I had a different schedule planned for today...

Then the Boy (age 11) noticed the package of laminated maps I bought at a recent homeschool seminar and asked if he could look at them. Then he asked if he could put them with Blynken's (5 y.o.) help.  And then Nod (3y.o.) wanted to help. 

And then the Boy thought the staircase should be a Hall of Geography, so he asked if we had any more maps anywhere.

Um.  The Rattery had several years of National Geographics in one of the bedrooms, all replete with maps.  I pulled them out and brought them home and they have been on a shelf in the Common Room for about three years.  I've pointed them out before, but apparently I was speaking to the air.

So I told the Boy there were lots of other maps on the Geography shelf upstairs.  He went dashing up and came dashing back down.

"We have a geography shelf?" he asked.

We have an entire geography bookcase, around 7 feet tall, 7 or 8 shelves on it.  Full.

"I've failed," I wailed.  It's a regular refrain around here.  I told him where the bookcase was and he went up and brought down more maps.

Nod got tired of it and ran off for a while.

The Boy discovered how useful a little brother is, even if the 'little brother' is not really a little brother, just a little boy who lives here half the time. He sent him to fetch and carry tacks, to hold them for him, to hand them to him when he wanted them, and to bring him the rubber mallet for hammering tacks into the wall when it seemed hard.  Blynken loved being so important and useful.

The task took almost two hours because the boys stopped to look over the maps and talk about them, the Big Boy pointing out bodies of water and countries on the map, talking about where we live, where we don't live, the difference between states and countries, and where, say, Egypt could be found on the map, and other such details- some of which he was really only learning himself as he read the maps, but he didn't tell Blynken that.  To Blynken he was as the Oracle at Delphi, only more comprehensible.  And Blynken's heard of the Boy, but not the Oracle at Delphi.  But other than that...

I did have a silly moment when I thought I might call the boys to hurry up and come away so we could 'do school,' meaning the stuff on my schedule,  and then Blynken asked The Boy, "What IS a state, anyway?  Is that kind of close to the town where you live?" and The Boy answered him by digging out a larger map of the US and pointing out where we live, and where the boundaries of our state are, and sanity prevailed, and I left them to their project.

Nod came back with a toy weapon.  He wanted to pose with it pointed at the older boys as though he was holding them at gunpoint and forcing them to work.  I figured that would freak people out and so I told him to stand down.  We also had to dismiss his army, as they got rowdy.

Yes, by the way, Nod has an army named Joe, Francis, and Jacob.  Jacob is his favorite army, but the army of Joe is the best shot.

Do you think our Hall of Geography clashes with the vintage linens on the opposite wall?

We also colored outline maps, sang geography songs (based on tunes from this), and ate leftover whole wheat spaghetti with home-made clam linguine sauce for lunch.

Incidentally, 'school' today was also briefly set aside when my son-in-law brought his family over to visit, and he kindly sat down to color with Blynken and talk about things like why we clean up our messes, why we don't hit people on the bottom, especially not Shasta, and the like.  Then Blynken helped the FYG clean the kitchen and he went with her next door to get a paper from the grandparents, and he chucked the baby Pirate's chin and discussed with me why The Cherub is older than Pip and Jenny but still can't talk and wears diapers, and listened to poems read aloud from When We Were Very Young, among other things.

And isn't it  a sad shame that during these interruptions poor Blynken was missing out on social experiences that the children in the kindergarten class at school get, and neither boy was in school?  They probably didn't learn a thing, and the glee with which they greeted the printable map of the Middle East Pip scrounged up online and printed out for them later was just so much nonsense, and coloring their maps together was definitely NOT socialization, nor was it socializing or educational when they got out the globe and found the places they were coloring on it to make sure they got all the bodies of water blue and all the land brown and green.

Poor deprived children.  If you should wish to insert a wicked gleam in my eye right here, that would not be amiss.




For more on scheduling, tune in every Thursday starting March 11th to hear how four different moms with 35+ kids among us handle this as well as other topics!

Interruptions at our house are not always so serendipitous as the one in this post.

Blynken and Nod aren't our kids by blood or law.  So who are they?

What's the Rattery?  You really don't want to know, but if you're morbidly curious, see here.

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