMIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11 YAYYYYY!
----

how was ur turkey day mini vacation? mine wuz great!!! yesterday i hung out w/ some friends , ate a lot of food, jumped on the trampaline!!

For which crimes against the English language and the human brain they ought to be confined to the living room with no other media but a stack of improving books. We could begin with the Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham before moving on to Five Little Peppers, The Hobbit, and Jane Austen. I'm not cruel.

Recipe Round-up

The Carnival of the Recipes Countdown to Christmas Edition is ready for your perusal

Wee Wifey is collecting Christmas Tea recipes to get ready for a tea at her church. If you have great recipe ideas for her Christmas Tea, please send them to Wee Wifey at zosha@voyager.net.

Next week's edition will be hosted by A Penny Closer The theme is Cooking on a Budget (since we're all spending any extra money on gifts). Send in your favorite inexpensive recipes to recipe.carnival@gmail.com by noon CST on Saturday or use the handy carnival submission form here.

The 41st Make It From Scratch Carnival is up- plenty to see and make and just think wistfully about there.

Rickets.

This was an interesting article on the rise of rickets as a result of less milk, exercise, and sunshine. Not only is rickets a problem, but less bone density results in a higher risk of osteoporosis later on in life. With all the time children spend playing computer games, they are getting far less sunlight and exercise which are needed for bone growth.

Another "this wasn't in my job description" moment

17 yo boy: Do you have any books on fatherhood and preparing for parenting? I seem to have gotten myself into some trouble and have a lot of homework to do.

I found some books for him, told him that even though things were probably really scary right now, he was going to fall in love with the baby at first sight.

And then I wished I had more words... words to commend him for making the right choice now. And wished passionately that parents would help their children to make the right choices beforehand.

unsolicited advice

People do love to give unsolicited advice to you while pregnant, nursing, parenting, etc. It is hard, and it does get frustrating. Try to keep an open mind, however. Some of the advice is dreadful., but some of it isn't. Some of it is the voice of experience, wiser, older women trying to tell you what they wish somebody had told them when they were pregnant, nursing, parenting, first homeschooling. Just smile, say thanks, and tell them something noncommital ("I’ll give that some thought", or even, ‘That’s something to think about, isn’t it?"). Then think it over carefully in the quiet and privacy of your own home- even if your home isn't exactly quiet, you know what I mean.=)

Once upon a time I had five small children. The three youngest were 2, 3, and 5. The 2 and 3 y.o. were 17 mos apart (still are, for that matter, but they are much older now). The 5 y.o. had severe disabilities and was very short for her age and acted about two (still does, for that matter, but she is also older now). Therefore, the three youngest looked to be nearly the same age. I got all kinds of rude comments, advice, questions, and busybodied interference. I would begin the day by smiling graciously and responding with humour, but sometimes at the end of the day I would be snapping and rude. On one memorable occasion I lost patience and responded to some version of "My, you have your hands full" with short tempered, defensive sounding "Yes, full of blessings, and I wouldn’t trade one of them for the world!" The lady I was talking to got tears in her eyes and told me she’d always wanted a large family, but her husband refused.

I didn’t learn, and something similar happened again. After telling me over and over how she was glad she only had one child because she couldn't handle any more and that one was all she could take, I got frustrated. She kept saying those things in front of her little girl, and I was sure her little girl was a darling, not a reason to never have another child, so I kept responding with, "But it's not really that bad. Your little girl is so sweet. I'm sure you could handle more if they were all like her. That lady finally told me she’d always wanted a large family but nearly
bled to death on the delivery table and the doctors performed an emergency
hysterectomy while she was unconscious. She was 20 at the time.

I still didn’t learn, and something similar happened and finally I got it.


When feeling irked at such advice, we need to be sure it is not our own pride reacting- Sometimes reacted defensively to things said to me as a new mother because I didn’t like people assuming I was ignorant (about birth control; about pregnancy; about parenting) I wanted them to realize that I was an informed, intelligent person. I should not have assumed that their advice meant they thought I was young and foolish and/or stupid, and I should not care so much about what people think about my
intelligence and maturity. I still care, but I shouldn’t care so much.=)


What people are actually saying to you is not always what they mean. People
make comments for many reasons- because they think it is expected; because they
wish they were in your shoes but have to hide it; because they aren’t thinking
at all, just making what is socially accepted as small talk. In that example above with the young mother who'd awoke from childbirth to learn that she would never have another child- I wasn't saying what I really meant to her, either. What I really meant was, "Please be careful of what you say around your little girl. I think you might be hurting her feelings or making her feel responsible for the fact that she has no siblings, and I am sure you don't mean that." But that's not what I said.

Sometimes people say things to you that have nothing to do with you- they are saying something they wish they’d said another time, another place, to another person. You just happen to be there. If you take my own unsolicited advice, you'll just smile, nod sympathetically, and change the subject when you can- or if you're really good, you'll ask the right sort of questions to draw out what the other person really means.

I admire people like that. My social skills limit me to smiling a lot and asking if anybody would like another cup of tea.

Homeschool Leadership

I wrote a post called Whose Your Guru that got a lot of attention back when, maybe more than it deserved. I've revisited the theme more than once, and I think it bears revisiting again.

There is a tendency to set people up on a pedestal, and the further removed they are from us in person, the higher and more unrealistic the pedestal. It's harder to make a guru out of somebody you know personally, because you see them sometimes show their feet of clay. You know, for example, that somebody may write in a breezy, friendly fashion, but be shy and reserved in person. You know that they have crooked teeth, unwashed dogs, a tendency to be impatient when hungry or air-headed when confronted with too many choices at the mall.

But for some reason, when all we know of a high-profile person in the homeschooling community comes from their writing and public speaking engagements, we put them up on a high pedestal and give their opinions more control in our lives than they may warrant, and give their faults, should we ever discover them, more blame as well. It's not fair, not to us, and not to them.


I was shaken when I read this article by Reb Bradley. I was even shocked. I could not understand how a man who had been writing and speaking as an expert on parenting for two decades could claim that after those two decades he had this revelation:

I was absolutely certain that since I was training them "in the way they should go", and I was doing most everything I had written in my book, I would be a success as a parent. However, I had yet to discover it wasn't all about ME and MY success. In fact, I had yet to learn that the parent who thinks it’s all about THEIR success is often contributing to their children’s struggles. (Revelation #1 – proper parenting is about the children not the parent.

I really, really like Reb Bradley and his ministry. I know he's helped a lot of people. I like what he says here- I agree with probably 85 percent of it. But this was something I took for granted that he already knew before he wrote his first book. Is this because I am a better person, a better parent than Reb Bradley? Not at all. I am positive that I have made mistakes and had 'revelations' about parenting that he would be stunned anybody who had a child didn't already know. I make my own mistakes. This just didn't happen to be one of them, and I was astonished that somebody I admired so much could have had such a fundamental flaw in his parenting yet still write books about parenting as an expert. But my astonishment was my fault, not his.

One of his paragraphs just about made my hair stand on end. He is writing about a temporary but serious breach in his relationship with his 18 y.o. son. It was so serious he had to ask his son to leave the home. And this is what happened:

I remember speaking the words to him – “Son, you’ve ruined my dreams.” You see, I had a dream for my family... But now, my son had gone and “messed up” my perfect dream. Nothing is wrong with dreaming of good things for your children, but the truth was, my dream for my son was mostly about me.

I read that and was genuinely shocked. How, I wondered, could it be possible for Reb Bradley not to have known that this was a problem? He says it took years before he was even able to see what role he had played in damaging that relationship (which I believe is now healed).

In hindsight, what was particularly grievous was that I was more worried about the failure of my dream of “success” than the fact that my son and I had a broken relationship.

How could he not have shocked himself when he blurted out something like "How could YOU do this to ME?" I thought everybody knew that this was the wrong thing for a parent to say to an errant child, because if a child is truly errant what he is doing to himself is so much worse than what he is doing to the parent that the parent should be too grieved to even think about himself. But apparently, everybody doesn't know what I took for granted.

We should never assume that even 'experts' know everything, even if it's something we do know.

He went on to say,

"However, when we begin to see our children as a reflection or validation of us, we become the center of our dreams, and the children become our source of significance."

I was stunned. I had made a bit of a guru of a man who learned something I considered an obvious piece of common knowledge only after a broken relationship and over twenty years of parenting? And of course, that is the problem- not Reb, but me. I shouldn't need to be told that he is a human with human failings. I should assume that and should not be shocked upon learning that his judgment has not been infallible over the course of his lifetime. I shouldn't assume that what I think is common knowledge really is. He did say and write things in his books that I did not know, or that I benefited from hearing put in a different way, or that helped me apply what I did know, and I would still recommend his work to other parents. Because I do not want a guru does not mean I have nothing to learn.

I should also assume whenever I read or listen to ' a guru' that I am getting a filtered picture- and this isn't even necessarily deliberate. Quite often we do not even realize where our thinking falls short of common sense or God's word until something heartbreaking shakes up our complacency. There is no reason for a person whose expertise lies in simplifying great ideas, making them practical for our use, and writing or speaking well about them to carry transparency so far that his books and speaking engagements resemble the confession box more than a homeschooling seminar. No public face in the homeschooling community is under obligation to us to reveal all his warts. We should not be ninnies. We should exercise common sense and realize that everybody has warts, flaws, even sin in their lives that might surprise or disappoint us if we know.

I do not want to be misunderstood, I am not saying 'don't listen to ....,' and I am not dismissing all teaching from sources we do not know personally. I am suggestion caution and common sense. If somebody has some important thoughts that we find useful for our homes, we should give thoughtful consideration to those points without fawning over them and creating a cult of personality. My point is really about those of us who make gurus of normal human beings who perhaps have a gift for communication, for explaining things well, for expounding on the Bible, for wisdom, or whatever. Admire them. Respect them. But do not let what they have to say replace your own careful, prayerful judgment. Do not mistake charisma for wisdom, either. This is especially true if the only way your know these people is from what they write. Or, yes, blog.

Several times a year I hear of yet another homeschooling guru who has written books, sold material, done a lot of public speaking, and advocated certain things for years, and one day begins selling more materials basically saying, 'Disregard the other things I said, this is the way to do it now.' The guru sounds just as confidant and sure about this new idea as the guru once did about the old one, although the 'new' idea is completely the opposite of the old idea. Who's to say which guru is right- version 1.0 or version 3.0? Well, you're the one who is going to have decide what is right for your family, and you don't do it by giving every gifted public speaker the keys to your brain. Sometimes they change their minds because they were wrong. But sometimes the new idea is the wrong one- they are not infallible (and neither are we. That's the point- none of us are). Sometimes we grow older and wiser- and sometimes we just get older.

Some time ago I read this interesting post about another guru who changed his mind:

Gary North recently wrote an article on Why Home Schools Are Superior to Private Schools”. It’s a good one to read, and worth commenting on. In the past, one of Gary’s criticisms of home schools has been their inefficiency.

Basically Gary believed that what a child could learn at home was limited to what the parents, primarily the mother, knew. He thought that if several families got together they could support a professional and thus make sure the offspring were really learning hard stuff. He acknowledges that he underestimated parents. He now realizes, he says, that:

Parents are more interested in their children’s performance than salaried teachers are. Teachers must concern themselves with a room full of other people’s children. A mother concerns herself with a room full of her children. It is a smaller room.

As 'Debitur' wrote:

Of course, what was an epiphany for North was likely self-evident to the average homeschooling Mom, even if she’s never heard of Mises.

If you've never heard of Mises, go read the post for the reference. My point is simply this- what was an epiphany to Gary was self-evident to me as a young mother in my mid-twenties- and not because I was so much more brilliant than he was-, and that's why he didn't even make me blink when I read, maybe a couple of decades ago, that he thought private schools were much better. There were several reasons, but that was certainly a key point in my decision not to read much of his stuff anymore. I knew that what he preferred was wrong for our family, and fortunately the HM and I were in agreement about what we knew.

But I wonder... how many less confidant (or simply less bullheaded) parents out there dutifully put their kids in a private school because Gary said it would be best and they thought he was wiser than they? How many of them set aside the fairly light and easy (and fun) work of homeschooling and picked up the much heavier burden of trying to work with other families to start a private school? I wonder what they are thinking now?

The entire post at is a great read on self-education, real learning, and homeschooling. I'm kind of yanking it out of shape a bit to make my own point, and I hope nobody misses out on the really interesting things he says about education.

I think it's important to think about what it means when a man to whom many people gave entirely too much authority over their lives can write 20 years later:

It’s obvious, isn’t it? Yet it took me 20 years of watching the home school movement develop to come to this conclusion.

This late conclusion may be an example that runs counter to my theory of child pedagogy. I wish that someone had pointed it out to me earlier. It might have saved me two decades. But I might not have believed it. Self-education is the best education as a general rule.

The truth, as always, was out there, and in this case not even so very far 'out there,' as I learned from reading the post, North and Robinson of Robinson's Curriculum have been friends and colleagues for twenty years (almost as long as we have been homeschooling). Robinson, for those who do not know, is a staunch advocate of self-education. For some reason, Gary North is just now seeing the light. I doubt it's because nobody told him. Too bad for those who believed he had already seen the light for the last twenty years.

Gary North is not one of my favorite authors- far from it. But I do not want to be unfair. We all make mistakes, learn, grow, change, improve our reasoning, come to different conclusions, change our minds. And that's on reason why we should not put overmuch trust in men or gurus. By all means we should be humble enough to glean and consider what the 'experts' have to say. But in the end, it's our family we are talking about, and Gary never met us. He can't make the best decisions for us.

