Dominion Family

I have been at home A LOT lately. Would you believe we have only one car at home now? We have also lost a few people and a bunch of laundry. My van leaves every afternoon when my son Christopher goes out to make some money. Christopher is the oldest child at home now. He uses my van more than I do. Thank the Lord for the PIG; milk and chittlins are just around the corner. Gas prices are keeping me at home more too. The more I stay home the less money I spend or burn.

So here I am. Time on my hands. I have been bantering around lots of blogging ideas. I have been bantering around so much I just can’t settle on how I want to return to blogging and in what form. I have watched as my husband stared incredulously at some of my ideas. What’s wrong with a blog entirely in iambic pentameter? Dr Grant has Eleventary.

I also realized that the posts I most needed to save were the Morning Time posts. Then yesterday while watching a You Tube video of Follow the Drinking Gourd, our current folk song selection, it occurred to me that it would be great to have a Yahoo Group to share MT resources. So there you have it. I have decided to start the Morning Time Moms Yahoo Group !!! I have many ideas for this group but I am sure it will take a while to get it off the ground.

If you are a mom trying to do some form of MT or circle time or group time or just plain reading aloud time, then I invite you to join this group. Dads can join also only we won’t acknowledge them in the name!! The slivers from the shattered glass ceiling are everywhere(wink). Perhaps, it is time to reread The Snow Queen. Broken glass is no joke.

Now I am off to have MT with my small passel of children.

You can join me by following this button (Excuse the code mess. It just won’t cooperate.):

Click to join morningtimemoms

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I thought I would tell a little bit about where we are in our lives right now.

The Yahoo Group, Morning Time Moms, is off to a great start and I am excited about the potential. We already have 21 members which rather shocked me.

The Designated Husband (DH) is working in TN again and we are trying to sell our house again. So far we haven’t even shown it once which is fine with me. I want to sell it not show it. This weekend I am going to pack up some boxes. I was greatly discouraged while reading Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books to hear a real estate agent tell the author that he needed to get rid of all the books if he wanted to sell the house. I always thought books were a selling point. I also think they want me to pack up the children but I do have some scruples.

I decided since I am single in the evenings now, to take an online Latin class offered by my friend, Beth. Beth studied under the famous Dale Grote. Well, Dale is famous among people who hang out at Latin sites and lists. I think Beth still has openings if you are interested in going through the first 10 chapters of Wheelock’s over a long period of time or just want to laugh at me.

Grandma Name? Tim decided to be called Pappy and I made terrible fun of him but he is used to it and being a southern guy with a big heart he maintained that Pappy described him well and our children all agreed. They always treat him tenderly when I make fun which is why I do it. It builds family camaraderie. I still couldn’t come up with a name. I wanted Me-Me but Emily gets called that by little children so I figured I would be stealing her name. Then I bought a classic Winnie the Pooh for the baby’s first book and I needed to sign it. In a matter of minutes I had to come up with a name or else not take credit for the purchase. So I quickly signed the book Ci-Ci and Pappy. After the ink was dry Emily reminded me it sounded like a pizza place but there you have it.

This is getting rather long so I won’t mention we have two boys playing baseball and attending college…in that order…at Tennessee Temple. They are having a blast. Isn’t that why people go to college?

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“Our pursuit and application of knowledge about the world must always be guided by a humble recognition that we are remarkably ignorant.” Ken Meyers Mars Hill Audio #92.

Bill Vitek appears on this month’s Mars Hill Audio discussing the intellectual pursuit of ignorance. I am re-listening to this session as I write.

We know that the Bible says that knowledge puffs up and that of the making of books there is no end and yet we, as homeschoolers, are immersed in a culture of knowledge in our homes every day. It is easy to forget, on a daily basis, that the goal of what we do is NOT knowledge. It is easy for us to think that we have obtained some sort of success when, if fact, our real success is our own recognition of our own ignorance.

In thinking through this it comes to mind that knowledge is a tool. In our culture knowledge is used as a tool to gain power but in the Christian worldview we find that knowledge is really a tool to gain wisdom and understanding. Ultimately, the only way for knowledge to become wisdom is through the power of the Holy Spirit.

One of the ways that we help our children wield knowledge carefully is teaching them to say, “I don’t know.” Often in homeschool circles we are so busy trying to make sure that no one judges us poorly on the educational front that we teach our children to be puffed up with knowledge. The true learner is the one who doesn’t know rather than the one who does.

