Beefing Up SOTW3, Part I: Adding more Canadian history

We’ve been using The Story of the World (SOTW) series by Susan Wise Bauer as the backbone, or “spine,” of our chronological history studies for about two years now; we started with SOTW1 when Laura was in first grade, and starting in September we’ll be using SOTW3, Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to [...]

Making Hay: A Summer Rhapsody

Before Tom and I were married and I moved here from Manhattan, I bought some books to help me understand my new life. One of them was Making Hay by Verlyn Klinkenborg, who splits his time at The New York Times and his small farm in upstate New York, and whose writing is equally split [...]

A possible title for the shopping cart…

…and an interesting contender for curriculum when we get to high school biology:
Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature by the father-daughter team of David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash. He’s a psychology professor and zoologist at the University of Washington and she’s about to start her junior year at Swarthmore, and their [...]

So Long at the Fair

All week long we’ve either been getting ready for the fair or at the fair, which kicked off on Thursday as usual with the big parade. Today is the last day, culminating with fireworks at 11 pm. Tomorrow we recuperate (the kids and their friends rode the rides at the midway all day [...]

My husband’s love language* is…

…lamb chops, one of my most favorite non-chocolate foods in the world, and which Tom brought home for tonight’s dinner. He knows the way to my heart, especially after a horrendous two-day headache (part of it endured through an otherwise fun homeschool Sports Day involving lots of kids, raucous noise, egg and spoon races, and [...]

Canadian Interlibrary Loans Dodge a Bullet, for now

Some good news, after my post the other day — according to an online story at the CBC yesterday, “Ottawa cancels planned postal hikes on library books.”
However, while this rate will continue “beyond April 2006,” that sounds like government speak for “you’re toast after June 2006″ and still applies to only books, so, after sending [...]

In memory of Ateeque Sharifi, the final victim

On Thursday, Britain’s Independent newspaper published the following obituary of the final victim to be formally identified following the fatal bombings on July 7th:
Ateeque Sharifi had seen his fair share of tragedy as a boy in Afghanistan. His parents were killed by the Taliban before he was 20 and he was the only male in [...]

Daniel is reading!

I don’t know who’s more proud and happy, M-o-m or s-o-n, as Daniel would say. In the last couple of days, he’s been spelling like Helen Keller after meeting Annie Sullivan, and tonight, in the middle of lesson 24 of The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading by Jessie Wise, he started sounding out all [...]

Is it me?

This month I’ve listened to a fair number of interviews with, like, 10- to 14-year-olds, you know, mainly in connection with the release of the new Harry Potter book? Today, I heard like two interviews on the radio and whatever, and it was like the straw that broke the camel’s, um, back? I’m reminded [...]

Farm Report

Haying season has begun. Tom has started swathing the alfalfa, but this year rather than letting it dry and baling it, we’re going to try haylage. Haylage is similar to silage (which is made from corn, barley, oats and so on) in that it’s gathered up green to ferment, which sounds rather nasty to me [...]

Building Ourselves Again and Stronger

I was rather confused on waking this morning to the CBC radio news about the latest bombings in London, because I had read myself to sleep last night with the The Economist’s glowing review of Incendiary by Chris Cleave, about a terrorist assault on the new Arsenal football stadium in north London.
An even bigger coincidence, [...]

Shockingly Provincial

What’s that saying about giving with one hand and taking away with the other?
While I was delighted that the same-sex marriage bill finally became law this week, I was distressed to learn yesterday that Canada Post, one of our Crown corporations, is proposing to eliminate the Library Mail Rate, also known as the Library Book [...]

Pass the Bean Dip, er, Cookies

I came across the recipe below in a current farm publication; it’s from a fairly new cookbook, Grazing: Portable Snacks and Finger Foods for Anytime, Anywhere by Julie Van Rosendaal, published last November. Tom proclaims it an abomination and a dreadful thing to do to chocolate chips, pecans, and dried cranberries (he does have a [...]

Excessively Diverted

I spent the afternoon on our deck with three kittens, a bowl of the first BC cherries, about a dozen dragonflies, a very vocal meadlowlark, a family of western bluebirds, one determined bluebottle fly, and my new “beach book” (never mind the fact that I’m landlocked in Alberta), Jane Austen in Boca by Paula Marantz [...]

Quick and easy sorbet

Here’s a recipe for incredibly quick and easy sorbet, without an ice cream maker. Actually, this is better in winter, when fresh fruit isn’t in season and abundant, so tuck it away for later. This was in The New York Times about 10 years ago, and makes 1 pint of sorbet. I’m [...]

The Word of the Week

is eristic, thanks to the CBC Radio program Sunday Edition’s new summer feature, “Word Report.” WR is dedicated, for the summer months at least, to reviving obsolete, underused, and otherwise forgotten words. So I was very happy to discover that my 1961 edition of Webster’s (not so) New Collegiate Dictionary does in fact include a [...]

An excellent Farm School lesson…

“An eight-year-old boy who watched his father get pinned beneath a piece of heavy farm equipment climbed behind the wheel of the family pickup truck and drove several kilometres for help.
“Family and neighbours are hailing James Amell and his little sister Neely as heroes for their part in rescuing their dad, Don Amell, a 39-year-old [...]

Bonne Fete Nationale!

Bastille Day is one of my favorite holidays, and one of my favorite Bastille Day celebrations was an evening in 1993 in San Francisco with some friends. We had a long, lazy dinner at a wonderful bistro (I’m not being coy — I’d share the name if only I could remember it after all these [...]

Summer School

Our last official day of school was Friday, June 17th, a good 10 days earlier than the local public school, and we celebrated by going to the playground. We’ll start up again on Tuesday, September 6th, the day after Labor Day (definitely not a Canadian holiday, even if you stick a “u” in it) and, [...]

Guns, Germs, Steel and Books: The Economist’s list of best-selling history books and then some

I read in the online edition of The New York Times yesterday morning that PBS’s three-part series based on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies begins tonight. Unfortunately, our household won’t be able to join in the PBS fun because we get only two TV channels, neither one of [...]