Not everybody who considers himself a 'leader' or 'called to ministry' is. And of those who actually are, they still may not actually be called to lead and minister to you. 'leader?' Not a single high profile person in the homeschooling community is in a position of authority in my church. Not one of them is an elected official in an area with any authority over me. Not one of them is in a position of leadership in a company that determines my income. Most of them are not ordained, elected, or appointed to serve in any sort of authoritative office. For many of them, their leadership seems to consist of charging money to people who want to hear them speak or to read the books they have authored. All of them have a gift for persuasive communication or they do not make it very far. That's a resource, and quite often a good one. These are not good enough reasons to make gurus out of mere men.

We all need to take heed how we stand and remember that it is to our own Master we stand or fall- not to a guru who writes well, and that what we are doing is about our children, not conforming to some model of perfection laid forth for us by a public speaker who does not know those children. Glean where you find good wheat to glean.

But I am inclined to think the best things in life are free.

Lares and Penates, redux

The Word for The Day at Merriam Webster's online Word of the Day is lares and penates:

The phrase "lares and penates" is at home in the elevated writings of scholars. A classicist could tell you that Lares and Penates were Roman gods once worshipped as guardians of the household, and an avid Walpolian might be able to tell you that his or her favorite author (Horace Walpole) is credited with first domesticating the phrase to refer to a person's possessions. In the centuries since Walpole used "lares and penates" in a 1775 letter to the English poet William Mason, the phrase has become solidly established in the English language, and it continues to be used by authors and journalists today.

Perhaps. But the first time I recall seeing the phrase in domestic use was in The Complete Home, An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Life and Affairs Embracing All the Interests of The Household.... by Julia McNair Wright and published in the 1870s. I have mentioned it here several times. It was the first book on homemaking I ever read. I was about twelve. It remains one of my favorites.

I blogged about the lares and penates (which rhymes with Aries and Potaties) passage here- following is a partial repost:

Now, into this beautiful and well-surrounded home we must invite those virtues which are the true Lares and Penates of a dwelling. First, we must call in ORDER, for where Order is lacking, comfort and beauty and their attendant train, and often love, will fly out of the window. Order will secure the saving of time, the saving of strength, prevent the rapid wasting or wearing out of house or furnishings, and preserve a healthful atmosphere, inspiriting to the family and inviting to guests.

But Order alone might be cold, and carried to the extreme of being forbidden. Let us secure the gracious presence of BEAUTY. The love of Beauty is in the human soul a reflection of the mind of God. Truly, He is a right kingly lover of Beauty, who could not let even a beetle go from his creating hand without polishing and spotting its wings; who paints admirably, not only the flowers of the field, but the fishes of the sea, the crabs crawling on the shore, and the reptiles burrowing in wood and wall. If we deny our homes of beauty, we deny what would be inspiriting and refining to ourselves, and we bereave our children of their natural inheritance. Beauty makes homes dear to their occupants, it softens the asperities of life, and binds in mutual tastes and mutual pleasures the members of a family.

Yet the pursuit of Beauty must not lead us into extravagance....

William Morris, whom we quote in our 'masthead' above about filling the eye and satisfying the mind, also said that we should have nothing in our homes that we do not believe to be beautiful or know to be useful.

The Apostle Paul said that the sort of things we wanted to spend time thinking about should be things which are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report, virtuous, or praiseworthy.

These are good lares and penates of a home and good principles by which to examine the clutter and habits of our lives. We want order and beauty, but not extravagance. I think it is important to avoid extravagance in order as well as beauty. "Aunt Sophronia," who is the fictional narrator of The Complete Home, is referring to economy and the bounds of good taste when she warns against extravagance in beauty. I would add that extravagance in order and organization is not necessarily the same thing as excellence.

If you are so orderly and organized that your friends hesitate to interrupt your scheduled pursuit of excellence to ask you to sit with a child while they have a doctor appointment, it is not excellence you are pursuing.
If you cannot set a math lesson aside to hold a funeral for a dead bird, that is not excellence.
There is a level of rigid perfection in the pursuit of organization that builds walls, tears down bridges, divides and discourages. We are not to be building walls that separate us, but bridges that connect, structures that support, lives that provide nurture and encouragement.

If people come to your orderly, organized home and leave feeling discouraged, inadequate, and inferior, it is not because you are engaged in the pursuit of excellence. If you preen yourself when complimented on your exquisite taste and the beauty of your home and when friends speak admiringly (or wistfully) of your order, but nobody ever says, "You have such a comfortable home. I feel so at home here," that is not a praiseworthy excellence.

Excellence does not put others down or give others a sense of your own superiority. Excellence is humble. While we do not wish to encourage complacency about disorder and slovenliness, excellence joyfully spurs others on to love and good deeds. It does not care more for its own reputation for perfection than it does for friends and family.

Let us not turn virtues into household idols.

A bible study I did:

I went through Proverbs and looked at what it had to say about what a Godly lady should be and what she shouldn't be.
Here's what I came up with :)
(Yes, is rather long for me:))

Qualities a lady should have according to the Proverbs

A Godly Woman is:

Gracious (prov 11:16)
Virtuous (12:4; 31:10)
Prudent (19:14)
Trustful (19:11)
Wise (31:26)
Kind (31:26)
Fears the Lord (31:30)

She should be able to:
Work with her hands (31:13)
Get food from afar (31:14)
Rise early and get food ready for her family (31:15)
Use money wisely (31:16)
Plant things (31:16)
Use her hands (31:19)
Help the poor and needy (31:20)
Make herself clothes (31:22)
Know the needs of her household (31:27)


She will be:
A crown to her husband (12:4)
Able to build her house (14:1)
A good wife (18:22)
Do her husband good (31:12)
Strong (31:17)
Not idle (31:27)

Results:
Her merchandise will be good (31:18)
Her candle won't go out at night (31:18)
She will have no fear of the cold because her family is well clothed (31:21)
She will have a wise husband (31:23)
She will have strength and honor (31:25)
Her husband and children will praise and bless her (31:28)
Her works will praise her and not herself (31:31)


Qualities a lady should not have according to the Proverbs

An Un-Godly Woman is:

Like a deep ditch and narrow pit
She waits as for prey
She increases the number of sinners among men
(23:27-28)
She causes men to sin with fair speech and flattery of lips (7:21)
She makes her husband ashamed and is as rottenness in his bones (12:4)
Her house inclineth unto death, and her paths unto the dead (2:18)
She flattereth with her words (prov 2:16; 6:24; 7:5)
She leaves the guide of her youth (2:17)
She forgets the covenant of God (2:17)
She as lips that drop as honeycomb (5:3)
She has a mouth that is smoother than oil (5:3)
(7:10-17)
She has the attire of a harlot
She has a subtle heart
She is loud
She is stubborn
She doesn't stay in her own house
She catches and kisses
She has an impudent face
(9:13)
She is clamorous
She is simple
She knoweth nothing
She sits at the door of her house calling to simple men
She is beautiful, but has she no discretion (11:22)
She tears down her house (14:1)
She is brawling/ cantankerous (21:19)
She is contentious/ angry (21:19)
She is adulterous and admits no wrong (30:20)

Her end will be as bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two edged sword (5:4)

If there is anything that you think I got wrong, or that you think I misunderstood, please, tell me. :)
Or, if you thought that this was helpful, you could tell
me that! :)

Coffee and Literature

Anne Fadiman has a new collection of essays out (oh, joy!!!) titled At Large and At Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist. One of her essays is devoted to the divine coffee bean and its handmaiden, caffeine. The Guardian has posted the little gem in full, and you can read it if your mother tells you it's okay after previewing (and some mothers will want to preview and perhaps edit one pesky little sentence).=)

She begins by telling us about a nightly study ritual she had with her friends Peter and Alex. They began by preparing the coffee, elixir of life without which the intellectual life is dulled and listless:

Alex came from Cambridge, but Peter was alluringly international. He had a Serbian father, an American mother, and a French coffeemaker. At my home in Los Angeles, the coffee-making process had taken about three seconds: you plunked a spoonful of Taster's Choice freeze-dried crystals in a cup, added hot water, and stirred. With Peter's cafetière à piston, you could easily squander a couple of hours on the business of assembling, heating, brewing, pouring, drinking, disassembling, and cleaning (not to mention talking), all the while telling yourself that you weren't really procrastinating, because as soon as you were fully caffeinated you would be able to study like a fiend. The cafetiere had seven parts: a cylindrical glass beaker; a four-footed metal frame; a chrome lid impaled through its center by a plunger rod topped with a spherical black knob; and three metal filtration discs that screwed onto the tip of the plunger in a sequence for whose mastery our high SAT scores had somehow failed to equip us. After all the pieces were in place, you dolloped some ground coffee into the beaker, poured in boiling water, and waited precisely four minutes. (In the title sequence of The Ipcress File, special agent Harry Palmer unaccountably fails to carry out this crucial step. As an eagle-eyed critic for The Guardian once observed, Palmer grinds his beans and pops them into his cafetiere, but fails to let the grounds steep before he depresses the plunger. How could any self-respecting spy face his daily docket of murder and mayhem fueled by such an anemic brew?) Only then did you apply the heel of your hand to the plunger knob and ram the grounds to the bottom of the beaker, though the potable portion always retained a subtle trace of Turkish sludge. What a satisfying operation! The plunger fit exactly into its glass tunnel, presenting a sensuous resistance when you urged it downward; if you pressed too fast, hot water and grounds would gush out the top. The whole process involved a good deal of screwing and unscrewing and trying not to make too much of a mess.

I chose that particular excerpt because that's how we make our coffee, although it does not take us several hours. Because we have an extra tap at our kitchen sink and this tiny tap dispenses water hot enough to steep tea and soak coffee I think it's only about two minutes longer than it would take us to make instant, using the microwave, and using the same hot water tap for instant would require some cooling down time before you could drink it without scalding your esophagus. Our coffee water gets the right length of cooling off time in the coffee press while doing the work it was made for- soaking freshly ground coffee beans. The return on those three minutes is in the immeasurable superiority of coffee made this way.. Since we also grind the coffee beans fresh for every two cups of coffee we make, add another few seconds and another immeasurable level of prodigious flavor

We own no other coffee pot than our Coffee Press. Our first press was a present from dear friends who wished to recruit others to their own personal addiction. It was a going away present when we left that state where residents prefer a coffee hut on every corner to a chicken in every pot (Washington, of course). We thought they were unnecessarily extravagant- until we had our first cup made this way. That one broke, and fortunately I found another in a local consignment store here in the beknighted midwest where nobody even knew what it was for. That's why I got a brand-new-still-in-the-box-French-Press for 5.00, so I am not complaining.

My husband calls the product he makes with this process a "Cup of Whoooaaaaaaaah!" My friend who has a weak stomach and complains that it burns going down and all the way out calls it a Cup of Woe. Less poetic types might call it a Cuppa Go. Most of our guests who taste this ambrosia look forward to having it again. We suspect this may be the real reason we have so many houseguests.

In my 1925 Encyclopedia (from whence the above illustration was taken) under coffee, in addition to all the information one could want about the history of coffee, the coffee drinking habits of different nations, and how and where coffee is grown, I read:

"In the seventeenth century the coffee houses of London played a very real part in the life of the day. In them were organized many of the social, political and literary clubs to which most of the illustrious men of the nation belonged; and from them went out judgments from which there was no appeal."

For lo! the board with cups and spoons is crowned
The berries crackle, and the mill turns round.
...
At once they gratify their scent and taste
And frequent cups prolong the rich repast
...
Coffee (which makes the politician wise/
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes). -

Flaubert, Balzac, and Jonathan Swift all used their pens to memorialize coffee. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:: A cup of coffee (real coffee) home-browned, home-ground, homemade, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.

~From Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock (1688-1744)

Isn't it nice to think that when we sip our morning cup of coffee we are in some mystical communion with the literary greats of yesteryear, carrying on a tradition of noble and erudite lineage? Our french press adds a touch of elegance and culture to an otherwise bleary eyed morning. Walking through the steps of preparing coffee this way is taking a stand for excellence and taste in a world of instant gratification and homogenized flavor. Instant coffee is utilitarian, and end, for expedience rather than taste. Coffee made by grinding the beans and slowly steeping them in the press is coffee is a discipline, an atmosphere, and a life.

Or maybe our French Press is just our little way of free-basing coffee. I am almost ready for second cup of the morning.

Previous posts about Fadiman books here, here, here, and here.

November Birds

This is from Frank Chapman's 1907 Bird Life, and I think addresses specifically seasonal bird life in the northeast:

It is an interesting fact that the last migrants to leave in the fall are the first to arrive in the spring.

The bird-life of November, when the fall migration is practically concluded, closely resembles, therefore, that of March, when the spring migration is inaugurated.

the reason for this similarity is to be found in the fact that both months furnish birds with essentially the same kind of food. thus the Loon, Grebes, Ducks, Geese, and Kingfisher remain until November of early December, when the forming of ice deprives them of food and forces them to seek open water. Woodcock and Snipe linger until they can no longer probe the frost-hardened earth; but the thaws of March will bring all these birds back to us by restoring their food.

Certain Sparrows stay with us until the weeds bearing the seeds on which they feed are covered by snow, when they are compelled to retreat farther southward, returning, however, as soon as March suns lay bear the earth.

Few birds' songs are heard in November. In some sheltered, sun-warmed hollow, Song and White-throated Sparrows may continue in voice, but the characteristic bird-note of the month is the sweet minor "scatter-call" of Bob-whites, who , after their sudden flight from the sportsman, endeavor to find one another by questioning, whistled whère-are-you? whère-are-you?

