rhubarb, coleslaw, constellations

a favorite interview of last year and some fun learning resources that caught my eye.

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 seven lives in Vermont in the United States.

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Hello! It’s rainy and overcast here. From our view above the valley the clouds have cloaked in the mountains. Everything is looking lush and green. We haven’t put plants in the garden yet, Vermonters wait until Memorial Day for fear of unexpected frosts in May. But we’re remembering plants we loved last year and looking forward to planting piles of things very soon. Tiny field strawberry plants are everywhere in the lawn and field, their little white blossoms catch your eye as you walk through the grass. By Juneteenth they’ll have tiny perfect alpine garnets on them. The rhubarb is slowly growing taller and pinker; I think we planted ours too much in the shade, it is tiny compared to the plots I drive past! I’m looking forward to making my friend Althea’s crumble. She adds an apple and strawberries, and it seems to add just the right sweet balance.

Althea’s rhubarb crumble

We had friends over for a midweek dinner last night. Keeping bottles of cheap sparkling wine handy has lately provided European aperol spritz vibes on my very own lawn. I made garlic-y spicy coleslaw to go with pulled pork sandwiches. Coleslaw keeps for a few days in the fridge and always tastes so refreshing with sandwiches. Here’s how I make it: I grate a couple garlic cloves into lemon juice, mix in a scoop of mayonnaise and a few dabs of hot sauce and then toss in pre-shredded bagged coleslaw. Season to taste with more mayonnaise, salt and lemon juice until you can’t stop eating it.

We had Mother’s Day in America. Thank you Sunday School teachers, for prompting these notes and flowers.

the season of baby leaves

Resource mooning

It’s the end of the season so I’m sorting of course, not buying. But between a few fun things that caught my eye recently while paging through the Rainbow Resource catalog and talking with some other moms about their school year, I’ve got some things on my mind to order in the next six months. These could be good gifts for a summer birthday too, I suppose.

Constellations & moons memory game: my kids love to play any version of Memory, possibly because they always win! Adults just cannot compete with their focus, it’s profound to witness. Anyway, we’ve had animal tracks memory, bug memory, bird memory…using memory to remember constellations seems like a great idea.

Blue Light Experiment: it is nearly firefly season here in Vermont. In fact the fireflies are already looping around everywhere, most of them having survived the winter living on maple trees. But they aren’t mating yet, so it will still be a few weeks before we get to see their lights blinking in our backfield. This experiment kit teaches kids about bioluminescence, pretty cool. On the topic, wouldn’t glow powder be handy to have around?

All about Today Board Calendar: our 6yr old loves to ask every detail about the day, both the day before and the morning of. What’s the plan, what day is it, when will we wake up, etc. We have found keeping a paper calendar with lots of details written on it taped at eye view in the kitchen to be very helpful. But this board would be fun for them to update each day, perhaps to keep next to their bed.

Atoms & Molecules Meet, Atoms, DNA, and Molecules illustrated books by Rebecca Woodbury and M.C. Detective Agency Files These fun and graphically illustrated books were recommended to me by a friend who used them all year. For us they would be supplementary for our past year of doing Periodic Table notebooks.* One of the M.C. Detective Agency books is about the Radium Girls, a tragic story about the women who painted alarm clock dials with radium that fascinated my children last fall.

*If you missed me discussing those notebooks, you can read about them in this post…

Expensive dates

Favorite Interview of the Year  

My favorite interview of the last year, and I listened to a lot of them, was Ezra Klein interviewing Zadie Smith. I’m going to link to the Youtube because the podcast is now subscriber only. Give it a listen on your next long drive; I’ve listened to it a few times now.

If you’ve encountered Zadie’s writing in any way you know she is one of today’s brilliant minds. I felt this interview just brimmed with wisdom and a unique perspective on nearly everything—youth, aging, politics, personal habits, understanding culture today.

In particular, I find myself often reflecting on Zadie’s reflections about why she can’t have a smart phone, mainly because it would determine what she thought about every day…

The thought of being exposed to those opinions every second of every day, of having to present my life to other people in some other form than it exists every day, like a media presentation — I cannot imagine what my mind would be, what my books would be, what my relationships would be, what my relationship with my children would be…

Apart from anything else, I am an addictive person, so I would be on that thing nine hours a day. Easy. I watched TV nine hours a day throughout the whole of the ’80s. I would be what my kids call brain rot.

Ahhh…some things for us to consider, no?

Joe’s winter wood piles and tulips on their last day.

A Question for You…🧺🍴 

I’ve been daydreaming about starting a new feature interviewing mothers of big families, 4+ children, homeschoolers or not. I’d like to think through what sorts of perspectives they have that we may not often hear. How they structure their day, household management, whether they bother with meal planning, do they worry about siblings squabbles? what their priorities are…the really in-the-muck, nitty gritty stuff.

What sort of questions would you have for them? Help me think this through.