Happy Thanksgiving!     We are not celebrating with a  turkey dinner today, because  we’re in a country which celebrates this holiday last month.
We missed it in October, because we were in still another country…..so we’re having our Thanksgiving Dinner on Saturday.  Tonight….Spaghetti, probably another puritan favourite.
I was just about to write up a post here about how hard it is to find cranberries in Canada in November, when I remembered that I did that last year and it doesn’t sound thankful at all, so I’m not going to do it again.  And anyhow, I DID find cranberries this year, and they are simmering away on the stove right now with sugar and orange marmalade, getting thicker and sweeter for Saturday evening.

For today, there is  no turkey yet, just thankfulness.  And thankfulness is just quiet contentment with what has been placed before us by the hand of God.   Recognizing that where I am is where God has placed me, and that I can learn more here than I could if I were in the place I might have chosen.    A. W. Pink said, in  a sermon on contentment, that it is  “the product of a heart resting in God”.

And Jeremiah Burroughs said “The great design God has in afflicting you is to break and humble your heart; and will you maintain a spirit quite opposite to the work of God? For you to murmur and be discontented is to resist the work of God. God is doing you good if you could see it and if He is pleased to sanctify your affliction to break that hard heart of yours and humble that proud spirit of yours, it would be the greatest mercy that you ever had in your life.”   And I say, Amen!

Ten or twelve years ago, out in the desert of California, I was complaining  to an older woman in our church there that I missed my family and was finding it hard to live so far from everything familiar to me, and that the rattlesnakes and poisonous spiders were getting me down.
And she told me that I’d have to stand up straight and act like a grown-up, get over my whining, do the best with what I had, because God had put me there in that spot so I could learn to trust Him better and quit looking to other people to meet my needs.  She also said that I probably wouldn’t learn that lesson quite as well if I were in a comfortable landscape with higher humidity, more live vegetation and a great gathering of old friends around me, seeing as I had such a deep affection for those things.
So, I left her house feeling a little cranky and out of joint over  her failure to empathize with me.  And I have spent the years since coming to understand her wisdom more and more.

So, whatever desert you are in, and however much you wish it were another landscape entirely, and for whatever reason you think you are entitled  to complain, I will just say “Don’t go there.”
There is something to learn where you are, and today’s opportunities are unique.  So don’t waste them complaining.  Be thankful and step out in obedience.

.

This post will not appear to be written by the same person who was in for those HAT posts below.
I’m multifaceted, and my husband would vouch for  that, I believe.

I have to say that last week was heavy,  and I think the heaviness crept up on me and perched atop my head like a vulture.
Understanding  that nobody wants to hear about the colorful side of my family of origin,   I’ll just say that I am thankful my husband took me away from it all.
But, last week, as someone in Appalachia, who I’ve known for nearly all my life,  was finding it impossible to make wise choices,  and at the same time I was reading just piles of high school biology (probably in an attempt to escape all the news coming in over the phone).  I found that I was sort of going down for the third time in a sea of  recessive alleles and monohybrid crosses.   Then,  I began to dream in Punnett squares and to drift away from conversations thinking of everything in terms  of gametes and genotypes.
I made a sudden return to consciousness this morning when  the kids knocked on my forehead saying “Mom, did you really just tell Daniel he could finish that whole pie?”

And having  snapped out of it, I  thought that  I would  drop in here with something a bit light that David read to me this afternoon.  It’s from an old letter E.B. White  wrote to his editor, J. G. Case after the publication of The Elements of Style:

Dear Jack:

The next grammar book I bring out, I want to tell how to end a sentence with five prepositions.   A father of a little boy goes upstairs after supper to read to his son, but he brings the wrong book.  The boy says “Why did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for?”

And how are YOU?

Yrs,

Andy

I really love E.B. White.  At some point in the late ’80s,  I spent part of one spring or summer driving past his house  in Maine trying to muster courage to go up to the door and say “Hi”, until I was told by my friend Scott (of  home-made Christmas gift fame) that White had actually been dead since 1985.  That news brought a dark down-swing of mood, I can tell you.

Now,  E.B. White’s letters are my magic elixir for kids who can’t seen to get a rhythm going when writing a paper.  If they are stuck or if they hand in a draft that sounds wooden or uneven, I ask them to sit down and read the letters or essays of E.B. White for as long as it takes to haul them out of the ditch they are in.  And it always works like a charm.

I wonder if anybody knows of another fun, concise writer who would help get the youngsters on track…..

~~I would also like to say that I get such a tremendous charge out of seeing my sixteen year old son loving E.B. White’s essays as much as I did.  I just Love It when he’s reading me little funny bits and I can hardly make out what he’s reading because he’s too tickled and can’t stop laughing.

Some time last year I said something (maybe on this blog, maybe on the old green one)  about how our family has a wild ambition to hand make our Christmas gifts for each other in 2010.

