The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

Beautiful World War II story of love and family.  Not a romance, though the love story is the centerpiece and it is compelling.   Wonderful characters, beautiful scenes of Paris, brutal scenes of war.  While I was reading it I felt it was a bit long, but when I finished I couldn't think of what might be left out.

Andras is a young Hungarian Jew, on his way to Paris and architecture school when he is given a package to deliver to an acquaintance in Paris.  And a mysterious letter, to slip into a mailbox.  The connections he makes through those items change his life.  Dramatic?  The Invisible Bridge is much better than that.  

A miscellaneous post

The other day I had a great idea for a post.  I didn't record it, and now it's gone.  That happens from time to time - wonder why I don't just start a draft with my idea so when I have time to sit down and actually write, the idea is still there?

Not that I have time to write today. But my kids are sleeping late after a long day - we'll call it a field trip - to New York City.  We've lived 90 miles from the city for 4 1/2 years now, and yesterday we finally got there. The impetus:  a nephew of mine, who lives on the west coast, came east for business.  He spent a few days with us, then needed to get to NYC to get home.  We gave him a ride, and he took us around the city.  It wasn't the most educational trip - we got just an hour in at the American Museum of Natural History - but it was fun and we got some great falafel and pizza, as well as spectacular views of the city from "The Top of the Rock" (Rockefeller Center).  The forecast had been for clouds all day, but the sky was blue and the sun shining on us as we enjoyed the view.

That nephew is a musician and while here, he helped us buy a guitar.  I always felt that James (who did not respond well to piano lessons) would benefit from having a guitar around.   I looked around for a used one for a few years, but nothing ever came up,  and I didn't know if I'd feel like I could choose a good one anyway.  But with a guitarist around, it's easier, so we now have a guitar in the house.  We're going to try the self-teaching route - we bought a book and dvd, and I have requested a bunch of stuff from the library - to see if that will work out.   Keeping the pressure off is a key to this particular child, so... we'll see how it goes.  I think I'll try my hand (heh) at it too.

A few months ago I had posted about James's mysterious illness.  It disappeared, finally, as mysteriously as it appeared.  I might write more about that later.  Let me just say that our doctors were great, but they still just don't know everything about our bodies.  We are trying to make up for what is basically a lost semester. I might write more about that later too.  Maybe that was even the lost topic!  I may never know.

Homeschool high school: looking for books, blogs... inspiration

All around me, the moms of rising high schoolers are bailing out of homeschooling.  Their kids are going to school, or they're signing up for the public cyber-charter school (popular here in Pennsylvania).  There is something about those choices that intrigue me:  having someone else take over high school.  

But the truth is, I don't want someone else to take high school over for me.  And so far, my kids don't either.

So, I need inspiration.  And help!  What are the best resources - books, blogs, commercial sites, Facebook pages - for homeschooling high school?   

Leave a comment with your faves - help me fill my reader and my bookshelf.

January reading

Once again I began January with a vow to  improve my reading life.  I managed to (slightly) exceed my goal of one nonfiction book and one novel for the month of January.  Yes, it's a pretty low bar, but since I am accountable to no one but myself in this, I decided to help myself be successful.  Here's what I read/am reading:

• The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden; illustrated by Barbara Cooney.  A beautiful picture book.  Cheating?  This is a favorite Christmas read-aloud that we didn't get to till January 1. 

• A Praying Life by Paul Miller.  Comments here.   The link is to Westminster Bookstore which is where I acquired this book.  I buy as many books as I can from them, and I'd like other folks to do the same.  They have very good prices, fast and cheap shipping, and wonderful employees. (And yes, I do receive a bit of compensation if you visit their site from here.)

• Animal Farm by George Orwell.  I read this along with my son as part of his schoolwork.  I must say I love having older kids to read and talk about great books with.  The picture book days were fun, sure, but these days are so much better. 
  

• The Iliad by Homer (tr. Fagles). Reading aloud to my kids as part of their schoolwork.  Still going; it's lengthy and I can only read aloud so much in a day!  Should be finished next week.  The link is to Exodus Books, which is where I acquired this.  It is my favorite homeschool store, located in Oregon, and I miss it so.  But at least I can order online. 
  

