Thank You cards season

As co-op wraps up this week, the girls and I officially open our "card factory" for the season! Number Seven's card, shown, is for her Art teacher, pictured holding artwork and books! ... so cute.

Speak up about the ND controversy

You can cast your vote in the blog that has been my most reliable source for ND scandal news!

Have a clothes-drying rack?

I do enjoy hanging clothes, but truth be said we don't use this rack very often. The amount of laundry done in this house has something to do with it. Yesterday I came up with a marvelous use for said rack. Voila!

Further benefits of a world-traveling Husband

Airports don't seem to foster great scoring words.

Have world traveler Husband...

...will receive very nice gifts!

Worth watching

Worth stopping what you are doing and turning the video/audio on! I have it on my homeschool table. These crazy days, some words shine and console. The lecture was sponsored by the ND Center for Ethics and Culture.

Update 3 PM: This issue is boiling today as Mary Ann Glendon published her letter of refusal of the Laetare Medal to Fr. Jenkins. May God have mercy on us!

Thoughts on gardening

Last night the temperature dipped to 39F... and found me and Number Four in the garden, gloves, shivering, preparing beds for onion and garlic.

Working in the garden seems to feed the imagination. In the silence of manual, heavy work, one is surrounded by one's own mind, as the mechanical movements of gardening repeat themselves seemingly ad infinitum.

Last night my thoughts took me far away and long ago to when I was probably nine or ten years old. My father had built us an outdoor playhouse, a floor model of a kit he had found at Sears in Rio, complete with a concrete foundation, glass windows, and mom-made-curtains. We played in it for what must have been a million hours--mind you, there are no cold winters in Rio.

As the row of peas stretched in front of me, I remembered my first little garden, in the back of our playhouse, a damp, shady plot of a mere few square centimeters of dirt completely unsuitable for growing anything. There I planted a few short rows of... weeds, that matched shaped and size, alone, enjoying it to no end. There was no vegetable garden at home, I had only a vague idea of what it looked like from illustrations in books.

I don't remember what happened to my little weed garden. But somehow my gardener spirit has remained still intact! There is a challenge out there, a competition with the elements of nature, to which I attempt to bring order and fruit by my hands' labor. I thank God for it, because it is a wonderful gift.

Art Show

Waiting for pictures... coming soon!

ND update

It continues still ...

Wishing I could go!

My musician nephew's beautiful graduation invitation! Congratulations to him!

Instead, I will be in Wisconsin participating in their Catholic Homeschool conference!

The Dot and The Line

Freedom is not a license for chaos is Number Three's signature below his email messages. It was written by Norton Juster, of The Phantom Toolbooth fame, and it comes from our almost-17 year old's favorite book:

The Dot and the Line, a Romance in the Lower Mathematics, by Norton Juster, copyright 1963 and 2001, Chronicle Books, ISBN 1587170663

The phrase is the turning point and premise of this amazing, simply delightful little Math book. Math? That is our son's most disliked subject. Wait, The Dot and the Line is not a Math book! It is a hilarious comedy! But is that all? It is a romance, a story of love deeply felt, pursued, capable of provoking great things in the soul. In a little math book? Is it possible? Yes, it is.

Our Classic Languages-loving son reads it aloud every time this book visits us from the library. (Readers, please remind me to purchase a copy for his next birthday). He suffers with the straight, dull and unbending line when driven to the "edge" (of the paper-- the line is drawn on the edge of the page) as the "perfect by every measure" dot flirts around with the anarchist, slothful squiggle. Moved by great love, the line at first attempts to show its own grandeur by asserting its importance in art, world politics, sports. To no avail: the dot is not impressed. Then the unimaginable happens: when almost giving up, the line, using great concentration, becomes able to make angles!

What follows next is what makes this little book a great book: the enthusiastic line makes more and more angles in a chaotic frenzy, until... it realizes that chaos without order leads nowhere. It stops, straightens itself again and it discovers that freedom is not a license for chaos. From then on, life changes for the line: exercising great control and virtue, it discovers a new world:

For months he practiced in secret. Soon he was making squares and triangles, hexagons, parallelograms, rhomboids, polyhedrons, trapezoids, parallelepiped, decagons, tetragrams and an infinite number of other shapes so complex that he had to letter his sides and angles to keep his place. Before long he had learned to carefully control ellipses, circles and complex curves...

Ah, the virtue of the discipline of Mathematics! The beauty of its exact angles and dimensions. The rhythm, art and music of what it is able to create, using exercise and order! I will refrain from spoiling it completely for the new reader, but let me quote his final "moral of the story": to the vector, the spoils. This type of humor is the best!