This is inspired, as I am sure I mentioned before, by my old friends Scott and Kristine Gryder, who undertook with their entire huge and extended family to make all their gifts for each other last year.    They made furniture, exterior light fixtures out of fallen trees, tie-dyed shirts, picnic tables, hand-sewn items, cookies, spiced tea mixes, faux legal documents which were framed….and which must have been really hilarious if the look on all photographed faces is accurate.  The pictures I saw of that celebration were breathtakingly inspirational to me.

So, we have been working like little squirrels getting ready for winter around here.   I am just itching to post photographs of the humble little offerings that are piling up in all my gifty hiding places.  But it would spoil the surprise.

I have  to say that this is the most fun I have ever had getting ready for Christmas.   I’m getting my littler guys organized on some of their projects now, and we are having a crazy fun time gluing stuff to picture frames, and sometimes also to  our hair and the legs of the piano.

This is great fun, and I am already planning how we can do it better next year.  I wonder if anyone else has done something like this, and could share some good ideas for those family members who are less crafty or who are hard to find a gift for.

The photo above is of some of the raw materials for my gifts……..actually, the yarn is more lovely than what I made with it.

And here is Maggie, hard at work on something mysterious.

Almost all of my time is spent educating my six children, and up to now I have carefully avoided speaking about it on this blog.

There are many reasons why I have been silent on this topic.  One reason is that I want to protect my kids’ privacy and my own.  Our progress is fast in some places, and slow in others.  I always have a nagging suspicion that every other home-educating mom out there is doing it faster, better, more beautifully and with better map over-lays and  arts and crafts than I am.   I mean, I have seen some of those other blogs out there…..families who spend all day long making topographical maps while the oldest daughter plays the harp in the background and then they all adjourn to enjoy fresh home-made bread lathered with butter from their own cow and honey from their own bees.  Ha!

Well, we’re not doing any of that.  But here is what we are doing, and I’m putting it up here to encourage the ladies out there who are sure that they are the only ones without the harps, bees and cows.  You are really not alone!  So, as baseline home-educators, here’s what we’re doing this week.

We use (and love) Tapestry of Grace for  history,  literature, and writing.  I am a huge fan of this curricula.  I cannot imagine what might ever cause me to switch to another.    Tapestry is a four year program of study, geared for all levels of learning, from the earliest reader to a high-school senior.  Following the classical model, Tapestry covers history, from creation to current history, chronologically over its four year cycle, repeating itself three times during a child’s twelve years in school.  This program includes more activities and reading ideas, projects and discussion plans than anyone could use at once, it is just rich with options and great ideas.

Last year, we studied Year Two, which covers the Renaissance and Reformation through the explorers and early colonization of America.  And this year, in a brazen move, we have skipped Year Three entirely, having given it such a thorough treatment four years ago that nobody wanted to do it again for a while (woops!).  So, we’re doing modern history now with Tapestry Year Four, and really loving the early 20th century.

We had an extra bonus this year, which was that we got to go to England and Norway for three weeks in October.  While we were there, we made a point of checking out as many WWI and WWII museums and exhibits as we could find.  We did also slip out and visit Shakespeare’s Globe Theater and the Tower of London, a few castles and cathedrals and art galleries, but we learned more than we ever expected about WWII in England and about the causes of WWI and II which were so much about the drawing of artificial boundaries all over Europe.

Before we left for that trip, we spent four weeks doing an ultra-fast summary of all that took place from 1700 to 1880, just to give us a foundation for this years work……then we left town and forgot 90% of it. (When I fill out the summary sheets for the kids work this year, I’m going to say that they were “exposed to the history and literature of the 18th and 19th centuries.”)

This week, we have been looking at the sweeping changes in technology, industry and science around the time of the turn of the century.    My kids are reading about Teddy Roosevelt, Taft’s progressivism, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Amy Carmichael, The Panama Canal, the scramble for Africa, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Triple Alliance and the  Triple Entente, and the authorization of an income tax with the Sixteenth Amendment.

The world was busy and booming, and in Europe and North America, everyone was full of hope and optimism.   They had no idea what was ahead in this century of great and terrible wars.

I love learning all of this history again, some of it for the first time.  It is an incredible gift to be able to talk about this with my kids, and to learn with them how all of these events and ideas and advances interacted with one another to set the stage for the events to come.

In a conversation today about air transportation, the invention of the automobile and the development of the assembly line, I was amazed to hear one of my kids say that the enormously high numbers of WWI casualties are in part attributable to these three advances in technology….because  more and better methods of transportation, mechanization and production  allowed for greater numbers of troops to be moved to places where more efficient weapons would be used upon them.  Amazing, we take pride in our achievements, only to see them bring on our downfall.

And still, God is sovereign, and nothing is random.