• The School of Night by Louis Bayard.  Fiction, for me!  This was sort of a historical thriller.  It was good, not great; suspenseful, funny (not laugh-out-loud funny).  Very blurry line between historical fact and fiction; I had to look up the time and method of Walter Raleigh's death to be sure I hadn't been wrong about it all these years.  Some forehead-slapping moments when something was revealed that I should have seen coming.  

What you don't see here are all the books I started and couldn't finish.  I don't have enough time to read all the good books I want to, so I will reject a bad one pretty quickly.

I'm fairly happy with the amount of reading, but of course I would like to do more.  After a few months of reaching or exceeding my initial goal, I hope to increase the amount of nonfiction and set specific goals for types of book (biography, history, science...)  But for now... at least I'm reading.

Any recommendations?

A Praying Life by Paul Miller

Prayer. Public or private, either way, prayer is something that should be so easy and yet can be so difficult, even intimidating.  There are so many books on prayer!  Some promise to teach us to pray in a specific amount of time. Some promise to revolutionize our prayer life (whatever that means).

I have often been intimidated by public prayer; when I have to pray aloud in a group I feel like a little kid among a bunch of grownups; everyone else is so eloquent and I am... not.  Even my private prayer often sounds like a task list for God.  Please do this and this and this.  Even when my request are good and right and not selfish (I'm not asking for a new car, though I may ask that my old car continue to work), it seems to hollow.

And there's the distraction!  My brain can go from earnest prayer to my daily to-do list to some random pop song without even slowing down.  Most mornings I take our dog for a walk and try to pray as we go, but it's hard to have a conversation, even with God, that's interrupted constantly... Lord, I do praise you as our soverei-- Max, leave it!... uh... thank you for... Sit!  OK, let's go... uh... ugh, I forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer... Lord, please help... Max, leave it!... Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'...

But I determined to "fix" my prayer life and looked for some books.  A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World looked promising, and it seemed providential that we already own it.    It didn't promise to revolutionize anything in my life, so I started in.  This is a book about private, not public, prayer. 

The author endeared himself to me right away by talking about distractions.  I am not sure that I agree completely that being distracted is OK, though I do agree that it is normal and that our distractions may lead us to prayer about something we hadn't been thinking about when we started.  Of course God sees our hearts, and hears the prayers we never manage to articulate perfectly, or even at all.   He reminds us to pray like children.  As I said, I am often intimidated by the prayers of others and even feel that my private prayers should "sound good."  My husband had to remind me that there's a difference between personal prayer, or even public prayer in, say, a Bible study setting, and prayer from the pulpit, which is somewhat prepared ahead of time.  But no matter:  we don't have to be eloquent with God.

This is not a book of method, though there is a section in which the author shares some of his own.  It is about cultivating a life of prayer in which we allow our prayers to shape our actions and our desires.  Prayer is often a long-term proposition.  Mr. Miller uses many stories of his family, including life with a disabled adult child, to illustrate this:  some of his prayers for his daughter took 20 years to be answered in a way he could see.  But of course God had been answering them all along.

A Praying Life didn't make me jump up and say "Oh! This is what I've been doing wrong!"  It did help me see that I am not doing everything wrong, though certainly there are some things I could change.  It's an encouraging, useful book, probably one to reread from time to time.

Read the table of contents and forward to the book here.

The reluctant Scout

No, not really.  My boy loves Scouts.  He started a little late, as a Webelo, so didn't go up through the Cub Scout ranks.  Now he's a Star level, with only Life rank between him and Eagle.

But today he's reluctant.  His troop is participating in a Klondike Derby, and he doesn't want to go.  He's dragging a little this early morning, unable to muster his usual Scout enthusiasm.

This is only his second Derby, though he's been in Scouts for four years.  He went during his Webelo year, and he loved it.  He was one of the little kids then, but he pitched into the work enthusiastically and was thus welcomed by the bigger boys.  (Probably didn't hurt that he is rather large himself and didn't look like a Webelo.)   He came home tired but all smiles.

The next three years he was sick at Klondike time so he hasn't been back.  These weren't sudden "ooh, I don't feel well, I can't go" kind of sick, but real sickness that had been going on.  He's sick in winter a lot.   This winter he's not, so he's going.

But his memory is not of the fun time he had as a Webelo.  That's been replaced by the stories of hardship, cold, mud, and bad food that he's heard over the years.  Yes, he does remember the steamed hamburger lunch (ugh, I'd remember that too, and not fondly).   But he's forgetting the good parts.  The shared memory of the troop is telling him he's not going to have a good time.