Reminds me of a poem:

I am the very model of a modern Major-General,
I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical,
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;
I’m very well acquainted too with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’ news—
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.

This also reminds me of the professor who recently said something like, ” I have learned that no one is as smart as they think they are.”

Lately to my usual litany of all education is self-education I have been beating my children over the head with the concept of admitting it when they don’t know something. To be honest it is a hard lesson to learn and it bears a bit of nagging. In nagging them I am also reminding myself.

I am also reminded that family discussion times are key tools in turning knowledge into understanding. I use Morning Time as a tool to create family discussion. How do you make sure that discussion is taking place in your home? I would love to crib your ideas.

Finally, the interesting thing about this particular Mars Hill session is that it stems from thoughts coming from the agrarian community. Not a surprise.

(OH, and a big hello to Lisa F. I hear our children met a school.)

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Artist:
Van Gogh

Composer:
Bach
Bach Cello Suites from eClassical

Folk Songs:
Follow the Drinking Gourd
An Emigrant’s Daughter

Shakespeare:
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Here I will admit this least favorite play of many is one of my favorites. The word play is just jolly good fun.

Plutarch:
Camillus

Grammar Moment:
Mother Tongue II

Bible Time:
I am using a book that my friend Linda gave me called Suffer Little Children Book 3 by Gertrude Hoeksema. We go through one lesson a week. We were taking such a long time to get through OT, I thought it was high time we studied the life of Christ. I highly recommend this study.

We are still in Psalm 91 because basically after last March our life fell apart. We had company for over a month last spring with lots of family visits during school spring breaks. Then my mom had a brain aneurysm. The good news is that she is home and though recovering, alive and well.

Review:
Romans 6
Books of the Bible
Psalm 20
Psalm 23

Hymns:
Non Nobis Domine

Review:
Rock of Ages ( I wish people would quit messin’ with this one. The original poetry was spot-on)
O, Sacred Head
Saviour Like a Shepherd Lead Us
Softly and Tenderly
Soldiers of Christ Arise

Poetry:
Finishing finally How Sweet the Moonlight and The Man that Hath no Music from The Merchant of Venice.

Review:
I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General Here is a clip of the song…we don’t sing it….with Linda Ronstadt and Kevin Kline.
The 2nd Coming Yeats
Horatius at the Bridge. Good news: you can find this at Librivox which saves some breath.
To Be a Pilgrim. I may add this to our list to re-memorize. It is by John Bunyan and I like it!
Where the Boats Go. RLS

Misc Memory:
Presidents Biographies. From the back of The Buck Stops Here. One a day. We just did Abe Lincoln.

Review:
Presidents Bee
Bill of Rights #s 7,8,9,10
Gettysburg Address

Reading Aloud:

While we did finish about 20 books last year, you will be happy to see we really are going very slow through some of these.

English Literature for Boys and Girls. I hope to finish this one up soon. We are on Burns.

The Little History of the World. Also coming to a close.

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. Probably shouldn’t have started this last year but I didn’t know how the year would end up. This book is on my top ten list.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis

Pilgrim Stories by Margaret Pumphrey

Andersen’s Fairy Tales

Rod and Staff Manners 2nd Grade. I have this very, very old workbook from R&S and I just love it for teaching manners and hygiene. We discuss one page a week.

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I think I have found one way to stop slow down the changes the Internet is making in the way I think.

In the article Is Stupid Making us Google?, James Bowman points out that we read online articles in an F pattern. That makes sense. I have become an inveterate skimmer since the Internet came along. I’ve decided to pay attention to my online reading habits which are profuse with the election, gas crisis and financial crisis; I definitely follow the F pattern.

Not anymore.

I have made a new commitment. If I am reading an online article, especially one that I plan to share, I will read it in its entirety as if I were reading the old fashioned way. No more skimming and jumping and hurrying. This will reduce the number of articles I peruse but it will increase the quality of my reading, not only my online reading but my regular book reading. It bothers me that my concentration skills are decreasing. I often feel flittery while reading books.

I will open tabs when I come across things of interest and if by the end of the day I haven’t had time to read the selection in full in one sitting, I will close the tab.

Here are my tabs for today so far:

New Adobe Suite Reviews

An article from The Slacktivist on the bailout found at The Common Room.

An article on a new book about Sally Hemings and Jefferson.