Mystery plants identified

Dogwood.

Peony.

This yard is full of plants I didn't recognize when we moved in. I'm not from the south, and we arrived in midsummer when most things were done blooming. Also, a poison ivy attacked me the first week we were here when I was sweeping the deck, and we had to clear out wasps and a huge snake, and all I could identify were yew berries (don't eat) and pokeweed berries (also don't eat), so I was not feeling the great outdoors for a while there. Who knew what other vicious plant forms were out to get us?

Anyway, all fall and winter I had this mystery tree at the end of the drive, that produced burgundy leaves and these little pod cherry things. I asked around and searched and searched online to figure it out, with absolutely no success. The bark looked like maybe a fruit tree? But the pod things didn't look edible?

And then this spring it bloomed. Ta-da! Dogwood!


Then there were these bush things out front. They got pretty big and then died completely flat for the winter. What are they? Will they poison us? The girls and I went on a field trip today to the gardens at Ida Lee, and one of the master gardeners happened to be in. I saw another of these mystery plants and asked her, and she was able not only to identify it for me, but also describe its habits, which also lined up exactly with ours. Peony, people.

It's kind of nice, figuring things out.

February was too much with us, late and soon

February was one of those months that seriously just wouldn't die. It started with that groundhog seeing his shadow, which was inexcusable. We spent about half the month sick -- I was pretty much positive I would never get to church again -- and it kept snowing and being mostly in the single digits. I am extremely tired of my winter clothes. Kate outgrew all hers. Since we were sick, we hardly got any school done, which meant we were stuck in ancient Mesopotamia for January and the entire month of February. I don't mind Sumer, Akkad, and the rest, because people have awesome names like "Enheduanna" and "Sin-Leqqi-Uninni," but it was getting old. As late as Saturday, which, you may remember, was February 28th, I was still telling people it was going to be February FOREVER.

I'm pleased to report that it's March. And, we started Ancient Egypt today! Woohoo!

I hadn't quite meant to start Meg with stories about Thutmose III, but that's what Jonathan wanted to tell her this morning, so I ran with it.

I started things off by playing "Walk Like an Egyptian" really loudly and repeatedly. I'm not sure about most of the lyrics, but pretty much all you can hear is "oo-way-oo-way" and "Walk like an Egyptian," which won't scar any tender psyches. We colored maps of Egypt, discussed Thutmose's reign and strategy at the Battle of Megiddo, and looked at his cartouches, his statues, his wives' jewelry, and, by Meg's request, his mummy. I've also started a new Ancient History pinboard. I've got big plans for copying some of those Thutmosid bezel rings and maybe we'll make Meg a full costume to go with it, white dress, collar, headdress, the works.

I have high hopes it might be spring again, ever.

More blog from me!

I've started writing specifically on our homeschooling adventures over at the HSLDA blog. I'm all pleased over here because my first post went up today and I feel like such a real blogger now. :-)

You can access it and future posts any time from hslda.org and scroll down to the "blog" link. Well, any future posts after they have been posted, I mean. There will be more, and at regular intervals too, but right now it's just the one. I'll be impressed if you can get to them before they go up: and will probably ask to borrow your time machine.

Rivers and planets

We always make a fuss when we drive over rivers. It makes life more exciting, and now that we're doing school it also counts as Doing Geography.
Me: "Hey, look, Meg! It's the Shenandoah River!"
Meg: "Hey, Shenandoah! Long time no see!"
Me, speaking as the river: "Hi, Meg!"
Meg, disapprovingly: "It doesn't talk."

We're learning about planets this week. I was telling Meg how Mercury doesn't have any atmosphere, so it gets really hot during the day and really cold at night. She observed, with great accuracy, "You would have to have a spacesuit or a pair of very wooly pajamas if you wanted to sleep there."

Also on that subject: "If you had a grown-up horse [on Mercury], you would have to take care of it and put a space suit on it."

Plant update

Also, the zucchini that looks like a watermelon might have been a pumpkin. At least one of those vines has produced an actually orange pumpkin; I'm not sure about the other vine or vines. The things on them are still green and one might still be a zucchini. But, you can consider this a public service announcement: if that mystery vegetable was a pumpkin, you can totally use grated green pumpkin to make Death By Chocolate cake with ganache and it won't kill you. It was fabulous cake and stayed moist for days.

What we did in August

We just got back from spending most of August with my family. We had lots of fun! Kate turned eleven months old while we were out there and didn't so much achieve milestones as speed-crawl past them. She sprouted two upper teeth, went from slow-crawling to the aforementioned speed-crawl, and started pulling up. And cruising on objects. And walking with assistance. She also smiled at everyone and blinked her huge blue eyes at them. She made lots of friends.

