April 2024

all the news that wants to share

Hi. I follow a number of substacks now and often forget why I follow people here until I’m halfway through their note. So just to recap…this is a substack primarily about homeschooling. We use of a mix of curriculum, Classical Conversations, and relaxation. Our family of six lives in Vermont in the United States.

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Tis the season for celebration and congratulations! Tis the season to reflect on all that has been learned and gathered over the year. Tis the season to forgive and smooth over what you didn’t get to. Tis the season to remember all the other things you love about your life. Lately I’ve found myself settling in for a movie night, or reading on the couch with a snack, or getting excited about some event we’re looking forward to and just thinking, “I love this. We have the best life.”

I turned 39 and asked for nice vinegar, a big apron (out of nowhere I became very tired of small aprons that did not completely cover my shirt. This is a working household!) and nice socks. I guess I was in a soothing domestic mood for 39. The seven layer Caroline’s Cakes my mom sends, half southern caramel, half chocolate made my day as well. Getting a layered cake half of one flavor and half of another is extraordinarily luxurious, even in a house rife with baked goods.

Two flavors in one day!

In my part of the world we are still waiting for the lilacs, and the daffodils are up, but not open. Trees have just a peek of future leaves. Regardless, when the weather shifts to being pleasant outdoors, school shifts for us as well. We start wrapping things up formally and evaluating which subjects will get extra-special singular summer attention due to falling “behind” in one way or another. (I don’t really believe in falling behind, but I do think subjects can benefit from getting solo attention .)

Last year Vermont home education office did away with asking to see portfolios from your student’s work year, but they still ask that parents put them together and have them on hand, just in case. Which is fine by me, as I am now firmly in the camp of annual three-ring binders full of papers from the year. Most of these papers that I include did not come from assignments. There are copies of thank you notes, to-do lists the child made for themselves, drawings, maps, etc. Basically anything I found drifting around the house that showed workmanship gets put into the binder.

The 7th grade of hand drawn maps is almost over.

The total eclipse happened in our part of the world and it could not have been more magnificent. Here is a chalkboard tribute done by a local artist.

Easter happened too!

A new homeschool substack for you

I've said this but here it is again: there cannot be enough homeschool substack writers for my taste. There’s just so much to learn, and they are all out there learning it. I have a new one for you, from a mom homeschooling high schoolers and nursing a baby. How’s that for span of experience? The Gothic Homeschool.

I enjoyed her posts on learning to homeschool high schoolers, her end of year reflections from last year, and on building and using a home reference library.

Fiction lately

Sometimes you drift into a vein of perfect books and every book you read is just the best. That has been my last three books so I wanted to share them with you here.

Goodbye, Vitamin a beautiful and surprisingly cheering portrayal of caring for someone with Alzheimer's.

Ahab’s Wife a thick tome of a novel set mostly on Cape Cod and Nantucket. Set in the time of Melville, Emerson, whaling, abolitionists, it is an immersive and unbelievably beautiful tale of adventures and love stories that will make you want to run to the nearest beach.

The Night Watchman Louise Erdrich’s fictionalization of her grandfather’s attempts to fight against the United States’ 1953 efforts to take reservation land and tribal rights away from Indians. Many characters, all fascinating and lovely in their own way. Excellent food scenes as well.

Joe went to Greece for a week for work and brought back candles, soap, and spices. An inadvertent Ox-cart Man, a la Donald Hall.

Swapping subscriptions in substack 

One of the delightful things about substack that should not go underestimated is that you can swap out your paid subscriptions. You can swap a globetrotting travel substack for a cookbook writer's. You can swap a mom's daily diaries for a stylist's. You can swap an adult-food focused one for a kid-food focused one. It’s a stages of life, even seasons of life thing, I find.

I have allotted myself two paid subscriptions per month. So, when foreseeing the time, I swap paid subscriptions and then work my way through all their archives. The content buried in many of these archives is it’s own set of books.

And if it's travel reviews or recipes you are after, don't forget you can command-print and then save as pdf as needed. 

Some I've enjoyed paying to subscribe to, over time...

Dinner a Love Story: Jenny’s voice is one of the cheeriest and most educational on the platform. Do I also daydream about moving into a condo in Manhattan once the kids are out traveling and college-ing? Yes. But her recipe curation often reminds me of recipes I once loved but forgot about, and the tips are pragmatic.

