Nine is fine

Today is Daniel’s birthday and it’s a fine sunny Spring day.  The frogs are singing, the birds are twittering and making nests, and the gophers are poking out of their holes.
One of Daniel’s presents this morning was the Marty Robbins CD Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959) which we listened to with breakfast (pancakes, bacon, [...]

Poetry Friday: A little trust and encouragement

An anonymous but appropriate and still fairly well-known bit of American doggerel, near as I can figure from the 1940s or thereabouts. From our small, battered copy of the Arrow Book of Funny Poems, collected by Eleanor Clymer and published in 1961 by Scholastic:
The wind riz
And then it blew,
The rain friz
And then it snew.
Spring [...]

Curtain Up

Tonight’s the big night and the kids are very, very excited. A bit pooped from yesterday’s full dress rehearsal, but very, very excited nonetheless. It’s going to be a busy weekend, with Friday and Saturday evening performances, and one Sunday afternoon too.  Tom got a sneak peak at the orchestra last night, and [...]

Mother’s Day photo contest

Crissy at Soliloquy is hosting a Mother’s Day photo contest:
In honor of my late grandmother, Grace, and my mother, Cindy, I am hosting a Mother’s Day photo contest. I am looking for your favorite photograph of a grandmother or a mother and her children.
The deadline is May 7th, and more details are here and here.  [...]

Suburban Green

Canadian home educating blogger Billi-Jean, who writes at My Bountiful Life… announced a new project for Earth Day yesterday (our own earth is white and frozen, so there wasn’t much celebrating in our little corner yesterday):
Suburban Green Is People
In her first post, Billi-Jean writes,
So here we are, a family of four, in the suburbs in [...]

Speaking of hands

Laura at Seabird Chronicles has a post about “Crafts for young children” — activities and projects toddlers can do by themselves — inspired by a toddler/preschool summer camp she’s planning. The camp planning in turn has inspired the idea for a Craft Swap:
You prepare and mail a box of fun craft ideas/supplies to your [...]

Hands

One of my favorite writers, science professor and naturalist Chet Raymo, wrote a recent post “Hand to Mind” at his blog Science Musings* about The New York Times review of Richard Sennett’s new book, The Craftsman; I highlighted some excerpts of the Times review here.
Prof. Raymo hasn’t read the new book yet, but has some [...]

The educational minimum

We have come so far down the trail of thinking that people go to school in order to become foot-soldiers in the economic battle, as if paid employment were the sole meaning of life, that we scarcely understand what Aristotle meant by saying “we educate ourselves so that we can make a noble use of [...]

Four words

Snow*
Blizzard
Cold
Spring?
* 12 inches since Saturday. Four more to come today supposedly. The only way we can get into our corrals is with the tractor, since ever more snow keeps falling and drifting in over the road; it’s over four feet deep in places. Two baby calves born, one last night and one [...]

Call of the wild

One of my Google Alerts picked up this article, “German Tots Learn to Answer Call of Nature” from The Wall Street Journal earlier in the week. From the article,
Each weekday, come rain or shine, a group of children, ages 3 to 6, walk into a forest outside Frankfurt to sing songs, build fires and roll [...]

Poetry Friday: From the tower, for children

I was delighted yesterday to find online Alison Lurie’s New York Review of Books May 1st Rapunzel reviews and essay, “The Girl in the Tower“. Which brought to mind the delightful poem below by the late Liverpudlian painter and poet, Adrian Henri, from our copy of The Macmillan Treasury of Poetry for Children, with a [...]

Links

We’ve been busy here, recovering from the Festival and celebrating the kids’ successes (including Laura’s big wrap-up prize for most outstanding student performing in three disciplines and going on to provincials for poetry/public speaking and musical theater), doing some more Spring cleaning (I still have a few walls to wash and all of the windows [...]

New from Jay Hosler

Via P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula, news that biologist and cartoonist (and Farm School favorite) Jay Hosler has a new book out, Optical Allusions.
I’ve written before, here and in comments at other blogs, about Dr. Hosler’s earlier titles, The Sandwalk Adventures: An Adventure in Evolution Told in Five Chapters and Clan Apis).  He writes about the [...]

Home from the hill

Well, home from three days at the performing arts festival (piano, voice, and speech arts), which was a hill of its own.
We returned to find that it’s finally, really Spring here in our corner of the prairies. I’ve had pussy willows in a vase for a few weeks, the geese have been flying overhead [...]

Craftsmanship

In yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Book Review, Lewis Hyde reviewed the new title The Craftsman by Richard Sennett (Yale University Press, March 2008). From the review:
… Sennett’s book gathers case after case in which we see how the work of the hand can inform the work of the mind. Moreover, it is through [...]

Mud pies and bibliobituaries

One of our favorite books, especially for Spring, is Mud Pies and Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls by Marjorie Winslow, illustrated by Erik Blegvad, whose Great Hamster Hunt, also out-of-print, is still on my shelves.
So I was delighted to see it receive a lengthy “salute” from independent bookseller Alison Morris on her blog, Shelftalker. [...]

A daily gift for National Poetry Month

Sherry at Semicolon is offering a post a day for National Poetry Month.  Here’s the initial post, and you can find the others by searching the blog (under the “Picture Book Preschool” block on the right) for the term “NPM”.  From Sherry’s first post,
April is National Poetry Month, and I intend to give you a [...]

The real Canadian two-tier system

And it ain’t health care.
Air Canada, which charges for each pillow and sandwich and is just a wee bit shy of requiring passengers to load their own luggage on the plane, is now offering “On My Way”, a new “travel assistance service”, which seems to be what most airlines, including West Jet, have traditionally offered [...]

Our newest little April fool

Laura’s 4H heifer finally had her calf the other day. We arrived at Bunny’s pen to find her in labor. If you look carefully, you can see the calf’s front hooves poised to make an exit.

Laura the midwife with her beloved Bunny.

Here’s one of the first glimpses of Giacomo Benny (Benny for short), [...]

Room with a view

Here’s an (admittedly not very good) photo of the old bedroom windows yesterday, with Davy peeking in. He’s standing on the scaffolding outside. Tom had already stripped off all the trim.

And here’s the opening today, minus the windows and most of the wall. Enlarged, in fact, almost from floor to ceiling. The [...]