Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
What with all the gardening around here it’s been a while since I wrote about Amie’s non-gardening doings and goings. Here are some newer developments. We’re working on her letters. She recognizes all the upper and lower case and can sound out and read three-letter words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4RYw1LUqv8 But writing them is something else altogether, especially …
Continue reading “Reading and Writing Checks Already, Arithmatic, and the Metaphyics of Time”
Amie and Pooh Bear It was our co-houser’s birthday so Amie and I baked some cookies and sang Happy Birthday while he blew out a candle. Then we sat down to eat, and we each had a glass of milk. Amie repeated that she had made the cookies for him and Rabbit (Amie picked the …
In A Handmade Life (read a general review here), Bill Coperthwaite promotes a different view of education. If education is more of an apprenticeship than a discipleship, if it allows the innate enthusiasm of children for the unknown to run its natural course, and if it acknowledges the value of nature, then children and, by …
I had three very strange conversations with Amie today. Part one Out of the blue (we were washing hands) she said: – Pooh Bear is very fluffy so he will never die again. – So you think if you’re fluffy you can’t die? – Yes. But I am not fluffy, so I am going to …
I found Amie’s Map Book. It had gone missing in the move. The Map Book, or Place Book, is a collection of maps, pasted in or drawn, of where we have been living and traveling (you can see some more scans here), with anecdotes and journal entries addressed to Amie. Amie became very interested in …
We were looking for a good example to draw from, and I pulled out the huge tome about Paintings in the Louvre Museum that DH and I lugged home all the way from Paris. We leafed through and as the book starts with art from the Middle Ages, the predominant image was of Jesus on …
Amie started asking “Why?” a couple of weeks ago and hasn’t stopped. Some of her why-s are genuine questions, asked out of curiosity, but many (more, I suspect) are not. It’s fascinating and annoying and often a challenge. I find myself in conversations like these: Amie, please don’t make that mess. Why? Why do you …
Continue reading “Why the incessant WHY? Also, why (or how?) WHY? is not the same as HOW?”
I think that potty-training was Amie’s first real challenge. It’s not like “learning” to walk and talk, is it? Those come naturally and very gradually – for both the kid and the parents. Going on the potty is the first fully learned skill, one that requires physical training, and patience and a resilience to failure …
I’m reading an interesting book called Talking with Children about loss, written by “Good Grief” counselor Maria Trozzi and co-authored by Kathy Massimini. I’m always picking up books like those. I read Hope Edelman’s Motherless Daughters, for instance, when I was pregnant, and got many comments, mostly in the vein of “how can you read …
Continue reading “Dinosaurs are Extinct: Death, Mourning and Our Children”
– Amie, what’s the opposite of short? – I don’t know! [she even pfsh-es, with an attitude already!] – If you’re not short, what are you? – Naked. “I don’t know” (with the attitude) is now a favorite, as well as “why?”, “why?”, “why?”. She is also afraid of wolves, now, suddenly. She doesn’t want …