YOLO Intel travel journal: the most interesting design savvy travel ideas. Her “black books” of city ideas are worth a few months subscription alone.

Alison Roman: a delightful writer, hip personality, and interesting food composer. I sometimes watch her videos on youtube while I cook, just to make things feel a little more lively.

David Leibovitz: David is a hilarious writer and shares about life in Paris so candidly, you feel as if you’d lived there yourself.

The Green Spoon: on kid-friendly homemade food with an unexpected, international feel to it. I haven’t subscribed to this one yet but I look forward to swapping it in soon.

Tradwives

In talking with a friend who recently had her fifth child, she mused that she hoped to take up sewing as a hobby this year, having set aside raising goats and selling plants at the farmer’s market for the time being, essentially wanting something that would allow her to create and make beauty but wouldn’t complain and die (as an animal or plant would) if she needed to set it down and walk away for two weeks. Was dinner going to make itself? Was the bathroom going to remain immaculate while the baby nursed for consecutive hours? Of course not. Did her mind still contemplate a new satisfying task? Yes.

I don’t have the interest to get into all the formulations of attacks against tradwives and whether they are just influencers financially profiteering from pastoral scenes or genuinely love to bake bread. Nor will I see any of the tiktoks the content was written in response to. (My response to the existence of Ballerina Farm is that she's in a league of her own--like possibly the Greek goddess league? Athena, is that you reincarnate?)

But I’ve noticed over my years of motherhood that people seem to get upset whenever common urges veer toward urges of beauty. Even as we bemoan the shrinking birth rate, we drag out barely-dried hatchets from our last attack and go after the next way someone has made life pleasant for themselves. 

Creating and making are inherent joys to being human, whether it’s shaping homemade butter and pressing a flower into it or writing this newsletter. The mind craves learning and challenges, longs to learn new things, attends to curiosities yet unknown, and one of the ways to survive thrive in sustaining a household—particularly in this culture of isolation—is enjoying elaborate riffs on necessities. Do children dressed in homemade clothing bicker less? Not that I’ve noticed. Do children raised with gardens get less cavities? I doubt it. Do babies well photographed need fewer diaper changes? Oddly enough, no. The work still has to be done, even when done in a beautiful way.

And, by and large, there is great satisfaction to be found in the work. One of the funny mind games I had to go through when we first moved from a city apartment to a country house was giving myself permission to not be good at gardening. It was a permission I had lost somewhere along the busy way of being told what I could do by society. I soon realized that I could read books till the year ended and I wasn’t going to get any better at it. I had to start doing it, messing up, losing money and time to failure, to learn how to do it. Naturally the same thing happened when I learned to bake, and when I had a baby.

So I cringe when those who are attempting something new and proud of their accomplishments are the next ones on the chopping block.

Interested to hear your thoughts on this, if you’ve paid attention to the debate at all.

Eerie moment when I went to note the date I was “randomly” doing seedlings and realized it was the same as last year.

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And a prose poem for you

Tether, by Jenny Boully

I didn’t realize until later, after the lights were out and the sheets were tucked around her, that when my daughter asked that I hold on that I hold on tight to the balloons that what she really wanted was for the party to not end and she thought that if we held on to the balloons that the party would not end and she needed my help in this one sure party-saving act and that is why she had what we call a meltdown: her mother failed to help her in this one act that was sure to keep us here at the party forever.

She had asked me, previous to the balloon-time-stopping attempt, to give her the moon. Can’t reach it, she said. I, too, could not reach it, knew I could not reach it, but showed her that I was trying that I would if I could.

And she has said the sentence as clear as a bell tonight: Mommy, let me have it.

And it was stunning: the message, the sentence, the want, the clarity of that.

We have given her the balloon at the top of the balloon tower; it is a giant shimmering silver star balloon that, after we had dismounted it, was discovered to be full of the buoyant helium. Hold it tight, I tell her, so that it doesn’t fly away so that it doesn’t go up and stay with the other stars that are too far away.

I try to placate her so that she will not cry the whole ride: someday Mommy will get you the moon.

I realize now that that is what I do when I hold her at night: I am trying to keep us here; I am trying to keep her from floating away and staying where I cannot reach her. And between the darkness and the bad dreams, it is the solely the hold that makes her trust the deep drowning of sleep.