These are the birds that fly south in November:
Wood Ducks
Great Blue Herons
American Bitterns
Woodcocks
Mourning Doves
Belted Kingfishers
Red-winged Blackbirds
Purple Grackles
Cowbirds
Vesper Sparrows
Field Sparrows
Chipping Sparrows

Here are some of the birds that remain in residence year round:
Bob-white
Ruffed Grouse
Red-shouldered and Red-tailed Hawk
Broad winged Hawk
Marsh Hawk
Sparrow Hawk- and other hawks
Owls: Screech, Long-eared, Short-eared, Barred, and Great Horned.
Woodpeckers- Downy, Hairy, Red-headed, Flicker
Prairie Horned Lark
American Crow
Fish Crow
Blue Jay
Starling
Goldfinches
Cardinals (from New York City and southward)
Cedar Waxwing
Chickadee,
Tufted Timouse
White-breasted Nuthatch

Sunday Hymn Post

Holy Trinity, thanks and praise to Thee,
That our life and whole salvation
Flow from Christ’s blest incarnation,
And His death for us on the shameful cross.

Had we angels’ tongues, with seraphic songs,
Bowing hearts and knees before Thee,
Triune God, we would adore Thee
In the highest strain for the Lamb once slain.

Cyberhymnal

---------------

A very long excerpt from The Two Towers

    'And we shouldn't be here at all,' said Sam, 'if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually-- their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on--and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same-- like Old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?'
     'I wonder,' said Frodo. 'But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to. '
     'No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was the worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it--and the Silmaril went and came to Earendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got-- you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?'
     'No, they never end as tales,' said Frodo. 'But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later-- or sooner.'
     'And then we can have some rest and some sleep,' said Sam. He laughed grimly. 'And I mean just that, Mr. Frodo. I mean plain ordinary rest, and sleep, and waking up to a morning's work in the garden. I'm afraid that's all I'm hoping for all the time. All the bi important plans are not for my sort. Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We're in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, year and years afterwards. And the people will say: "Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring!" And they'll say: "Yes, that's what of my favorite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn't he dad?" "Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that's saying a lot."'
     'It's saying a lot too much,' said Frodo, and he laughed, a long clear laugh from his heart. Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron came to Middle Earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them. But Frodo did not heed them; he laughed again. 'Why, Sam,' he said, 'to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you've left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. "I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn't they put in more of his talk, dad? That's what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn't have got far without Sam, would he, dad?"'
     'Now, Mr. Frodo,' said Sam, 'you shouldn't make fun. I was serious.'
     'So was I,' said Frodo, 'and so I am. We're going on a bit too fast. You and I, sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: "Shut the book now, dad; we don't want to read anymore."'
     'Maybe,' said Sam, 'but I wouldn't be one to say that. Things done and over and made into part of the great tales are different. Why, even Gollum might be good in a tale, better than he is to have by you, anyway.'

The Two Towers, by J.R.R. Tolkien

For those of you who do NOT know, I absolutely despise the movie of the Two Towers. Peter Jackson ruined, mutilated, and destroyed a work of art when he made that movie, and I can't stand it. But the book is wonderful!

Another doll

I making a family of 8 dolls for a lady, and here is one of them:

The Barred Owl and Education

As a rule [owls] are nocturnal or crepuscular birds, passing the day in hollow trees or dense evergreens, and appearing only after nightfall; but there are some diurnal species, such as the Snowy Owl and Hawk Owl.

Next to the Screech Owl the Barred Owl is doubtless our most common representative of this family, but its fondness for deep woods prevents its being known to many....

...in March [it] makes its nest, selecting for a site a hollow tree, or the deserted home of a Crow or Hawk. Two to four eggs are laid, which, like the eggs of all Owls, are pure white.

Bird Life, Frank Chapman, 1907.

I have a handful of vintage bird books by Frank Chapman, all in poor condition and picked up for a song at a library booksale. They all have lovely illustrations, which is why I got them, and I have enjoyed his prose as well. Frank Chapman was a New Jersey native who made good. Born in 1864, just before the close of The Civil War, he died in 1945- the year the second 'War to end all War' ended.

He left school at 16 and went to work in a bank. Birding was then but a hobby, albeit a passionate hobby. Through his dedication to that hobby, he made some useful contacts and in 1886 was able to make an impressive career change:

"Not formally educated beyond high school, his consuming interest in the natural history of birds led to volunteer work and then to a permanent job at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Chapman rose to the leadership role in the Department of Birds there, and under his guidance its collections became the world's largest. He was also an imaginative display designer, pioneering the use of habitat group exhibits.... ...Last but not least, Chapman was the foremost popularizer of bird studies of his era...."

He is also the originator of the annual Christmas Bird Count:

Prior to the turn of the century, people engaged in a holiday tradition known as the Christmas "Side Hunt": They would choose sides and go afield with their guns; whoever brought in the biggest pile of feathered (and furred) quarry won. Conservation was in its beginning stages around the turn of the 20th century, and many observers and scientists were becoming concerned about declining bird populations. Beginning on Christmas Day 1900, ornithologist Frank Chapman, an early officer in the then budding Audubon Society, proposed a new holiday tradition-a "Christmas Bird Census"-that would count birds in the holidays rather than hunt them. So began the Christmas Bird Count. Thanks to the inspiration of Frank M. Chapman and the enthusiasm of twenty-seven dedicated birders, twenty-five Christmas Bird Counts were held that day. The locations ranged from Toronto, Ontario to Pacific Grove, California with most counts in or near the population centers of northeastern North America. Those original 27 Christmas Bird Counters tallied a total of 90 species on all the counts combined.

Not bad for a man many would call 'uneducated' because they confused an 'education' with a college degree.

But we *want* Shakespeare and Austen!

(a post that got much longer than I intended)
The BBC is planning to produce all of Shakespeare's plays again within the next twelve years. That could be interesting ... it could also be ghastly. They've enlisted American director Sam Mendes, the guy who did American Beauty and Road to Perdition. It's too early in the process to know what direction they'll be going; it's a project I'll definitely be keeping my eyes on, though. The costumes will probably be better. :-)

And speaking of better costumes, the 2008 Jane Austen season is coming to PBS quite soon. There will be new versions of four of her novels, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey being the two I'm most excited about. They'll also be re-airing the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice and the Kate Beckinsale Emma. Personally, I never thought Kate Beckinsale fit as Emma, but Mark Strong wasn't bad.

In the Shakespeare article, someone complains that the BBC is only going for literary celebrities (specifically naming Shakespeare and Austen) and ignoring many other brilliant British novelists.
That's an interesting question to ponder. One the one hand, Shakespeare and Austen are perfect for the BBC to focus on because they are so universally loved and recognized and because they are the standard for their respective genres. A playwright does not seek to outdo a Shakespearean play, he seeks to match it. A novelist writing ironically about smalltown life, polite society, and romance only wishes to remind the reader of Austen.

Still, Britain does have a rich literary heritage where many authors have carved out for themselves their own special niche. The BBC has paid attention to some of them, giving us such excellent films like Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. Other productions of her works have been done, although they don't quite equal W&D. A new production of Cranford is now airing in the UK; I can't wait for it to make it to the states!

Dickens' works have been produced. Our Mutual Friend is fantastic.

Still, I suppose there will always be some author that is (unconsciously, perhaps) being ignored. I for one think that E. Nesbit deserves more closer attention. True, she's a children's author and a fairly decent version of The Railway Children was done a few years back, but I don't understand why no one has realized what a truly phenomenal fantasy film The Enchanted Castle would make.

On the mystery side of things, Agatha Christie has been done and redone (and then done again most recently in an outrageous manner) but Josephine Tey has been left out of the picture. The last time any of her novels was done was almost twenty years ago. The same goes for Margery Allingham. Both of these women wrote mysteries with good plots and fascinating characters and yet their works sit on the shelf. Very sad.

Those are my I-wish-someone-would-do-a-good-production-of-these titles. What are yours?

This great low price only while supplies last!!!

The way sales work:

You get the sales flier for your local stores. You read in big, blazing letters that the item EVERYBODY is buying this year, the item that will make your hair shinier, your teeth whiter, your house larger, your dress size smaller, your kitchen cleaner, your friends more stylish, you more popular, this amazing treasure is available in stores for a limited time only, no more available at this price once those in stock are all gone.

Until you read the ad, it had not occurred to you that your hair wasn't shiny enough, your teeth were too dull, your house too small, and your dress size too large. Okay, scratch that. You probably are bothered by your size. But you didn't know you had to buy something to fix it. You thought you just needed some garden variety self control. Now you know you really will never be quite whole without these new things. If you like to think of yourself as frugal, you do without most of them anyway, but you resolve to keep your teeth covered when you smile, to get some new friends, and get that kitchen whipped into shape just as soon as you buy the three new cleaning products you just know are the Holy Grail of cleaning products- they will work so well you won't ever actually have to work in your kitchen again. And you'll watch for those previously unheard of products at thrift shops and yard sales.

The first line of attack in these ads is to foster discontentment. You have needs you did not know about and you have not the means for solving those problems without these special products you also did not know about five minutes ago.

Some of the ads will say they only have, say, ten times, or fifty, or a hundred of the item, available. When these are gone you won't be able to get another one at this price anywhere. Not even for ready money. Hurray now, come on out and buy yours while this incredible deal is still available. They can't hold it forever. TODAY ONLY!!!!!!!!!!!!

The human mind is a bizarre and strange little region, and this is the second line of attack (I am not mentioning things like color, photographic angles, and market tested logos and such like). Fear of losing something is always greater, or at least more urgent, than the desire to gain something- that's why sales promotions have time limits, limited numbers of the item, and why they stress an approach that tells customers they will 'lose,' miss out on something, if they don't buy it now.

"If I don't buy it now I might not get to buy it at all" is a powerfully seductive line of thinking, and it seems to work on most of us even when we could also be telling ourselves, "If I don't buy it now, I won't care a few weeks, days, or even minutes from now. I do not need it and I never wanted it until I was told I might not be able to buy it."

When you are confronted with an ad campaign watch closely for those hooks that make the need seem more urgent to you, that highlight your risk of losing the item if you do not buy it NOW. Any 'now or never' approach should set off alarm bells in your pocket book, as somebody is trying to separate you from its contents.

Bless a Blogger

Pass on a good read from a blog to the rest of us:

More leftover recipes

My weekly post is up at Frugal Hacks on this Black Friday. I've posted some more recipes for post-Thanksgiving eating, as well as reposting some of those I shared here.

Babies Brighter Than Some Have Thought

Babies as young as six months old can watch examples of helpful or hurtful behaviour and then deliberately choose to play with the helper rather than the harmer. The researchers used their study results to talk about babies and socialization, but what stood out to me is that this is some sophisticated processing for little people who aren't supposed to be able to even understand cause and effect.

Keep in mind that babies born to deaf parents typically begin signing at six months. While thinking about this, remember that babies are able to understand far more than they can actually communicate- so if they are able to communicate meaningfully in sign language at 6 months, imagine what they've been able to understand before that! Because we use sign language in the home with The Cherub, who cannot speak, our youngest two babies were signing at about nine months. They had signs asking for food, drink, breast-feeding, Mama, Daddy, more, dog, table, sleep, home, and a few other things.

The problems babies have with cause and effect is not so much a developmental issue, In My Personal Opinion, but one caused by the fact they are new to the planet. They do not know what's 'normal' around here, and so they have to figure it out from scratch. They are new to this world and they have a lot of figuring things out to do- why do things fall when they are dropped? This wouldn't happen on the moon, so it's not really all that strange that babies do not know this.=) Why do hot things hurt and soft things tickle, and how would they find this out without trying it out first?

They don't know the things we take for granted and they have to figure them out. Figuring out things that we think 'everybody knows' looks kind of silly to grown up people who don't remember what it was like not to know those things.

Grown up people with common sense will try to imagine what it's like not to know how the world works, and so when the baby cries inconsolably when mother leaves the room, the sympathetic and sensible grown up person will realize Baby doesn't really know that mother is coming back, because he hasn't been long enough in this world to know how things work, and has no other way to communicate the despair over this concern except to cry. On the other hand, sensible grownup people will also realize that babies are fast learners, and they can understand far more than they can communicate.

As I posted here once before many moons ago, I am not a fan of the crying out method. I think babies need to learn that we respond to their needs and wants quickly, and that the time for teaching them to ask nicely and be patient is after they have the words (whether in sign or verbally) to express those needs nicely. On the other hand, while I never let my babies cry on purpose, neither do I think it is reasonable to run, dripping water and soap, from the shower to a crying baby who has awakened early from a nap. That's no longer the time to stand luxuriously beneath the hot water, but you do have time to rinse, dry, and even dress first. I am not making that example up, although I wish I was.
Nor is it sensible to do as a different young mother I knew did, and sit with a baby and toddler on the couch until another grown up comes home because there's broken glass on the kitchen floor, but the baby cries every time she is put down, so Mama cannot go sweep up the mess (I am not making that story up, either, but it's less embarrassing to me than the first one. See if you can guess why).

Homeschool Blog Awards

Voting begins December 3rd. Nominations are all in and tabulated (I didn't even realize they were taking nominations already until the deadline passed)-you can start looking at all the nominations now and planning your votes accordingly. Just remember who sent ya.;0D

"The Rainy Day"

Today the rain has been continuously pouring down. Mother loves it. I don't.

Now, this poem has two other stanzas but I didn't like them; they were about how life was dark and dreary and it most certainly isn't!
Thanksgiving is tomorrow!!
I LOVE this holiday! :)


The Rainy Day by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

"The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the moldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary..."

That fits the weather but not how I feel. I feel like...

"'Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving!'
Joyfully, gratefully call,
To God, the preserver of men,
The bountiful Father of all."*

*("Stolen" from an earlier post of Mother's :) )

I hope you all have a Wonderful Thanksgiving!!

There might be, after all, objective standards of beauty.