But he will go, because he's a Scout and a Patrol Leader and it's his job to go.  And if he is a good Scout (and of course I think he is), he will be enthusiastic and the Webelos who are under his care will have a good time too.

Scouts is a lot of fun but it's also a training ground. There is a lot of hard work involved and not every moment is pleasant.  A few weeks ago during  a conversation about some rule that had previously annoyed him at one of the troop camps, my Scout and I had one of those moments I wish I had captured on tape: "Yeah, Mom, I realized that sometimes there are things we do that seem not to have a reason, but later we find out there was a good reason after all."   Yes!

Klondike Derby may look like a day of pointless hard work, bad food, cold, and mud.  But maybe this year he will find there's a good reason for it.

A day in a homeschooling life

It's been a long time since I've done a day in the life post.  Yesterday (Monday) wasn't a typical homeschool day, but it was a pretty nice one, and despite our best efforts, we got a little work done, even though we weren't supposed to.

Monday is my husband's day off, so my expectations for school work are low.  I try to plan for a 4-day week so we can be free on Mondays to do something fun as a family.  Lately, Mondays have been pretty busy with medical appointments and such, so it's a family fun day in theory only right now.  But, it's nice to be able to hang out with Dad a little too.  So, all I demand on Monday is Bible study (we use The Most Important Thing You'll Ever Study: A Survey of the Bible by Starr Meade) and math.  Oh, if we have a read-aloud going, we'll try to read some too.

Monday everyone was up pretty early.  Dad had some dental work to be done, so he was out of the house shortly after breakfast.  There was still some snow on the ground, and rain on the way, so the kids went out to sled.  We have a hill that's little more than a slight incline, but it still makes for fun snowboarding practice.  So after the kids finished their Bible reading, they were out the door.

Two hours later (!), Dad had returned, the rain had started, so the kids came in.  Just as they walked in the door the microwave exploded, so there was some excitement and cleanup needed, including making a whole new pot of hot cocoa.

(The microwave didn't exactly explode.  I was running it with a bowl of soapy water inside to create steam to soften up the crud that had accumulated.  I guess I created a little too much steam because suddenly the door burst open and water came shooting out all over the stove, surrounding counter, and me.  The water wasn't hot, so I didn't get burned, but soapy water flew everywhere, including into the pot of cocoa and all over the new stick of butter in the dish.  Between the explosion sound and my scream, it must have seemed like something pretty exciting was going on.  My microwave is really clean now.)

Wet clothes were put away and hot cocoa was consumed while the kids checked out American Rhetoric and youtube for an assignment for their speech class.  They did that for a while, then I set them to their math.  One had a final exam (Life of Fred fractions) and one worked on Khan Academy exercises.  I ran out to fill some prescriptions for the dental patient.

Somewhere in there, the kids ate lunch. I don't know what they had, but it probably  involved bread and cheese.

After lunch we wanted to settle down to our current read-aloud, The Iliad, but we remembered that my boy had some biology work to finish up from last week.  So he and I did that while my girl practiced piano. 

Somewhere in there, a few loads of laundry were completed.

Finally in the afternoon we sat down to read.  I made it through one book (chapter) before my voice gave out.  It was a long one.  We talked about it for a while, then it was time for me to think about dinner.  While I did that, the kids did some personal reading.

So we got in PE, math, history/literature, science for one, music for the other, all on a day we don't do school.

Today won't look anything that.  We'll be more structured with our time and our work.  But next Monday won't look anything like that either.  Typical day? Not really.  But a good day in a long homeschooling life.

Different and the same

We are all so different.

We are Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, atheist.  Politically left of center, right of center, apathetic, ignorant.  We are unschoolers, cyberschoolers, public-schoolers and everything in between.  We drink decaf, full-caf, and nothing at all.  Our kids play shooter video games and no games. We are technologically savvy and plugged-in, and we are... not.   We protest oil pipelines and we say "drill, baby, drill." 

We are just a group of mothers and friends, and when we sit around that coffee shop table at our once-a-month gatherings, we laugh and cry and talk and enjoy each other.  We disagree and argue (not too loud) and laugh (that's when we're loud) some more.  We love the ways we are different and the ways we are the same.

And we can't wait till next month to do it all over again.