The back jacket, after telling us that the author, among other things, runs a support group for negative numbers (one can glimpse Mr. Juster's opinion on the state of the culture in the 60s) mentions an award winning film, and I found it on You Tube. I was happy to see that that the screenplay was also written by the author but I warn you that the book is much better. This new edition has wonderful graphics and some different pictures as well.

Divine Mercy

We finished the Novena and participated in the Divine Mercy prayers at the Cathedral today!

A sneak peek

...into the marvelous results of my Friday Co-op art students' year-long project: their own mixed media self-portraits. We will finish mounting and show them next week.

SMF Jr. Classical League

A bunch of wonderful Latin students!

We met for the last time on Thursday evening and had a fabulous guest speaker, teaching us on the use of Latin through the centuries of Christianity.

Picture book of the week

The Victory Garden Vegetable Alphabet Book by Jerry Pallotta and Edgar Stewart, 1992 Charlesbridge Publishing, 32 pages.

I found this in our library's seasonal display... copyright 1992, certainly not a new title, but my love for alphabet books and vegetables together made me decide to take a look.

Product description: Bestselling author Jerry Pallotta teams up with former Victory Garden host Bob Thomson to present 26 common and not-so-common vegetables. Learn about fiddleheads, munchkin pumpkins, sweet peas, walla wallas, and more. This informative book also includes a brief introduction to soil preparation and seed planting. 30 color illustrations.

These times of economic slump and contaminated foods from doubtful origins is seeing a huge growth in home gardening. I have seen this new trend being referred to as Victory Gardens all over again. This is a nice and informative book for children, most especially children whose parents want to encourage to get out there and help! The illustrations are very realistic and seem to be based on photos.

...and it continues.

Read about the continuing sad state of things at ND here.

Too cute

Goddaughter MM is something else.

Enjoy!

Sounds of Spring

It is quiet around here. And yet if one listens carefully, there are competing sounds of pencils attempting to mark correct answers during testing week--against the sounds of new plants stretching, reaching for warmth and healthy growth.

Number Six, bird photographer

This was taken right by the living room window yesterday!

Garden journal: yesterday we planted two more beds, one each of spinach and leeks, and continued working on the walking path. Peas are planted all along the north and west fences, plus the east fence between corner and garden entrance. We cleaned garlic bed and replanted two tomato seeds on starting trays inside.

Numbers Three and Four

I am a happy and proud mother. This was taken yesterday after mass.

Easter Day Mass

I confess I had a hidden camera... what mother of such superb altar boys would blame me? I happened to have caught Fr.'s new handsome biretta and sent a copy of it to biretta-fan Fr. Z's blog...

The church looked so beautiful! Thank you, Fr.! His sermon around the theme of the empty tomb brought me so much consolation. Journeying towards heaven has the added and joyful hope of being united with our loved deceased ones, as we will, one day, with God's grace, also leave an empty tomb behind.

The Passion and Ressurrection, Illuminated Ink

Last year we lost Judas so Numbers Five and Six made a new one, looming unhappily in the shadows of sin and betrayal...

They happily rolled away the stone this Easter morning!

Easter Sunrise

I prayed the Rosary as the sun rose this glorious morning. There is nothing, nothing like an Easter sunrise! My heart is filled with gratitude.

The spiritual richness of the early morning has always caught my heart and soul. My mother's heart, still torn with the loss of my own dear mother, prays with the certainty that when we ask, the Father in heaven will not refuse us.

Exult now O ye angelic throngs of the heavens:
Exult O ye divine mysteries:
and let the saving trumpet resound for the victory of so great a King.
(From the Exsultet, see more at this awesome blog by an American priest who lives in Rome.)

To my dear readers, a most blessed Easter!

A Day in the Garden

Garden Journal: we cleaned and burned, stacked tomato cages, fluffed up the mulch on the strawberries, mulched aspargus, planted peas, leeks, spinach, lettuce and arugula.

Several hours in the sunshine does wonders for the soul.

Looking forward to a glorious Easter tomorrow!

Paschal Candle from Illuminated Ink

What a most suitable project for Holy Week! We cannot wait to light it tomorrow!

Good Friday

Excellent pictures of the Love of my life sporting his new Ethiopian Cross. On the stereo, the Good Friday Liturgy in Gregorian Chant superbly done by the Gregorian Choir of Paris.

Evolving controversy at Notre Dame

I am impressed by NDResponse. Their daily updates keep me well informed. Today the plot thickens further with a letter published in the ND newspaper the Observer by ten Holy Cross priests admonishing ND's president.