Had The Equuschick more time this morning, she would share not only this article, but also all of her own personal commentary, which would be alot because she is fascinated beyond words by the idea that mankind has been hard-wired for the appreciation of the truly and objectively beautiful.

As it is, she will suffice it to say, for the sake of the DHM's Homeschooling Mommy Pride, that The Equuschick does remember learning about the Golden Ratio in high-school and was excited to find a reference she recognized in the article.

Thanksgiving Recitations And Readings

November Party
November Gave a Party,
The leaves by hundreds came,
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name;
The sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand;
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind, the band.

The Chestnuts came in yellow,
The Oaks in crimson drest;
The lovely Misses Maple
In scarlet looked their best.
All balanced to their partners,
And gayly fluttered by;
The sight was like a rainbow,
New fallen from the sky.

Then, in the rusty hollows,
At hide-and-seek they played;
The party closed at sundown,
And everybody stayed.
Professor Wind played louder.
They flew along the ground,
And there the party ended
In "Hands across, All round."

~Unknown



A Good Thanksgiving

Said Old Gentleman Gay, “On a Thanksgiving Day,
If you want a good time, then give something away.”
So he sent a fat turkey to Shoemaker Price,
And the shoemaker said, “What a big bird! how nice!
And since a good dinner’s before me, I ought
To give poor Widow Lee the small chicken I bought.”

“This fine chicken, oh, see!” said the pleased Widow Lee,
“And the kindness that sent it, how precious to me!
I would like to make some one as happy as I—
I’ll give Washerwoman Biddy my big pumpkin pie.”

“And oh, sure,” Biddy said, “’tis the queen of all pies
Just to look at its yellow face gladdens my eyes.
Now it’s my turn, I think; and a sweet ginger cake
For the motherless Finigan children I’ll bake.”

“A sweet cake, all our own! ’Tis too good to be true!”
Said the Finigan children, Rose, Denny, and Hugh;
“It smells sweet of spice, and we’ll carry a slice
To poor little Lame Jake—who has nothing that’s nice.”

“Oh, I thank you, and thank you!” said little Lame Jake;
“Oh, what beautiful, beautiful, beautiful cake!
And oh, such a big slice! I will save all the crumbs,
And will give ’em to each little sparrow that comes!”

And the sparrows they twittered as if they would say,
Like Old Gentleman Gay, “On a Thanksgiving Day,
If you want a good time, then give something away.”

—Marian Douglas.

Giving Thanks

For the hay and the corn and the wheat that is reaped,
For the labor well done, and the barns that are heaped,
For the sun and the dew and the sweet honeycomb,
For the rose and the song and the harvest brought home--
Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving!

For the trade and the skill and the wealth in our land,
For the cunning and strength of the workingman's hand,
For the good that our artists and poets have taught,
For the friendship that hope and affection have brought--
Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving!

For the homes that with purest affection are blest,
For the season of plenty and well-deserved rest,
For our country extending from sea unto sea;
The land that is known as the "Land of the Free" --
Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving!
~anonymous


Thanksgiving- a group reading
First Reader:
"Have you cut the wheat in the blowing fields,
The barley, the oats and rye,
The golden corn and the pearly rice?
For the winter days are nigh."

Second Reader:
"We have reaped them all from shore to shore,
And the grain is safe on the threshing floor."

Third Reader:
"Have you gathered the berries from the vine
And the fruits from the orchard trees,
The dew and the scent from the roses and thyme
In the hive of the honey-bees?"

Fourth Reader:
"The peach and the plum and the apple are ours,
And the honey-comb from the scented flowers."

Fifth Reader:
"The wealth of the snowy cotton-field
And the gift of the sugar-cane,
The savory herb and nourishing root -
There has nothing been given in vain,"

Sixth Reader:
"We have gathered the harvest from shore to shore,
And the measure is full and running o’er."

All:
Then lift up the head with a song!
And lift up the hands with a gift!
To the ancient giver of all
The spirit of gratitude lift!
For the joy and promise of Spring,
For the hay and clover sweet,
The barley, the rye, and the oats,
The rice and the corn and the wheat,
The cotton and sugar and fruit,
The flowers and the fine honeycomb,
The country, so fair and so free,
The blessing and the glory of home"

First Reader:
"'Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving!'
Joyfully, gratefully call,
To God, the preserver of men,
The bountiful Father of all."

Adapted from an arrangement by Amelia E. Barr and reprinted in Recitations Old and New for Boys and Girls by Grace Gaige (intro by Christopher Morley), published by Appleton and Company in 1924.


Anna-Marie has a few others

Quote.

I did not suppose that those words, "all will be well with you," implied my happiness, for I never supposed that what man means by wellbeing and what wellbeing means to God could possibly be the same. They might be as different as joy and suffering. I only knew that I had promised God my life, even, if it were his will, to Death.
This is my ultimate Witness.

"Witness," by Whitaker Chambers

How to tell honors students from non-honors students

Girl in my 300-level history of women class: "Isn't that like, you know, like, sort of...."

Guy in my 400-level honors history of Europe class (talking about the reading before the Prof got to class): "That guy was such a dissembler!"

Thanksgiving break is here. Bliss!

Thanksgiving Readings

GRAND'THER BALDWIN'S THANKSGIVING

UNDERNEATH protected branches, from the highway just aloof;
Stands the house of Grand'ther Baldwin, with its gently sloping roof.

Square of shape and solid-timbered, it was standing, I have heard,
In the days of Whig and Tory, under royal George the Third.

Many a time, I well remember, I have gazed with Childish awe
At the bullet-hole remaining in the sturdy oaken door,

Turning round half-apprehensive (recking not how time had fled)
Of the lurking, savage foeman from whose musket it was sped..

Not far off, the barn, plethoric with the autumn's harvest spoils,
Holds the farmer's well-earned trophies--the guerdon of his toils;

Filled the lofts with hay, sweet-scented, ravished from the meadows green,
While beneath are stalled the cattle, with their quiet, drowsy mien.

Deep and spacious are the grain-bins, brimming o'er with nature's gold;
Here are piles of yellow pumpkins on the barn-floor loosely rolled.

Just below in deep recesses, safe from wintry frost chill,
There are heaps of ruddy apples from the orchard the hill.

Many a year has Grand'ther Baldwin in the old house dwelt in peace,
As his hair each year grew whiter, he has seen his herds increase.

Sturdy sons and comely daughters, growing up from childish plays,
One by one have met life's duties, and gone forth their several ways.


Hushed the voice of childish laughter, hushed is childhood's merry tone,
the fireside Grand'ther Baldwin and his good wife sit alone.


Turning round half-apprehensive (recking not how time had fled)
Of the lurking savage foeman from whose musket it was sped.

Not far off, the barn, plethoric with the autumn harvest spoils,
Holds the farmer's well-earned trophies--the guerdon of his toils;

Filled the lofts with hay, sweet-scented, ravished from the meadows green,
While beneath are stalled the cattle, with their quiet drowsy mien.

Deep and spacious are the grain-bins, brimming o'er with nature's gold;
Here are piles of yellow pumpkins on the barn-floor loosely rolled.

Just below in deep recesses, safe from wintry frost and chill,
There are heaps of ruddy apples from the orchard on the hill.

Many a year has Grand'ther Baldwin in the old house dwelt in peace,
As his hair each year grew whiter, he has seen his herds increase.

Sturdy sons and comely daughters, growing up from childish plays,
One by one have met life's duties, and gone forth their several ways.

Hushed the voice of childish laughter, hushed is childhood's merry tone,
By the fireside Grand'ther Baldwin and his good wife sit alone.


Yet once within the twelvemonth, when the days are short and drear,
And chill winds chant the requiem of the slowly fading year,

When the autumn work is over, and the harvest gathered in,
Once again the old house echoes to a long unwonted din.

Logs of hickory blaze and crackle in the fireplace huge anti high,
Curling wreaths of smoke mount upward to the gray November sky.

Ruddy lads and smiling lasses, just let loose from schooldom's cares,
Patter, patter, race and clatter, up and down the great hall stairs.

All the boys shall hold high revel; all the girls shall have their way,-
That's the law at Grand'ther Baldwin's upon each Thanksgiving Day.

From from the parlor's sacred precincts, hark! a madder uproar yet;
Roguish Charlie's playing stage-coach, and the stage-coach has upset!

Joe, black-eyed and laughter-loving, Grand'ther's specs his nose across,
Gravely winks at brother Willie, who is gayly playing horse.

Grandma's face is fairly radiant; Grand'ther knows not how to frown,
though the children, in their frolic, turn the old house upside down.


For the boys may hold high revel, and the girls must have their way;
That's the law at Grand'ther Baldwin's upon each Thanksgiving Day.

But the dinner--ah! the dinner--words are feeble to portray
What a culinary triumph is achieved Thanksgiving Day!

Fairly groans the board with dainties, but the turkey rules the roast,
Aldermanic at the outset, at the last a fleshless ghost.

Then the richness of the pudding, and the flavor of the pie,
When you've dined at Grandma Baldwin's you will know as well as I.

When, at length, the feast was ended, Grand'ther Baldwin bent his head,
And, amid the solemn silence, with a reverent voice, he said:--

"Now unto God, the Gracious One, we thanks and homage pay,
Who guardeth us, and guideth us, and loveth us always!

"He scatters blessings in our paths, He giveth us increase,
He crowns us with His kindnesses, and granteth us His peace.

"Unto himself, our wandering feet, we pray that He may draw,
And may we strive, with faithful hearts, to keep His holy law!"


His simple words in silence died: a moment's hush. And then
From all the listening hearts there rose a solemn-voiced Amen !

From Ballads, by Horatio Alger

See also Frances Jenkins Olcott's Good Stories for Great Holidays for other Thanksgiving Stories

Read about 'the Starving Time' here or here, and then read:

Five Kernels of Corn

by Hezekiah Butterworth

'Twas the year of the famine in Plymouth of old,
The ice and the snow from the thatched roofs had rolled;
Through the warm purple skies steered the geese o'er the seas,
And the woodpeckers tapped in the clocks of the trees;
And the boughs on the slopes to the south winds lay bare,
and dreaming of summer, the buds swelled in the air.
The pale Pilgrims welcomed each reddening morn;
There were left but for rations Five Kernels of Corn.
Five Kernels of Corn!
Five Kernels of Corn!
But to Bradford a feast were Five Kernels of Corn!

"Five Kernels of Corn! Five Kernels of Corn!
Ye people, be glad for Five Kernels of Corn!"
So Bradford cried out on bleak Burial Hill,
And the thin women stood in their doors, white and still.
"Lo, the harbor of Plymouth rolls bright in the Spring,
The maples grow red, and the wood robins sing,
The west wind is blowing, and fading the snow,
And the pleasant pines sing, and arbutuses blow.
Five Kernels of Corn!
Five Kernels of Corn!
To each one be given Five Kernels of Corn!"

O Bradford of Austerfield hast on thy way,
The west winds are blowing o'er Provincetown Bay,
The white avens bloom, but the pine domes are chill,
And new graves have furrowed Precisioners' Hill!
"Give thanks, all ye people, the warm skies have come,
The hilltops are sunny, and green grows the holm,
And the trumpets of winds, and the white March is gone,
Five Kernels of Corn!
Five Kernels of Corn!
Ye have for Thanksgiving Five Kernels of Corn!

"The raven's gift eat and be humble and pray,
A new light is breaking and Truth leads your way;
One taper a thousand shall kindle; rejoice
That to you has been given the wilderness voice!"
O Bradford of Austerfield, daring the wave,
And safe through the sounding blasts leading the brave,
Of deeds such as thine was the free nation born,
And the festal world sings the "Five Kernels of Corn."
Five Kernels of Corn!
Five Kernels of Corn!
The nation gives thanks for Five Kernels of Corn!

To the Thanksgiving Feast bring Five Kernels of Corn!

Jane Murray's Thanksgiving Story is, perhaps, best suited for older readers- maybe junior high and up. I enjoyed it, but am not sure younger children have enough life experience to find it interesting yet.

Bible passages on Thanksgiving

(previous list deleted, as it turned out to be not quite what I thought it was. I'll try to add more later)

Carnival of Homeschooling

Check it out here.

Thanksgiving Program

Click to enlarge. From the 1925 Worldbook

Child abuse

When you hear those stats about how children are more likely to be abused by somebody in the home than anywhere else (like, say, school), you're only hearing half the story:

....many scholars and front-line caseworkers interviewed by The Associated Press see the abusive-boyfriend syndrome as part of a broader trend that deeply worries them. They note an ever-increasing share of America's children grow up in homes without both biological parents, and say the risk of child abuse is markedly higher in the nontraditional family structures.

"This is the dark underbelly of cohabitation," said Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia. "Cohabitation has become quite common, and most people think, 'What's the harm?' The harm is we're increasing a pattern of relationships that's not good for children."
[...]
Children living in households with unrelated adults are nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries as children living with two biological parents, according to a study of Missouri abuse reports published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2005.

More here, though it gets waffly towards the end and the proposed solutions are, as always, all about more power to government employees than anything.

It's a shame you can't inject common sense like a vaccine.
Two parents are better than one, unusual circumstances aside.
Marriage is a commitment. You get married, you stay married. You put the marriage first. If you have kids, that goes triple. The best thing you can do for your kids is to stay committed to their other parent. 'Daddy loves you, darling, he just doesn't love Mommy anymore...' that's a crock. If Daddy can say this and walk off to another house, he's not loving the child as much as he should, either. likewise, Mommy.
I don't care how hard you think it is to stay married because 'you're just not compatible anymore,' and the truth is that neither do the kids. They prefer their parents to be married. To each other.. IF we are not talking abuse and/or infidelity- stick it out. If you don't think you can do that, don't get involved in the first place. Don't make babies, don't get married. Focus on growing up and learning that you don't come first.