Meg, meanwhile, reveled in all those outdoorsy New Mexican things to do. We hunted shell fossils in the mountains, played in mountain streams, dug up dinosaur bones out of my sister's yard, camped and roasted marshmallows in my parents' backyard, observed the recent flood damage at Bandelier, picked and identified wildflowers for our flower prints, and went to the museum and archaeological site where they dig up Clovis points. In between times she played with grandparents and cousins, amused herself in the wading pool, and arranged dinosaurs on otherwise normal tablescapes. A good time was had by all, I think.

All illusion, really

It was such a harmless quote...

"Mommy's just filling in the corners."
"Which was a hobbit allusion, " I said, for Meg's benefit. Because she clearly needs to be fully acquainted with all of Tolkien's passing turns of phrase at the earliest opportunity.
Meg announced, "It was an OCCLUSION!"

We all laughed, and Jonathan started defining all the "--lusion" words he could think of.  Meg suggested "solution."
"Yes, a solution is a problem fixed," Jonathan agreed.
I added, "Or it's something dissolved in liquid."
"Yes, which solves the problem of nothing being dissolved in your liquid. Or you're about to throw it at a troll. Which makes him solvent. His bankruptcy creditors are delighted!"

"I'm going to be a laughingstock of linguists and alchemists alike." Jonathan

Quotes

"It slipped through my mental fingers like greased lasagna." Jonathan

I was narrating Meg. "A small burrowing mammal..."
Meg was outraged. "I am not a burro!"

Jane the invisible mousie, it turns out, has watched the Sonic the Hedgehog show, which I didn't even know exists. I said she was very avant-garde.
This puzzled Meg. "Jane's not a guard."

My daughter can lick your daughter

And I mean that in the most literal sense. Kate is currently deeply interested in everything and everyone that crosses her path, and the best way to find out about it is mouth-first. So many textures! So many flavors! So many delicious friends! Cold marble countertops feel wonderful on the gums and wooden blocks get slightly softer when they're all wet. When you lick Mommy's shirt or jeans, she often makes interesting noises and jumps.

A couple of days ago I accidentally dropped a bat, the stuffed animal kind, onto her head. She leaned over in a spirit of inquiry and -- what else? -- gently licked it.

Meg and the wise men

"Do you know who the 'starlit magi' were, Meg?"
"No, who?"
"The three wise men, who followed the star!"
"Oh. What were their names?"
"Well, the Bible doesn't really say, but according to tradition, their names were Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar."

I was vaguely pleased with this passing-down of knowledge that Everyone Should Have. I'm so glad to have seized a teachable moment. Meanwhile, Meg was contemplating.

"I think their names were Pinky, Dinky, and Binky."

Wait, what?

Meg, looking out the window: "What is that?"
"What is what? The wind?"
"What is the wind?"
"It's when the air gets pushed around."
Meg, nodding sagely: "Ah. That's why I'm eating my breakfast."

Do we need to work on cause-and-effect??

So Meg can read clocks, now

Meg just boggled me by reading a clock. She looked up at the big one over the couch and announced that it was seven o'clock - the little hand was on the seven, and the big one was (almost) pointing up. Who knew?

Meggie cuteness

The other day, after it had snowed and thawed and there was rock salt all over the sidewalks, she said, "Look, Mommy! Snow crumbs!"

Then last night, Jonathan tried to tell Meg a story about France. I wasn't sure Meg was clear on France, so I started quoting Ratatouille at her. "Ze best food in ze world is made in France. And ze best food in France is made in..."

Meg looked blank. But then she guessed -- "Mexico!"

And get over it

We had a pretty emotional morning, ending with a heart-to-heart chat on the importance of wearing big-girl underwear.

Ah, potty training.

First time resurrected since graduation

I knew, theoretically, that this day might come.

You get a sewing maching - you start to use it - you start thinking, I could make that. You buy fabric.

And then you start drawing triangles and doing trigonometry before you cut.

Yes... I made Jonathan go find my scientific calculator so I could do square roots, and everything. a squared plus b squared equals c squared. And thus it goes. Using that equation was deep in my memory and so even though I kind of forgot, I really remembered. I know because when I checked my work, it came out true. That's good. My math teachers should be so proud!

We certainly wouldn't want an uncongenial habitat

"The cathedral was supposed to be a setting in which humans could glimpse heaven, thereby experiencing a taste of the hereafter. It served to draw people toward heaven. Durkheim's ideas about the sacred, however, suggest a different, almost opposite view of the cathedral's purpose -- in which the cathedral is a place designed to draw the divine down among people. We might say this is done by creating a congenial habitat for the divine."

