Reading together

I'm going to start with the end of the day, because that was my favorite part. When we finished dinner this evening Calvin, who was done eating and who had been eyeing his newest library book all through dinner, a book that we had made a special trip to the library to get earlier in the afternoon, suggested that he read the first chapter to us while we finished our meals. Although I'd had no intention of his reading this book by himself, hadn't even considered it as a possibility, we took him up on his offer, figuring that if he had trouble he'd let us know and we could pick it up from there. And because nobody told him he couldn't read it, he sat down and promptly did so, reading to us the first chapter of his newest book, The Knight at Dawn, a Magic Treehouse Book.

It has long been a dream of mine to share stories read aloud together as a family after dinner, and for all of his life we've been doing this to some extent because we always read to him before bed and he is happy to forgo all other activities to fill the small space between dinner and bed with books. But I had figured it would be some time yet before he took his turn at the helm. It was my favorite part of the day because it's a moment I've been waiting a long time for, and it was as delicious a moment as I believed it could be.

The rest of the day was fine, too. Calvin spent much of it in the middle ages, and between reading books, looking at pictures, and writing on note cards he kept himself pretty busy. I spent my free time, when I wasn't also in the middle ages, reading my own book and researching cameras, because while we did go for a fantastic hike this morning, and did see a majestic Great Blue Heron in our pond not more than ten yards away from us, I have no pictures, just whole lot of frustration, to show for it.

And by the way, nobody said homeschooling was a venture for the neat minded. As you can see, our house is now littered with a bread crumb trail of books on the middle ages. From where I sit, it looks like those crumbs all lead back to the castle (or possibly the laundry we'd just folded), but I think where they really go is straight into the future.

Clear as glass

I have a terrible confession: it is a hard thing for me to follow a thread of interest through a day.

We started today in the middle ages, with the clear intent of reading through all the middle ages books we'd gotten from the library. All of them because Calvin is a determined child and that's what he wanted to do. It wasn't far from there to the illustrated book on the authentic building processes in late medieval castles and cathedrals, and it wasn't the stories themselves, or their heavy stones, or the references to kings or religion, that caught Calvin's fancy, but the simple question: how do they make the glass?

Yes, sometimes it's following the thread of interest that's the hardest thing to do. I know, I absolutely know, that the kind of education I want Calvin to have is one of empowerment, one that teaches him to trust his dreams and make them happen and that kind of education begins with honoring his interests and teaching him to take the step past the "I wonder" or "I will", straight into the doing. I know this, and still I am driven to respond to questions like "I wonder how they make glass" with "we can find out later but first let's finish this book," and how often do we remember to go back? The moment is gone. I don't know why it's so hard for me to follow his threads when in actuality it is the easiest and most rewarding thing in the world to do. But I did it today; We marked our place in the book and looked up glass blowing right away, and it was fun, and fulfilling, and rewarding. And easy. He asked, we looked it up. We watched almost thirty minutes of video on making antique glass and then he wanted to watch it again, and wanted to be sure that I saved it so that he could return to the topic at some other time.

And then there was more reading, and more reading, and piano, and more reading, and book cataloging, and laundry, and more reading and piano with dad (and pets galore because they all come out at feeding time), and, lastly, a return to the glass making discovery. YouTube is my friend, and I already had field trips to Greenfield Village on the brain, but now I'm moving them up in my mental calendar. And through it all I am gaining a new skill, one that is sure to be my best friend through of all of our days together: I am learning to follow his threads.

Even the badish days count for something

Some days just turn out to be not all that good. Some days are dreary and cold and dark and tired. Some days were meant to just slide by unnoticed, or at least would have been better that way. Maybe it's the longing for spring, maybe it's the return of winter, or maybe it's not weather related at all, but today was grouchy. The sky, the people, the animals, even the inanimate objects in our home were grouchy, and they didn't have eggplant at the market. We didn't exercise, we didn't make bread, we're lucky we made it to the store, which is saying something since we were up and ready for swimming in time for a class that turned out not to be scheduled for today because the rest of the world is on spring break. Spring? You've got to be kidding.

When we feel this way, which thankfully isn't often, we usually turn to books but today we turned to writing, after the store and a short afternoon nap, that as. Calvin wrote poems and I wrote an analysis of the book I finished last night, Bailey's Cafe, getting to three pages before I started wondering what was the point of writing something nobody was likely to read. Maybe the point was the relaxation, or the way I could write while secretly watching Calvin meander through his own poetry over the top of my computer (because I found years ago that I write like I talk—too much—and if I write my ramblings by hand my fingers are sore all the rest of the day and I can hear the felling of trees in rainforests everywhere, so now only my journals are hand written). Writing our lives, I'd like to think. Spending the in between times on writing our lives, so that even the badish days count for something.

Deja vu all over again

They promised us sixty degrees today. Sixty! And it may actually have been a balmy sixty when I went to the library just before eleven this morning, but it was a nippy fifty when we went out to the store just two hours later, and much chillier low forties by dinner. Bah. Calvin had wanted to walk in the field today, and I think we would have done it if it hadn't been damp on top of cold. That phrase gives me a strong and unfortunate feeling of deja vu. He decided, as we came home from the store, that he'd rather stay in and play games. We played Mammoth Hunt, with help from Cookie and Torso Boy, and we also tried our hands at Connect Four.

Piano, Oz, chopping carrots for dinner (soup, which actually turned out to compliment the weather nicely), taking turns reading to each other, quiet, individual play and reading—cold, wet days with tempestuous winds are good for something. And with his bosses out of town, Jon worked from home today. Since we have commandeered the office when he works from home he usually does so at the kitchen table, making him central to all of our goings on. We do a pretty good job of ignoring his existence while he's working, but I left Calvin to draw quietly across from him when I went to the library and he spent the entire hour I was gone doing just that. When I came home he presented me with a cornucopia of castle drawings. I don't have pictures of them yet, but they are coming.

After dinner tonight, while we still sat at the table, I asked Calvin to read to us. He skipped off to select his own book from the other room and came back with the Giving Tree and read it to us, fluently and with feeling, while we reclined in our dining chairs. Then we went on with the rest of the evening. The surprise of hearing him read like that is beginning to wear off. I could get used to this autodidactic nature of his.

Losing a landmark

Snow today. Not much, and it didn't stick, but enough of it in the air to remind us that winter isn't done just yet. This time last year it was unseasonably warm, and remembering that I can't help but be disappointed by spring's tardiness now. We lazed about this morning, eating cherry walnut pancakes and playing geography games. Jon and Calvin practiced the piano while I hit the treadmill (really, spring, I'm ready to run outside already). After lunch, though, we broke our winter coats back out of the closet and headed out into the still frigid world. Jon was teaching, but Calvin and I spent that time perusing the jumbled and dwindling shelves at the closing Borders store in Ann Arbor.

It's hard not to go there. We shopped there the weekend they announced its closing, when the discounts were much smaller and the shelves much more full. It's hard to resist sixty percent off classic fiction, science books, and even children's books. We usually buy our books used—almost always—but some wish list titles are hard to find that way, especially new releases or more obscure older ones, so we gave in on a few books, to the tune of a few dollars each. At that price it's almost like buying used anyway so all I have to reconcile myself to is the tree loss. There's a Tolkien rewrite of a Norse legend and a new Elizabeth Kostova that I can't wait to read. But after wading through shelves of books that are no longer sorted alphabetically, and barely even sorted by subject, I think we've said our goodbyes to the Arborland Borders.