You've already got kids? Time to grow up. See above- stick it out.
You got stuck with somebody who wouldn't stick? That's horrible, and I am not in favour of no-fault divorce laws, especially when children are involved. I am really, truly, and deeply sorry. There are some daddies we know about whom the nicest thing my husband can say is, "The only thing wrong with that guy is that he's still alive."
You have my prayers, my compassion, and my understanding. I didn't get the Headmaster because I was any wiser than you when I was 20. There but for the grace of God....

So you're in a lousy situation- you decided to be a grown-up, the other parent didn't and now you're a single parent.

You don't trust somebody with your kids until you've seen good reason to trust that person with your kids.

You don't leave your kids alone with somebody who has shown himself to be constantly irritated by your kids and not really pleasant for kids to be around. You don't have a romantic relationship with somebody like that if you are a parent.

You don't put your wants ahead of your kids.

Celibacy will not kill you. Choosing the wrong boyfriend might kill your kids.

This wasn't in my job description.

Crying Little Boy at the front desk, after trying unsuccessfully to find a website his dad told him about: "My dad lied to me!"

This was painful on several levels... I don't believe the Dad would intentionally lie to his son, but that seems mainly because he doesn't intend to DO much with him at all. My only exposure to the father is when he drops off his four young children at the library for several hours on most Saturdays.

Ugh.

The Lottery

Honey, Love of my life, sweetheart. DHM,

I love you . . . . and I did not win the Lottery, but if I ever bought a ticket & I won I would tell you!

Holiday Recipes

Semicolon is rounding up a scrumptious collection of celebratory holiday recipes. It doesn't have to be your own post, either, you can add links to another blog (somebody kindly did this for me, which is how I found out about it).

Whatever makes your festival a really festive feast, that's what she wants you to share. Old links are fine, too. If you don't have a blog you can email her your recipes. This looks like it could be a really delicious round-up!

Mission Accomplished!

The "Toy Area" is now clean!!!!! :)

Butterhorn rolls

Update below:

Over on Frugal Hacks last Friday, I mentioned that Pip and Jenny had baked crescent rolls. Several people asked me for the recipe. I was going to wait and post it on Friday, but then I realized that some people may want the recipe for Thanksgiving.

We have two recipes, the one we usually make, and the one the girls made last week. Both are good, but I like our usual one best. However, I must blushingly confess that neither recipe is technically a crescent roll. They are shaped like crescents, but they are butterhorns. I have never made a genuine crescent roll from scratch in my life. I make those from a can.

True crescent rolls are made by a process of repeated steps of buttering with cold butter, folding the chilled dough over and rolling it lightly (preferably on a chilled marble slab with a chilled marble rolling pin), adding more dabs of cold butter, more folding and rolling, and so on. OR you can roll out the dough paper thin, spread it with icy butter, fold it, spread more butter, fold it, spread more butter, fold it again, until it's the right thickness, then roll it slightly, and slice into triangles and roll for the crescents. Those careful layers of butter and dough are what makes the flaky goodness of your genuine crescent roll. The butter melts, leaving a steamy space in between dough layers, a space full of buttery flavor, and that makes the flaky, tender, layers of the crescent roll. And that's just the easy, short version. For a great step by step tutorial for making croissants, see this website. you can use either recipe I post below with these directions.

Butterhorns are crescent shaped and they are tasty, rich, buttery dinner rolls, but they are not very flaky. Just tasty.

butterhorns, recipe #1

combine in bowl:
3/4 cup warm milk
1/4 cup warm water
1/2 cup sugar
Mix well, sprinkle 1/4 teaspoon of yeast over top, let 'proof' for five or ten minutes.

Stir in one lightly beaten egg
Add four cups flour (we use whole wheat, white works too)

roll into a circle.
Cut the circle into 12 triangles. Roll triangles up, starting at wide end, curve slightly and set on greased baking sheet. Let rise. then bake at 350 degrees for about ten or fifteen minutes. Makes 12. We generally triple and usually quadruple this recipe.

butterhorn recipe #2
2 packages yeast
1/4 cup warm water
Dissolve yeast in water for ten minutes- set aside
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 cup shortening
blend the above ingredients until in mixing bowl until you have a smooth paste
3 eggs
add one at a time, blending well.
3/4 cup milk
Add milk, stir in slightly.
5 1/2 cups flour

Reserve 1/2 cup of flour. Add rest to mixing bowl, stir in yeast mixture and mix until you have a smoothe dough. If it is too sticky, add more flour.

Let rise. Put dough on floured surface, flatten to remove air pockets. Roll into a round shape like a pizza Brush the top with melted butter, then cut into 16 triangles. Starting at based of triangle, roll the dough up, curving ends slightly in, place on greased pan about an inch apart. Brush again with melted fat for an artisan finish, with an egg wash for a shiny finish, or leave as is. Cover with towel, let rise again.
Bake at 390 for 18-20 minutes

To make a huge batch, do not roll the dough into a circle. Roll it into a rectangle. Then cut a zig zag pattern down the dough to make your rectangles.


Second recipe taken from Elementary Baking by William Sultan. This dough is extremely versatile and is used for yeast doughnuts, parkerhouse rolls, fan rolls, cloverleafs, frankfurter rolls, and about a dozen other things.

----------------------------------

Updated just over a year later to add this recipe- and explain. A long time back, we cut this recipe out of a Taste of Home Magazine, and this is the one we use. But it got tatty, so we copied it out by hand and misplaced the original. I found the original while cleaning up after Christmas (of '08), and realized we'd left out something important in the handwritten copy. So here is the original:

INGREDIENTS

* 4 cups all-purpose flour
* 1/2 cup sugar
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1 cup cold butter or shortening
* 1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
* 1/4 cup warm water (105 degrees to 115 degrees)
* 3/4 cup warm milk (110 to 115 degrees F)
* 1 egg, lightly beaten
* 4 tablespoons melted butter, divided


DIRECTIONS

1. In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar and salt. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. In another bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water; add to crumb mixture. Add milk; mix well. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
2. Divide dough into four equal portions. On a lightly floured surface, roll one portion into a 12-in. circle. Brush with 1 tablespoon melted butter; cut into 12 pie-shaped wedges. Roll up, beginning with the wide end, and place on greased baking sheets. Repeat with remaining dough.
3. Cover and let rise in a warm place until nearly doubled, about 1 hour. Bake at 375 degrees F for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown. Remove to wire racks.

Bernice Smith submitted the original recipe to Taste of Home- and you can adjust serving sizes (this makes 48 rolls) here.

Something is wrong with this picture.

The Boy was singing as he very diligently cleaned his bedroom in preparation for company, but not just any song. He was singing: "Hallelujah, I'm a bum. Hallelujah, I'm a bum..."

Thank heavens it's not the truth.

Assorted Trifles Cont.

Last Thursday we had music lessons and grocery shopping for the second half of the day. We tried to squeeze in some book larnin' in the morning. I did a Bible lesson in the van with The Boy while his sisters had their music lessons. He and I also did a small spot of bird-watching from the van in the drive at the music teacher's house. From music lessons we went to the grocery store where we divided and conquered, then we rushed home. I cooked dinner while organizing the general campaign and attack plan for the Progeny ( FYB and FYG carry in the groceries, Jenny makes the tea and sets the table, Pip makes the orange juice and gets out cups, Equuschick peels cucumbers and makes salad, you empty the trash, you put the butter on the table, you empty the dishwasher, you find me the molasses...) because we were supposed to have company for dinner within the hour, three 'foreign nationals' that the HG met in connection with her duties at the library.

The company called three or four times with some bizarre drama (Call one: would you please tell my girlfriend I and my friends are just coming over for a family dinner, that I am not cheating on her? Call two: the girlfriend to make some disparaging remarks about her boyfriend's ethnic background. We asked if she wanted to come over too, to see that things were on the up and up, she said no. Call three: My girlfriend is angry now and she and her mother are throwing things at our house) but never said they weren't coming- in fact, the last time they called they said they would see us between 6:30 and 6:45. At 7:30 when our collective stomachs were growling so much we thought we would not hear the phone ring over the noise, we called them again and learned they weren't coming.
HG: "Oh? I'm sorry. Is something wrong with your car?"
They: "Well, you know, you asked if I had a car, and I do have a car, but I don't have a license."
HG: "Um, yes?"
They: "Well, and I got pulled over by a police man for driving without a license."
HG: "Oh, I'm so sorry! On your way here?"
They: "Well, no. Last week."
HG: "Oh. Well. Um, I guess we'll have you out to dinner some other time then."
They: "How about tomorrow or Saturday?"
HG: "No. We already have plans. We'll have to figure it out later."

And so we ate dinner at nearly 8:00 when it had been ready since 6:30 and we had all been waiting hungrily to eat it. Always hold dinner until the people eating it are starving to death. That way, no matter what you serve they will think it is delicious.


Friday: I just realized that when I posted the story about our long day and the boy clearing off my bed for the purpose of burying his cold and tired self beneath my blankets, I neglected to mention the time we arrived home. We left the house at 11:00 a.m. We arrived home about 1 a.m. We did bring bags of school books, and the older girls got some school reading done. We also brought some cookbooks and made a short shopping list and a menu of easy to make crockpot or freezable meals.

Our errands had included a trip to the doctor's office, where Pip was diagnosed with a sinus infection and I with bronchitis. From there we went to the grocery store, the thrift shop, the pharmacy to pick up our antibiotics, a friend's house to pick him to take with us to the singing, then on to the actual singing (90 minutes from our house), off to another friend's house, and then we retraced some of our steps and dropped off our friend and finally made it home, Pip and I hacking and coughing charmingly all the way. Since we arrived home we were too tired to unload the purchases from the van except for the cold goods in the ice chest. Those we unpacked and put away before dropping off to bed at about 1:30 a.m.

And on Saturday morning, instead of resting quietly at home, I went to a giant discount store about 45 minutes to an hour from here because Granny Tea wanted to go but didn't want to drive that far all alone, and being the first born child I am susceptible to guilt. As a child I was able to resist. Now I am older, it is much harder. This store is, seriously, on five acres of concrete. They have a little bit of everything except fresh produce and frozen goods. They buy from stores going out of business, from businesses discontinuing a product line, from trucks that have been in accidents so that the boxes of cereal they carried are all bent, or some jars of jam or chutney broke in the case so all the sealed jars are sticky and their labels stained, or from stores getting rid of items too close to their sell-by date, or for all I know from anonymous and odd little men with hats pulled down over their eyes making whispered deals behind the largest tombstone in the cemetery at the dead of night.

You never know exactly what they are going to have at any given time. Beautiful tablecloths (4.00 each), china, green olives in snack pouches for .50 a pouch, caribou coffee granola bars for .99 a box, some nasty looking sliced raw potatoes sealed in a plastic pouch, Christmas decorations, pickles, jams (.79), toilet paper, off brand cleaners, rugs, bean bags (9.99), giant cans of green beans, peas, spiced crab-apples (all for around 3.00 a can), strange candies, cheap freezer bags (.89 a box), eggplant pesto, asparagus pesto, mango-pepper chutney (very sticky jars), paint supplies, baby clothes, tools, clothesline, shelving, home decor, craft kits, white boards, envelopes, cookbooks, dolls, puzzles, artificial Christmas trees, chocolate candies shaped like eyeballs, lips, and ears- there is a weird and interesting variety of the weird, the useful, the hideous, the nasty, the strange, delicious and beautiful. On five acres of concrete. So you push your cart up and down, zig-zagging over that five acres until your (giant) cart is full to overflowing, your knees are giving out, your back is screaming, your feet are aching and you check out through the line where you have to empty your cart yourself and there is no scanner, the clerks have to remember most of the prices and strangely enough they do, and you take your cart out to the van and put your bags in it and then go back into the store to finish shopping through the second half of the store.

The above, by the way, is not a list of the things I bought, just some of the things I can remember. I did try the olives in a pouch (I like them, progeny don't), jams, freezer bags, and a whole bunch of other stuff, but one of the hazards of shopping at this store is that by the time you finish you are so overwhelmed and numb to all but your aching legs and back that you can't remember what you bought.

Naturally, while working so hard you work up a huge appetite. While looking for somewhere in town to eat, we passed a used book and secondhand store that I have never seen open before- and it was OPEN. So naturally, we had to peek in there. It, too, was an interesting collection of the weird, the beautiful, and the useful. I bought three paperback Georgette Heyer books and two packages of beads for dolls' heads for Jenny and escaped for under four dollars, but now that they are open I hope to go back again.

Feeling desperately in the need for some trans-fats and lots of them, we went to Burger King (the only other restaurants in town were either closed or so full of cigarette smoke that it billowed out of the establishment whenever the door was opened). And trans-fat was what we got. Ugh.

I arrived home from my third straight day of running errands all day long so happy to be home that I would have fallen on the ground and kissed it, except that if I had I would probably still be there, wallowing around trying to figure out the best and least painful way to try to stand back up again. Instead I settled for racing to the bathroom and repenting me of greasy hamburgers. TMI, I know.

There's no place like home. There's no place like home.


Sunday: Much scrambling to get the main areas of the house presentable and get a potluck meal on the stove, but it was otherwise a quiet day for us. We had church here, but the people who usually come were all out of town, so it was just us and Granny Tea.

There's no place like home.

Right now, of course, it's such a mess, that there really is no place like home. I thought about posting a picture in the interests of transparency, but then I looked again. Not happening.
It could be worse. After our dinner of pea soup and peanut bread we decided to spend one hour cleaning and then meet in the dining room for a game of dominoes and a snack of crackers, cheese, and pickles. We played Mexican Train and I took advantage of our family size (even with two of us missing, as Equuschick was at work and Jenny working on a doll order) to leave the table and go unpack and put away the thrift shop purchases in between my turns.

