Ordinary Days: Mid-July Daybook

What’s the Weather: It’s July in Mississippi.  Highs in the upper 90’s with humidity levels to match.  Highs to hit 100 in the next few days.  (Translating all this into Celsius for my non-American readers… that would be 37.7 degrees C.) It’s an average summer.  We just got back from spending a few days in northeastern Ohio with my family, and there were groans at the difference between highs of 78 degrees and lows of 78 degrees.  Personally I’m not sure why the heat index warnings have expiration dates of a few days.  I think they should say, “from July 15 to mid-September.”

Cuyahoga River in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio, photo credit Katie Boord

Thankful for… Being able to attend my grandfather’s 100th birthday party!  Most of my extended family on both sides still live in the Akron area (my family moved away when I was five years old), so they threw him a big party with a cake that had 100 candles on it.  My cousin hired a photographer for the occasion so we could all just visit, which was a great idea, because there were a lot of people there to visit with! The kids were amazed that they had that many cousins (2nd, 3rd, 4th…). Grandpa’s health has been declining in the past few months so I wasn’t sure that he would remember me, but he did.

Learning all the Time: I’m trying to focus on getting my 11th and 7th graders’ years set up, with heavy emphasis on the 11th grader.  But it is really hard to focus on anything when you’re nauseous from noon until you go to bed.  Anything requiring movement or clear thought has to be done in the morning.  My goal for this weekend is to make a list of links corresponding to each chapter in Spectrum Chemistry, which she is supposed to be working through this summer.  (She wanted to take AP Environmental Science, but chemistry was a pre or co-requisite.  We dropped all her other science last spring so she could start working on chemistry, but it hasn’t proceeded on schedule exactly.) Spectrum Chemistry is basically chemistry in a box, which is nice, and very hands on, which is also nice, but it seems to be lacking a little in the explanation and practice departments.  So we’re going to supplement with Crash Course Chemistry, Kahn Academy, and whatever other links I can find.

But mostly it’s still summertime learning around here.  Our trip to Ohio was full but we did sneak in one morning in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, which added another national park to our list. (The boys are keeping track.)

All photos by Katie Boord

In the Garden: You don’t want to see any pictures of our garden this year.  It is a giant, weedy mess with nothing of any value growing in it except a couple of volunteer tomato plants.  Our only hope at this point is to start completely over, redoing the beds with new soil and liners this time.  (Bermuda grass is the scourge of the earth.  The irony is that it doesn’t grow well anywhere in our yard except for the garden.)

In the Barnyard: After being chickenless for an entire year, we are trying to set up the coop and chicken yard again so we can take a friend’s five hens.  We’ll have to replace all chicken wire with hardware cloth so that the racoons can’t bend it away from the walls.  Then we have to fix the fence so our dog can’t get in the yard.  Maybe if we also added a laser defense system the chickens might have a better survival rate.

The osprey nest we saw in a Wendy’s parking lot in Akron.  Photo credit Katie Boord.  The same girl who stood in the parking lot with her binoculars while we went through the drive-thru. 

In the Kitchen:  Progress, slow but sure.  Andy has started giving Gareth assignments on the days he doesn’t work.  Yesterday Gareth took off most of the remaining cabinet doors and sanded them.  Our next big step is get an electrician to come look at the wiring.

Around the House: Right now I’m just trying to catch up on the laundry from our trip and keep my dinners down.  I still have school shelves to sort through, but I’m taking those one by one in the mornings.

Pondering: Well, a number of things, probably related to what many other Americans are pondering this summer.  Mostly I have been considering how political issues might impact the kind of education I give my children. My conclusion — it’s more important now than ever to provide my kids with a non-utilitarian, generous dose of the liberal arts, including a lot of old books.

Reading:

  After reading Jen’s excellent post Truth and Beauty: Rebuilding Culture by Doing the Next Thing, I immediately went over to Amazon and ordered this book.  It’s taken me a couple of weeks to get around to reading it, but last night when I wasn’t feeling well, George took the two year old on his nightly rounds of our perimeter (he likes to walk our fences), and I retreated to the bedroom with the new First Things and this book.  Granted, I had to skim through sections of First Things because I couldn’t concentrate, but this book is a very friendly read.  Alice von Hildebrand strikes me as a very powerful role model for women in today’s world, and perhaps an even more powerful one for teenage girls, presenting as she does such an alternative to liberal feminism.  I think I’ll be passing this one along to Katydid when I’m done.

Clicking Around:

My clicking for the past couple of days has mostly involved reading posts about Ambleside Online’s Year 7 and Year 9.  Amber has a good review of Year 7 from a Catholic viewpoint here (with pertinent substitutions) and I also found myself nodding along with the thoughts she shared in this post about how to handle AO in general without doing it to the letter.

A good post about starting Charlotte Mason language arts with older kids: Beginning Charlotte Mason Methods with Older Students by Karen Glass.  I was particularly interested in her recommendations for written narrations, since one of my goals this year is to work on writing with George.

And a wonderful post about how using living books for science contributes to a deeper understanding of scientific principles.

Goals for the Weekend:  Put together that list of chemistry videos for Katydid.  Finish sorting the papers from Gareth and Katydid’s school shelves.  Decide on some read alouds for when it’s too hot to go outside next week.  Try to manage the nausea. (This list may be a little too ambitious!)