The Gothic Enterprise by Robert A Scott, pg 153


I'm thoroughly enjoying this book on Gothic cathedrals and highly recommend it. Scott is working with a lot of the same ideas as Lewis' Discarded Image and is very interested in the connection between politics, medieval theology, and cathedrals. He gets into Scholasticism and Bishop Suger and all kinds of interesting stuff. For all that, I laughed really hard when he described cathedrals as a habitat for the divine. It's so... contemporary. He makes it sound like they were building hamster cages.

Also, he's kind of off-kilter due to not coming from an informed Christian philosophy himself. I would argue that one could, actually, describe the Tabernacle and the Temple as a "habitat for the divine" (if you dared!), but not so much churches anymore. The veil was torn in two, and now the Lord is building a new house out of living stones, which are His people. For that matter, the cathedral builders were off-kilter themselves on occasion.

Munch, munch, said the black hole

As a star gets sucked into a black hole, it sends out an oscillation or "quasiperiodic wobble" that we can pick up on earth.

"You can think of it as hearing the star scream as it gets devoured, if you like," says the astronomer who co-authored the paper. The scream was an ultra-low D sharp.

How not to fix a cowboy boot

Cowboy boots: good.

This is actually a two-parter post. A two-step, if you will.

Part One:
These are my cowboy boots I got in Amarillo back when I was in college. I outgrew them while Meg was on the way. This made me sad, because they're great boots.

Then I came across a thing on Pinterest claiming that if you use a little alcohol and a hair dryer, you can stretch out a too-small shoe. I thought it was worth a try.

Whiskey: bad.

I had a few drops of this Scottish whiskey left from our honey- moon and thought it was just too awesome not to try. So I put on two pairs of socks, my boots (with Jonathan's help), whiskeyed them up, and hair dried them.

And yes! It did help! The boots are a little snug, but much better. I can take them off all by myself now.


Part Two:
I went to my sister's baby shower and sat next to the Pink Pixie and her mother. They're shoe professionals, and I thought they would be interested in my cowboy boot fix.

Actually, horrified would be closer to it. Come to find out, you should NEVER put alcohol on shoes, especially leather - that way lies crackage and destruction and all bad things. You shouldn't bombard shoes with hot air, either.

The correct technique for stretching a shoe is to hit it with a hammer. Literally. You work the leather maybe while you're watching a movie and it softens up. Or you can just wear the shoes around the house with extra socks every day until they're comfortable.

When I protested, the Pixie assured me that good things come to those who wait.

Let that be a lesson not to believe DIYs you read on the internet.

The first step into a larger universe

We started Narnia today. I didn't quite know if Meg was ready for a chapter book, but she likes picture books and is able to follow the story  of such classics as If You Give a Pig a Party and Fancy Nancy. She'll sit with them herself, identifying the pictures and (half the time) reciting the text for that page, so I thought it was worth trying, at least. I got out The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and started reading aloud.

We counted the children - Peter, Susan, Edmund, Lucy - on our fingers, and talked about their riding the train to the Professor's house. We talked about the owl sound Lucy heard and made owl noises ourselves. We talked about exploring big houses and what wardrobes and fauns are and examined the illustrations closely. We made it all the way to chapter two and started having tea with Mr. Tumnus before she got restless, so we put it away and went and had a glorious tea of our own, with a fried egg and croissants with honey, lemon curd, or Nutella. All in all, it was a highly successful introduction to Narnia. I'm so pleased I could just about cry.

I hadn't ever put this together before, but I realized Lucy's meal with Tumnus was especially notable because back home in England, she was under wartime rations! A cake with sugar on top would have been a particular treat for her. I'm so glad we're not rationed these days.

Moo, baa, la la la

Some animals are better to have around than others. Cows, sheep, horses, tigers, monkeys, cats, dogs, and birds - those are all cool, because they have an assigned noise to make. Having real live cows across the street is wonderful. Cows are cows, and dogs are dogs, and we all know where we stand. The only trouble with this scenario is that now Mommy has the urge to baa, for instance, whenever sheep are mentioned, including in church.

Bears are a little tricky, because sometimes they say "grr" and sometimes they snore. Mice are hard, because they are quiet but they also say eek and squeak, but Meg has a hard time saying eek and squeak.

And then there are the camels and rhinoceroses and buffaloes, that don't exactly say anything. Sometimes they usurp other animals' noises, like "moo," but it's just not right. We have some, but they are not trustworthy characters.

Update: Just now I came across this video of - what else?- baby rhinoceroses squeak/honking at each other. Now we know.