Company's coming for dinner on Tuesday night, and we have to be in town from about 9-1 on Tuesday morning. Overnight guests will begin arriving Wednesday and staying thru Friday- two families, seven people. We spent half an hour during lunch yesterday working out the schematics of who sleeps where:
Family A- single mother and two tiny children. She gets the main guestroom with her baby, her preschooler will share a futon pallet with the FYG and they will be on the floor in Jenny's room.
Since the FYG's room will be free, The Equuschick will sleep there.
We need the Equuschick's room because she has the trundle bed, making two free twin beds in her room. Family B is a single mother with three children, one of them a college student, and one 18 years old. So the Mama and her youngest child, a ten year old, get the Equuschicks' room.
Family B's college age daughter gets the twin bed in the craft room, and since she is an interior design major she will be sympathetic to the crafty mess that Jenny is in the middle of in that room and won't mind sharing the space with ongoing art projects.
Family B's 18 year old son gets the FYB's bedroom, and the FYB will have a pallet on our bedroom floor.
We are thinking of putting temporary nameplates on the doors so we can keep things straight.

Thanksgiving is, of course, Thursday, and we're having it next door at Granny Tea's house. My pantry needs a complete overhaul, the dust in most of the rooms is fast becoming its own eco-system, and I don't even want to think about the habitats forming in my refrigerator. The laundry, well, let's just say it's high time somebody got to the bottom of that issue. It is difficult to work on character formation, habit training, and math while spending so much time in the car, and the FYG and FYB have demonstrated a need for some remedial work in all these areas. We still need to switch out our summer and winter clothing. All we've done so far is haul the totes of winter clothes out of storage and leave them open in our rooms, where we can pull out a turtleneck shirt or a sweater when we need it.

The guests who stood us up Thursday night had been invited for Thanksgiving as well, but we're assuming they won't show. The one who speaks English has called two or three times since the no-show Thursday, so I don't think our involvement is over unless we want it to be. We're not sure what we're going to do about them. There is an opportunity here to do some good while also learning something, but we're just not sure how to proceed at present.

And through this last week I have been reminding myself that somebody once said, "Embrace the interruptions, the moments, the unplanned experiences. After all, they're going to happen anyway. The difference between a good and bad day isn't usually the interruptions- it's the quality of my responses."
Of course, sometimes I am not at all sure that somebody knows what she's talking about.

Sunday Hymn Post

Ancient of Days, who sittest throned in glory,
To Thee all knees are bent, all voices pray;
Thy love has blessed the wide world’s wondrous story
With light and life since Eden’s dawning day.

O Holy Father, who hadst led Thy children
In all the ages, with the fire and cloud,
Through seas dry shod, through weary wastes bewildering;
To Thee, in reverent love, our hearts are bowed.

O Holy Jesus, Prince of Peace and Savior,
To Thee we owe the peace that still prevails,
Stilling the rude wills of men’s wild behavior,
And calming passion’s fierce and stormy gales.

O Holy Ghost, the Lord and the Lifegiver,
Thine is the quickening power that gives increase;
From Thee have flowed, as from a pleasant river,
Our plenty, wealth, prosperity and peace.

O Triune God, with heart and voice adoring,
Praise we the goodness that doth crown our days;
Pray we that Thou wilt hear us, still imploring
Thy love and favor kept to us always.

Cyberhymnal

A Brief Anecdote

A young fellow of The Equuschick's brief acquaintance (he was in fact a member of the party at the wedding of The Equuschick's dear friend in May and now a brother-in-law of said friend) recently moved to Idaho with his family.

He discovered shortly after the move that his mother had been praying for no snow. He was appalled. "Why," he asked, "Would you do this?" His mother responded that there was simply too much still to do, and snow would get in the way. "The boxes in the shed must be sorted through and unpacked, the yard and grounds need to be set up, etc."


Our hero considered this, and requested a To Do List, a request gladly granted by his mother (every mother probably lives for the moment when her child will ask for a list of chores), and he's been steadily ploughing through the To Do List ever since.

The Equuschick despises snow herself, but she does sincerely hope that it snows in Idaho early this year.

Fall!

This day seemed like a very "When the Frost is on the Punkin" day to me, so I thought I'd share it with you all:

When the Frost is on the Punkin by James Whitcomb Riley

WHEN the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,
And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the hens,
And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O, it's then's the times a feller is a-feelin' at his best,
With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

They's something kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is here--
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees,
And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of the bees;
But the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock--
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin' of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn;
The stubble in the furries--kindo' lonesome-like, but still
A-preachin' sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill;
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;
The hosses in theyr stalls below--the clover over-head!--
O, it sets my hart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock!

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps;
And your cider-makin' 's over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and saussage, too! ...
I don't know how to tell it--but ef sich a thing could be
As the Angels wantin' boardin', and they'd call around on me--
I'd want to 'commodate 'em--all the whole-indurin' flock--
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock!

Rest of the Bird Meals, or, After the Turkey, Then What?

Turkey Soup, of course (see here), using your turkey carcass. Frugal, nourishing, and something good cooks have been doing for millennium. Broth made from bones such as your turkey carcass will contain minerals in a form the body can absorb easily—not just calcium but also magnesium, phosphorus, silicon, sulphur and trace minerals as well as chondroitin sulphates and glucosamine. Think about that while buying expensive chondroitine supplements.


Turkey and Stuffing Casserole
6 beaten eggs
Two cups of thinned gravy leftover from Thanksgiving Dinner (or two cups of some combo of milk and cream soup if you're out of gravy).
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of dry mustard (this really does contribute to the flavor)
1 teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce
10 slices of slightly stale bread (I never use bread. I use leftover stuffing or dressing)
2 cups grated Cheddar cheese, sharp
2-4 cps of diced leftover turkey

Mix the first four ingredients to make a sauce.

Grease a 13X9 casserole dish

Spread half of the stuffing (or bread if that's what you use) in the bottom of the pan. Spread the turkey and cheese over this, and top with remaining stuffing (or bread). Pour the milk mixture evenly over this and refrigerate for four hours or overnight.

Brig it to room temperature and bake in your preheated, 350 degree oven for 45 minutes to an hour (until it's bubbling hot). Let stand another 15 minutes before serving.

This serves eight.

Turkey Enchiladas

Sauce~
In a large saucepan heat together:
two cans evaporated milk
2 cans cream soup (usually cream of chicken, but cream of mushroom is also good)
1 small can tomato sauce
1 envelope onion soup mix (optional- it will be richer with it, but it's not necessary).
grated cheese to taste (how much cheese will depend entirely on your budget and your taste preferences).
1 or two cans of diced green chiles

Filling~
Mix about 4 cups of chopped leftover turkey, grated cheese (to taste), and some more green chiles (to taste). Measurements are very flexible. Do you like your enchiladas thick or thin, full of cheese or full of meat, spicy or mild, dry or saucier?

Grease a casserole
Dip a corn tortilla in the sauce mixture. Lay it in the casserole dish. Put a spoon full or two of turkey mixture down the middle of the tortilla. Roll it and turn it seam side down in the pan. Repeat until the pan is full of enchiladas. Pour remaining sauce over the enchiladas and bake until hot all the way through and golden around the edges.

Serve with a salad and refried beans on the side.


Cranberry Pinwheels:
(Check back tonight for this tasty casserole recipe)

pinwheel topping
* 2 C. packaged biscuit mix
* 1/2 C. milk (Or just make some biscuits)
* 1/2 C. Cranberry-Orange Relish

Sauce
* 1/4 C. chopped onion
* 1/3 C. flour
* 14 1/2 oz chicken broth
* 1 1/3 C. milk
* 1 1/2 C. cooked chicken or turkey cut into bite sized pieces
* 1 C. shredded cheddar cheese
* 3 oz can sliced mushrooms, drained

To prepare pinwheels, combine biscuit mix and the 1/2 c. milk. Stir till well blended. Turn out onto lightly floured surface: knead 5 to 6 times. Roll out to a 10 inch square. Spread cranberry relish over dough to within 1/2 inch on all sides. Roll up as for jelly roll. Moisten edges with water; seal. Cut into 8 slices; set aside.

Sauce
In saucepan cook onion in butter till tender but not brown. Stir in flour, blending well. Add chicken broth and the 1 1/3 c. milk. Cook and stir till mixture is thickened and bubbly. Cook and stir 1 to 2 minutes more. Stir in chicken or turkey, cheese, and mushrooms. Cook and stir over low heat till cheese melts and mixture is boiling. Turn chicken mixture into a 9x13 pan. Arrange pinwheels, cut side down, atop hot mixture. Bake in a 425 degree (Fahrenheit) oven about 25 minutes or till pinwheels are browned.

Serve hot.

Makes 8 healthy helpings, or 11 or so more prudent servings.

``````````

Chicken can be substituted for the turkey in any of the above recipes. I don't know why you couldn't substitute any other meat- the cranberry pinwheels would probably be quite tasty with ham, the stuffing casserole would be just as good with ham, chicken, or ground beef, and while the enchilada really are out of this world when made with smoked turkey, they are quite satisfactory with other meat in the filling- or just as cheese enchiladas.

Double meanings

It's a very chilly night. We left the house at 11:00 in the morning to run errands, have doctor appointments, and go to a singing. We arrive home, chilled, tired, dosed with antibiotics, and still humming from the singing. But we are really, really cold.

Me to boy as he flings things off my bed with abandon: "Don't make a mess."

Boy to me as he finishes flinging things off the bed with abandon and dives under the covers, straightening them up over himself: "I didn't. I made the bed."

Pray for the Children

Prayer: Over at Dominion Family somebody asked for some suggestions on how to pray for our children, and somebody else shared this link to a beautiful post by Amy at Amy's Humbling Musings. It is lovely, and I am passing it on for those who can use it. But I want to tell you I am a bear of very little brain and even less memory and absolutely no organization to speak of, and my prayers for my children are much simpler than this. They are so much simpler that when somebody asked for ideas about how to pray for our children I was a little nonplussed. I could not think of how to answer that.

I have no system. Sometimes I pray that they will forgive their mother. Sometimes I pray that they my children will walk in the light always, and I do pray for their future spouses, if such men there should be, and I pray for the sorts of things that come up day to day, but in general, I keep it simple.
When asked for the greatest commandment, this is what Jesus said,

"... Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.This is the first and great commandment, And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

What I pray most often is that my children will love the Lord with all their hearts, all their minds, all their strength, and all their souls. I think everything else on Amy's list pretty much flows from these things.

Assorted Trifles

My weekly post is up at Frugal Hacks. Go see, if only to look at the beautiful bread pudding my 11 year old made this week.=)

On the difference between Mars and Venus- During my last pregnancy, 9 years ago, I was struck most forcibly by one particular difference. I was able to laugh at it after the baby was born. When I am pregnant I am sick, all nine months. I am very happy when I reach the ninth month and am only vomiting once a week. I do not lose weight because I do not stop eating because so long as I keep eating I feel better, even if I am tossing cookies (and other things) left and right. But I am sick. I feel dizzy, moving overmuch in a sudden bout of nausea can be disastrous, and so my family serves me. They bring me toast with peanut butter and bagels with cream cheese. When my daughters would do this for me, while the bread toasted they would prepare a tray with a full place setting and usually a ribbon around my napkin, too. It was beautiful.
When my husband would do this for me, he would run past and toss a butter knife, a toasted bagel, and a package of cream cheese into my lap.

This little reminiscence was not prompted because I am pregnant (I am not). Nor are they prompted by any spirit of churlish resentment or pique. I promise. This is purely delighted amusement and I hope you will share it with me.
My husband brought me a cup of coffee this morning. He is a prince among men.
We collect coffee cups. We have all sorts. I tend to buy the ones decorated in botanical prints, or with flowery sayings, old art prints. He buys cups with manly slogans or some geographical reference. Which is why, of all the cups I own that are covered with flowers or strawberries, little girls in bonnets, charming vintage advertisements, or prints by some baroque artist, he brought me the cup with this slogan:
"I love the smell of jet fuel in the morning."

He is still a prince among men.

There is a deliciously cranky homeschooling rant over here (I found it at Ten'O'Clock Scholar)- and it's funny stuff. Please, please, do not go read if you are the sort to take offense, if you are the sort who thinks you are not the sort to take offense easily, but this is just obnoxious, you don't need to come tell me. Really. Yes, it's a little, um, acidic, and certainly such responses are really never called for in real life. But there have been times....



Recently I shared with a friend some specifics of our ongoing trial that is sometimes hinted at but never explained here at the Common Room. She was very kind, and as an aside said she had been supposing I was one of those who suffer from periodic bouts of clinical depression. There is a limit to transparency for me, and this is about where the curtain is going to stay drawn for now, and I am not at all intending to minimize or dismiss those who do suffer from depression. But that's not what we're dealing with here.

That Southwest Airlines passenger who who was so humiliated by being taken aside privately and asked to adjust her skirt she wasn't flashing passengers ? You know, she was so embarrassed she flew covered in a blanket because she hated to draw attention to herself, and then she appeared on national television in the same outfit to complain about it (and they had to censor the shots because she was flashing the television audience). Now she's dropped the clothes and posed for Playboy. Tell me again about how she doesn't want attention.

Louisiana politician, Democrat, calls a black supporter 'Buckwheat.' Stupid, crass move under any circumstances, but there's some stupidity that you just can't help but gawk at. Gates of Vienna has the details.


Speaking of race, here's a question I am pondering, and I really don't know what I think. Suppose that some, not all, but some, of a politician's supporters are, well, unsavory. Okay, suppose that some of them are white supremacists. Should that political return those donations? Is a politician necessarily tarred by the beliefs of every single one of his supporters? What do you think?

My brain: Recently my son asked to find out whose present he is getting for Christmas (we exchange names rather than have each child give gifts to each of six siblings). And I have that list on the computer, so I went to search for it using the search function, and nothing came up.
That was just weird, because the list is definitely here.
Okay, maybe not.
Because, when I double checked, for reasons that may be found somewhere in the dark and cobwebby recesses of the frightening space I call my brain but which are totally hidden to me, I did not type 'Christmas.'
I typed, "bathroom."
I did not even need to go.
Christmas, bathroom, Christmas, bathroom... nope. I just do not see a connection.
My brain, however, functions independently of me.

I had some other trifles (and, like some o fthe above, not so trifling) things to share, but I have to run. Two of us have doctor appointments today, one of our young friends has viral pneumonia, Thanksgiving is coming, life keeps intruding on my safe space.

A Few Nickels in the NIckolodean

In one of Cindy's thought provoking posts, she linked to this article by Mark Steyn, and I am cherry picking some of my favorite plums, because there some berry juicy ideas here:

But wait. Nauseating punnery aside, let me ask you a question. What's your favorite music? What do you listen while driving down the highway, jamming in the kitchen doing dishes, chilling out when the kids are down for the night, as background music for whatever you're doing? What's in the music player of your choice (CD, iPod, MP3, tape deck, record player, victrola) right now? What were the last three things you listened to? You don't have to tell me, I just want you to have that up front and readily in your mind for the next question.

How is it different from what you listened to when you were 15 (assuming that was more than ten year ago)?

Think about that, and then read this, thinking about what it means to live in a society of perpetual teenagers, where most of us keep the same standards, tastes, and preferences we formed when we were teens and these things remain essentially unchanged:

"“'Popular culture' is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner."

We live in the here and now. I remember my shock when a friend of mine, an honor roll student who graduated in the top ten percent of her class from a yuppie area school- had never heard of Teddy Kennedy's Chappaquiddick and did not know where the Eiffel Tower was. When she saw how shocked I was she pointed out, "You have to remember I'm younger than you." She's only six years younger than me, and Chappaquiddick wasn't exactly contemporary with my school years, either. But this what we consider 'history,' whatever happened ten years before we were in high school. If it was twenty years before we hit high school, it's ancient history. Our musical taste keeps us in the here and now. It has no reference deeper than itself, and if it did, most of us wouldn't recognize it anyway.

And it's ubiquitous (the Bloom he refers to is Alan Bloom and his book The Closing of the American Mind):

"...in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music. I was at the airport last week, sitting at the gate, and over the transom some woman was singing about having two lovers and being very happy about it. And we all sat there as if it’s perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, it’s very weird—though, as he notes, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” Whether or not rock music is the soundtrack for the age that its more ambitious proponents tout it as, it’s a literal soundtrack: it’s like being in a movie with a really bad score. So Bloom’s not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go... But he’s not doing album reviews, he’s pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic.

I like the stuff, too, but what worries me is when we are complacent about it, or worse, think we are somehow broadminded or demonstrating 'eclectic taste' if we like The Carpenters, Styx, Alabama, Nickel Creek, and Tears for Fears. These are only differences in flavor, not kind. That's like eating only ice-cream and thinking you have interesting, broad, and eclectic tastes because you like dozens of flavors of ice-cream. It's still something that appeals to us primarily because it goes down easy and we don't have to think about it:

Popular culture has dwindled down to a bunch of mutually hostile unpopular popular cultures. The only thing about it that’s universally popular is its overall undemanding aesthetic.

Undemanding. It doesn't, for the most part (I am thinking of Pat Benatar's Wuthering Heights as something of an exception) have a point of view more than twenty years deep, and because we've been swimming in the shallow end of the pool for so long, neither do we- and we're okay with that. Steyn quotes Wodehouse, of all people, an author who ought to be accessible to all of us:

... P. G. Wodehouse is stuffed with literary and classical and Biblical allusions: “He conveyed to young Mr. Rastall-Retford the impression that, in the dear old ’Varsity days, they had shared each other’s joys and sorrows, and, generally, had made Damon and Pythias look like a pair of cross-talk knockabouts at one of the rowdier music-halls.” Wodehouse assumes you know who Damon and Pythias are: They were best pals back in the fourth century BC. Ran into a spot of bother with Dionysius of Syracuse.

But Wodehouse isn't accessible to all of us, not even on DVD. Too many of us would read that without comprehension and blame Wodehouse for being hard to understand (Wodehouse!). We are, Steyn says: ...down to a present-tense culture unable to refer to anything beyond itself.
How I wish I could just quote the whole thing, or be sure that everybody would skip my rant and just go over and read it.

The Headgirl holds that just about the last bastion of anything even resembling classical music still being produced today is movie scores, and I think she has a point- but why is that? Steyn has a suggestion:

Imagine if talking pictures hadn’t been invented in 1927, but eighty years later, in 2007. Do you think Hollywood studios today would conclude that they needed to hire house composers and full orchestras to accompany the drama with symphonic scores? Something we take for granted about the form of modern talking pictures—dialogue accompanied by orchestral music—arose from a particular kind of cultural aspiration that no longer exists.

I've noticed a few movies lately where the soundtrack is largely 'classic rock.' I wonder if that's a trend, and pretty soon we won't have orchestral music in the movies, either.

Steyn also has a lot to say about the 'keepin' it real' approach to rap, but it's not printable on a family blog. It's popular to toss in the race card whenever anybody objects to rap or its predecessors. It's apparently racist to criticize certain forms of musical expression that can be said to have African underpinnings (even if it's said inaccurately). This happens even when the argument is made entirely without reference to race, but purely on grounds of taste, aesthetics, and intellect. But the same people tossing in out that accusation of bigotry are dismissing thousands of years of culture with a direct reference to race- how often do we hear somebody make a scornful reference to 'dead white guys?' And isn't it interesting that it's only the likes of Bach, Mozart and Shakespeare qualify as 'dead white guys' to ignore. Kurt Cobain is a dead white guy, too, but I've never heard anybody suggest he should be ignored on the basis that he is a. dead, and b. white. (There are other, better reasons).

And speaking of keeping it real, there really isn't much that it is real about that whole music scene- not even the angst and rebellion. Maybe especially that:

The last time I saw Paul McCartney on stage he was urging us all to give our money to Africa. Yet I found myself thinking of Sir Paul’s late wife. Linda McCartney had been a resident of the United Kingdom for three decades, but her Manhattan tax lawyers, Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts, devoted considerable energy in her final months to establishing her right to have her estate probated in New York state. That way she could avoid the 40 percent death duties levied by Her Majesty’s Government.

At the Live8 extravaganza in London two years ago, Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd said: “I want to do everything I can to persuade the G8 leaders to make huge commitments to the relief of poverty and increased aid to the Third World. It’s crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations.

No, it’s not. It’s no more crazy than Linda McCartney giving such a paltry percentage of her estate—i.e., 0 percent—to the British Treasury...The rockers demand we give our money to African dictators to manage, while they give their money to Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts to manage. Which of those models makes more sense?

It's sad, and more than a little bit scary. We really are witnessing the decline of Western Civilization, and most of us don't care, we just want our Johnny Cash, pizza, beer, and favorite television show. Oh, some of us will forgo the beer for a Coke and toss in a cheesy Christian romance novel for good measure. We'll hang a Thomas Kincaide picture on the wall to show our appreciation for 'art.'

Just like some of us like chocolate ice-cream, and some vanilla.

Maybe it's too late. Maybe the decline is over and the fall is in progress. We still need not be complacent about the current state of our minds. Save the ice-cream for dessert. Learn to love those delicious, flavorful, nourishing vegetables. Eat more vegetables than ice-cream.

Iron Sharpens Iron

Cindy has been lighting fires and pushing the limits over on her blog (and I, heh, have been tossing a splash of gasoline on it here and there). I highly recommend you get some marshmallows and go start reading. Just everything, everything.

Here are some of my favorite recent posts (I also think she has one of the most thoughtful, iron sharpens iron, comment sections of anybody):
On Richard Weaver's book Ideas Have Consequences (I'll post more on this later):
Egoism in Work and Art, Part 1, Work

Egosim in Work and Art, Part 2 The Arts

On parenting:

Disciplining Children

Calling All Moms for Real Advice

Calling All Moms for Real Advice

Older Mothers of the World Unite

the Importance of Good Principles

Pip, Jenny, and I were reading in Charlotte Mason's Ourselves about the importance of having good principles in your life.

We read this:

There is a certain class of opinions of which we must take special heed. Sometimes we get them from others, sometimes we think them out for ourselves; but, in either case, we make them our own because we act upon them. These opinions rule our conduct, and they are called Principles because they are princeps, first or chief in importance of all the opinions we hold. We speak of a well-principled boy, a man of principle, a young woman of high principles; but everyone has principles––that is, everyone has a few chief and leading opinions upon which every bit of his conduct is based. The boy who is late for roll-call, cribs his translation, shirks both games and work, may not know it, but he is acting upon principle. His principles may not even have found their way into words, but, if we fish for them, they come up something in this form: 'What's the good of doing more than you can help?' ...These, and the like, are the principles on which his whole conduct is based. He has allowed himself in thinking the thoughts of the slothful and negligent until he cannot get away from them. People call him an unprincipled boy, but probably there are no unprincipled persons; he is a boy who has deliberately chosen bad principles upon which to build all his conduct.

Well, we were interested in the italicized word, so we looked it up. According to Wikipedia, princeps is:

(in this sense usually translated as "First Citizen") was an official title of a Roman Emperor, by some historians seen as the title determining the Emperor in Ancient Rome...Princeps is also the (official) short version of Princeps officii, the chief of an officium (the office staff of a Roman dignitary)

Which makes sense- since principals are the things on which your conduct is based, they rule your behaviour. Which would all be very well and quite interesting, only we misspelled the word, and what we initially looked up is the word princepes, which is, according to Wikipedia:

Specifically, usually in the plural, in the military, the so-called Principes formed the second line of battle in the Roman Republican Army. They were experienced soldiers...
In battle, the principes were meant to counter attack if the hastati happened to fail in the initial engagement.

We like that connection better, picturing our principles as soldiers in the line of battle helping us to fight the good fight of right conduct and repudiate temptations toward bad.

And Yet, Another Post Devoted to The Equuschick's Favourite Subject-

The Zeus Dog!


He, on his end, is not too thrilled with The Equuschick at the moment, as this evening she gave him the Unmentionable Treatment.

But as The Zeus Child's Muck Level had, several week ago, surpassed the minimum amount dictated by the self-respect of a dog his size who views himself as a Farm and Guard Dog, The Equuschick really felt the time had come and gone and come back. He simply had to have a bath.

As they've been through these proceedings before, The Equuschick prudently found the canine in question a good half hour before she actually planned to start the bath, because that's about the time it takes to get him in there.

He has never won. Not once. He always gets a bath. "But, he seems to declare,"that's no reason for me to make it easy on you. I am not cooperating. I refuse."

First there is the job of getting him in the bathroom, this involves much chasing and cornering and ZEUS IF I HAVE TO CALL YOU ONE MORE TIME YOU'RE DEAD hollering, and then he's in the bathroom with the door shut behind him.

This is the part where the 110 lb. dog pretends that, if he lays down and curls up by the wall just right, he can't be seen.

But he can be seen, and so The Equuschick shoves and prods and lifts and mutters under her breath, and with one hand puts a treat in front of his nose and with the other she encourages the other end.

The Equuschick would like, in theory, to believe exclusively in positive reinforcement, hence the treats, but reality is what it is and dogs are what they are, and each dog is different, and Zeus is the kind that says "Do not bribe me, I am not stupid."

So in the end, though he'll eat the few treats that line the way from the door to the tub, he has never yet eaten a treat that was actually in the tub.


After The Equuschick feels that she's had the physical work-out recommended by most health experts, she hollers for The Pipsqueak,and the Zeus Dog is picked up and lifted, amid much muttering and panting into the bath, much to his severe humiliation and distress.

That is when he gives The Equuschick his look that she calls the "If I Knew I Could Do it and Survive I Would Bite Your Nose Off" look.

But The Equuschick is unabashed, and begins to shampoo and spray cheerfully, singing all the while.

Once in the bath he usually resigns himself to his bitter fate, and the ears droop and the eyes glaze over until The Equuschick turns the water off, when he regains consciousness and leaps for freedom.


This leap, of course, is a wet one. It is his revenge.

This evening he rather doubled The Equuschick over with laughter, being his calculating, self-interested self.

After he'd drenched The Equuschick and ran around the bathroom a time or two, relishing his release, he suddenly stopped and sniffed in the general direction of the bathtub, where a treat or two still lay untouched. (Zeus's interest in food is never completely stagnant, he can't help it. It is the Lab in him.)

His expression suddenly became one of the most intense calculation. The Equuschick doesn't really know what else to call it. She has seen this look before and it is one of her favourites, one she cherishes, in spite of the fact that nine times out of ten it leads to trouble. It is his Thinking Look.

There he stood, looking at the tub, and looking back at The Equuschick, otherwise not moving a muscle, and The Equuschick rather fancied the internal monologue went something like the following.

"Would she let me get away with it? She has never repeated this horrible humiliation immediately, if I were to touch this treat now would I be safe? Or would this strange woman who took over my life three years ago throw me back in the terrible tub the minute I touched it? You never know with her, she's weird."

The Equuschick could only watch him and laugh.

In the end, he took two cautious steps forward and, for the first time in his life with The Equuschick, ate a treat directly out of the tub, shooting as he did so a questioning look back at her.

And he was petted and cooed at and told what a lovely, charming, boy he was, because there is a great deal of sense in letting him think that the tub is not always terrible.

Yay!

I am DONE cataloging all our history books! No doubt there are still a few odd history books put in the wrong places, but I am done cataloging all the history shelves. Yes, this makes me very happy. :) Next comes Geography, Classic Lit/Fiction, Science, Picture Books, Junior Lit/J.Fiction, poetry, etc. etc. etc.... um, yeah. We've still got a lot to do. :)

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Cash Advance Loans

I thought that this was really good quote:

"Our society, once rightly called a Christian civilization, has become secular to a greater degree than the solons of Western civilization would have thought possible. Education, government, business, the media, and , in many cases,
religion, have moved through progressive stages of secularization from Christianity to atheism.
As a result, God is not merely ignored but rather is resented, opposed, and vilified at every opportunity.
With unimaginable arrogance, our society has declared Jesus Christ to be persona non grata in the culture.
Concomitantly, the Bible has lost its final authority, the Christian religion has been pluralized, the family is fast disappearing, and morals are at a low ebb.
Those who insist that the force that moves history is not God are now on the speaker's platform and before the television cameras.
What will they do when the platform collapses and the lights go out?"

Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave

Charlotte Mason on Fairy Tales

Let him learn life through the transfiguring medium of the fairy tale. But how is the fairy tale better than the tale of Tom and Harry who had each a cake sent to him at school? Simply because in the fairy tale all things are possible and strange things come to pass. What if these things are not true? The children knows perfectly the difference between the kingdom of make-believe and the arid realm of fact; when they confuse the two it is often because their diet of make-believe is so limited that they figure to themselves facts otherwise than as they are; they have met so and so, whom they have not met, who said thus and thus; in fact, they "tell lies!" but their fault is not so shocking as it looks, for necessity is laid upon them to get out of the confines of use and wont. Is it perhaps the element of infinity in children that makes the fairy-tale world necessary? However it is, we need not be alarmed, for these tales make for righteousness, for the punishment of the evil-doer and the praise of them that do well.

There are excellent mediocre people who do not exercise the process or possess the power of seeing those things which are invisible, but all our great men and women have found this way to distinction; historians, poets, painters, explorers, politicians, conquerors--all alike have seen the things invisible. Even mathematicians, most exact of men, play like children at "Let us suppose"; as for proof, demonstration, "There is a growing feeling that it is better to give results without proof rather than to offer proofs in which all the difficulties are glossed over, and which afterwards have to be abandoned as unsound" (Preface to A School Algebra, by H.S. Hall). We make two prime mistakes; we place children in a category by themselves instead of regarding them as persons like the rest of us; and we parcel off the elements of personality into imagination and a dozen other components, when spirit and matter are all we need take account of. We know pretty well what to do with body; spirit, mind, is apt to be inarticulate, and we must fall back on the analogy of body as our most convenient guide. "Brother Body" demands a good deal: activity, rest, food, air--these things and more are necessary, and not the finest poem that ever was writ will feed a hungry child. Mind has just such claims, and no external activity, be it making a pattern, dancing a minuet or making a "shell," brings mind its due and proper aliment.

The food of mind, a daily bread as necessary as that of body, is precisely those "mental pictures or ideas" which imagination produces; and for this reason, children must have the mind-stuff which they can transmute into such pictures or ideas; nothing external serves the purpose. I am not bold enough to say with Mr. Chesterton, "Hans Anderson or Hell," but I do venture to say that the mind which does not feed on poetry, history, fiction, travel, all the treasures that are bound up in books, on pictures, on the beauty of a sunset or a flower, such a mind may be acute and alert, but it does not dwell in heavenly places.

source

Charlotte Mason, Montessori, and Children With Disabilities

Yesterday we talked about common assumptions of a common time and how we should keep this in mind when reading Charlotte Mason. That is, people who are contemporaries share certain assumptions they don't even know they share. This often only comes out in a later generation when those assumptions are no longer shared. When we lose those assumptions it's easier to spot them in our predecessors, but this should keep us humble and ever mindful of our own unrecognized assumptions. Today we'll get more specific about Montessori and Charlotte Mason, and also working with children with disabilities.

In this previous post on Charlotte Mason and ideas, Maria Montessori came up in the comments. I'm revising that comment here (which means that it's about four times as long), and sharing something else from one of the comments that I think is too insightful, too helpful to too many of us to leave buried there where readers might miss it. That important comment is from Tammy Glaser, who homeschools children with autism. If you want to get straight to the crux of things that would work for you at home, scroll down to the bottom of this post.

It is true that Montessori and Charlotte Mason have many things in common, just as Mason and Froebel do. There are many similarities and Montessori seems to me to have always been a wise woman with no small amount of love for her charges and we could learn much from her. But it is also true that Miss Mason disagreed with Montessori very specifically on some key points.

Incidentally, in the quotes that follow Maria uses a word for disabled children that has fallen into grave disrepute today. Please understand that it was merely a medical term at the time and it fell into disrepute through its abuse, to the point that it now has completely lost its original meaning and is merely an insult. In the same way the the once useful word 'retarded' has lost its nonpejorative associations and is now used as an insult by people who ought to know better.

Maria Montessori writes that early in her work she hoped that "some day, the special education which had developed these idiot children in such a marvellous fashion, could be applied to the development of normal children," and that was the aim of her work. About her work with the Childrens' Houses, she says, "Methods which made growth possible to the mental personality of the idiot ought, therefore, to aid the development of young children, and should be so adapted as to constitute a hygienic education of the entire personality of a normal human being."

Charlotte Mason says that ideas developed for disabled children (as Maria Montessori's were) are not suited for healthy children- that it's like treating all children as though they are mentally crippled: "I am jealous for the children; every modern educational movement tends to belittle them intellectually; and none more so than a late ingenious attempt to feed normal children with the pap-meat which may (?) be good for the mentally sick..."

I think she's also talking about Montessori (and possibly others) here:

"We come dangerously near to what Plato condemns as "that lie of the soul," that corruption of the highest truth, of which Protagoras is guilty in the saying that, "Knowledge is sensation." What else are we saying when we run after educational methods which are purely sensory? Knowledge is not sensation, nor is it to be derived through sensation; we feed upon the thoughts of other minds; and thought applied to thought generates thought and we become more thoughtful."

I am pretty sure she is talking about Montessori, as in The Montessori Method, by Maria Montessori we can note Montessori's emphasis on 'sense training' and reaching the mind through outside sensations:

"I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you," recalled the fundamental phrase which sums up Séguin's whole method,–"to lead the child, as it were, by the hand, from the education of the muscular system, to that of the nervous system, and of the senses."
"IN a pedagogical method which is experimental the education of the senses must undoubtedly assume the greatest importance."

Pedagogy...is...designed ... to... educate the senses. ... the education of the senses is entirely possible.

the education of the senses has, as its aim, the refinement of the differential perception of stimuli by means of repeated exercises.

Speaking of her graduated blocks and the pegs she uses, Montessori says, "Our didactic material renders auto-education possible, permits a methodical education of the senses."

She says she teaches writing "through a series of problems to be solved. These problems are presented as sense exercises."

the education of the senses must be of the greatest pedagogical interest.

In chapter IV, Maria Montessori says explains her view of why it is wrong to start education from ideas instead of from motor activities to develop the senses.

The education of the senses should be begun methodically in infancy, and should continue during the entire period of instruction which is to prepare the individual for life in society.

Æsthetic and moral education are closely related to this sensory education. Multiply the sensations, and develop the capacity of appreciating fine differences in stimuli and we refine the sensibility and multiply man's pleasures.

The directress must intervene to lead the child from sensations to ideas–from the concrete to the abstract, and to the association of ideas. For this, she should use a method tending to isolate the inner attention of the child and to fix it upon the perceptions–as in the first lessons his objective attention was fixed, through isolation, upon single stimuli.

Here is an interesting article on education (for those interested in philosophical underpinnings) which points out Montessori's agreement with the philosopher Herbart:

Montessori embraced the [Herbartian] concept of orderly steps and developed materials carefully designed to facilitate each step. She based this program mainly on her observation of children, and their interests and abilities shown at each moment of growth. For Montessori, this was scientific pedagogy. Her observations, however, were filtered through Herbartian lenses that assumed an orderly progression of intellectual development.

Recall that Miss Mason very specifically distanced herself from Herbartian philosophy, in her tenth principle of education. Those principles she considered foundational to her approach. Again, for those interested in reading them, you can find them in the front of each book, but I especially recommend reading them in the sixth volume, as that was her latest work. The first few chapters of volume 6 also flesh out those principles.

Perhaps the greatest area of disagreement Miss Mason had with Montessori was in the realm of imagination and literature.
In this PR Article, Miss Mason specifically responds to an article by Dr. Montessori for the purpose of refuting Montessori's ideas in this area. The entire article is worth reading, and I will repost a portion of it later, but for her and now I will just say that Miss Mason dismissed Montessori's term' cultivating the imagination' and said it was rather a feeding of spiritual hunger. That sentence, I think, sums up the difference between Mason and most other educators of her time. Others wanted to 'develop' faculties and separate portions of the mind that were either not there to begin with or so latent that it required a teacher to bring them out and build them up. Miss Mason believed the faculties would take care of themselves if only we would feed the child's natural, inborn hunger for meaningful knowledge, for ideas. And if the faculties did need this development, she thought, they would develop well enough if fed real mind food- ideas, just as all the parts of the body would develop holistically if fed real nourishing food.

Miss Mason also wrote a pamphlet, which I have not seen but have been told, expresses her disagreement with certain of Montessori's methods.
another PR article the president of the PNEU says, "I have never been able to
develop any enthusiasm for the Montessori system since I learnt from Madame
Montessori's book that stories play no part in her scheme of education."

So while there are indeed similarities, Miss Mason expressed serious reservations about significant points of Dr. Montessori's work.

And now that the philosophizing is out of the way, Here is Tammy Glaser's much more useful comment:

On the whole sensory thing, here is what I have observed in my daughter with autism. For her, doing sensory activities was about getting her calm and focused. Sometimes, she felt so much stress she could not learn because she was about ready to meltdown. When the brain is in flight or fight mode, it is unable to transfer information from short term to long term memory (Carroll Smith pointed that out at the 2006 ChildLightUSA Conference).

So, sensory activities calmed her down! Then, we could get to the business of learning. They helped her brain focus and get ready to learn when she was having a rough day, but they were not the main vehicle of learning.

I do think that distinction fits within a Charlotte Mason philosophy.

I agree with her. Tammy, as I said, homeschools a child with autism, and she keeps a blog about that experience here. If you have a child with disabilities, you should bookmark her blog and return to it often for wisdom, inspiration, encouragement, and thought provoking ideas.

More Gingersnaps

HEre's another page of recipes handwritten in a notebook dated 1901:
gingersnap No. 2

1 pint molasses
1 cup shortening
1 cup gran. sugar
1/2 cup water
Spices- teaspoon ginger, cloves, and cinnamon
1 tablespoon soada
flour to stiffen (sic)

Molasses cookies Delineator
1 cupful of sugar
1 cupful of butter
1 cupful of molasses
1/3 cupful of vinegar
flour to thicken
1 teaspoonful salt
1 teaspoonful soda
1 tablespoonful ginger
1 egg
Rub butter and sugar together egg will beaten
Add soda to vinegar and vinegar to molasses. Stir all together and add flour.

I have no idea why those are called 'delineator.'

Keeping Little Ones Busy in the Kitchen

Something I used to do when my children were smaller and I needed to keep them occupied while I was working in the kitchen:

I collected simple pictures illustrating folk tales or Bible stories they knew. I picked them up from Sunday School materials, old story books, or coloring books. I laminated them and put bits of magnet strips on the back- you can also re-purpose those magnets that businesses give away for free- they are thin and flat so they can be cut up and pastes to the back of a laminated picture quite nicely.

These went on the refrigerator at child's eye level, or on a cookie sheet, or on a metal door (depending on our kitchen that year) and the small fry could play with them, telling me stories about them or just working through the stories themselves.

You could do this with any pictures, of course, including pictures of food from local grocery sales, shapes, colors, pictures from a catalog or your photo album. It Worked for Me.=)

Bits & Pieces from My Day

My professor from Argentina talked to us today about how the rest of Latin America views people from his native country. As a general rule, people from Argentina are seen as being rather arrogant and egotistical. According to him, there are a host of jokes about this; he shared one with us today, and it was too funny not to share here.

So in a lightning storm, most people go inside to protect themselves. People in Argentina go outside during a lightning storm, though. Why? Because they think God wants to take their picture.

----
Guy to a girl with a lip piercing in my Spanish Class: "So why do people do things like that?"

Aaand then there was a lot of the typical un-repeatable stuff heard, too. I get really tired of people who think they're being witty when in reality they're just being trashy... and inflicting their disgusting sense of humor on the rest of humanity.

Wow. That was rather cynical of me...

I did enjoy an excellent class discussion on traits of a good political leader and how being a talented political personage does not necessarily mean having good analytical abilities or a good understanding of history.

Other class discussions: Spinoza (I'd like to take a break from this guy one semester), Peter Bayle (new guy for me), Enlightenment figures, the Oneida and Shaker communities in America, and anti-Semitism in Europe today.

It was a long day.

This is cool.

They're working on designing a WhereAbouts clock so that you can keep track (in a general way) of where your family members are. The article was pretty interesting, but my favorite part was this one:

What's surprising, said Sellen, is that none of the test families had issues with privacy. "They explained to us that knowing the whereabouts of family members is about family life. Even teens didn't have a problem," she said.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Charlotte Mason- a Carnival- plenty of good stuff to think about and act upon. Go visit, read, think, and do!