Homeschool

This week in homeschooling: Gingerbread and fairy tales

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The week marked one ending and one beginning for our homeschool, as Monday was the last day of this session of co-op and today the kids had some friends over to start a new project. They’re sad that co-op is over (I’m relieved), but they were excited to have their first Project Gingerbread meeting today. They’ve put together a team for the National Gingerbread House Competition, and now my kitchen looks like the Swedish Chef set up shop in there.

An actual photo of me supervising the gingerbread team.
An actual photo of me supervising the gingerbread team.

In history this week we talked about the German Empire and the Second Reich, and our end-of-week project was to write a couple of fairy tales a la the Brothers Grimm. The kids were supposed to take a story they’ve heard from our family history and give it a fanciful twist. Here’s what they wrote:

When Mommy and Daddy Got Married

by Pete

Once upon a time, there were a boy and a girl. But there was also a cat! The cat is very important in this story. So are the boy and the girl.

Now, our story begins in high school. The boy and the girl were in high school. One of them had a cat. The cat went to the boy and said, “Meow! Meow!” And so the boy followed the cat. The cat went over Mount Everest, into the deepest darkest cave, out of the deepest darkest cave, and into a house.

It was a nice house with boxes of Nerds everywhere. The girl was there eating Nerds.

The boy said, “Hello.” The girl said, “Hi.” The cat said, “Meow.”

Then the cat went back to Mount Everest.

The boy and the girl fell in love, and they got married.

And the cat lived happily ever after.

The End

The Story Of Marsha

by Poppy

Once upon a time, there was a boy and a girl who were married. They decided they wanted a cat. So they went to the cat store and looked at the selection. They had to journey through New York and met Dr. Strange. He made a portal for them and then they were outside the cat store. There were exactly 100,000 cats in the store.

The first 20,000 cats they met were not well-mannered. They were very gassy.

The second 20,000 cats they met were too hungry. The boy and girl did not have enough cat food for them.

The third 20,000 cats they met were too ginormous. The boy and girl only had one house, and none of those cats would fit in it.

The fourth 20,000 cats they met were too addicted to television. They did not even notice the boy and girl were there.

The next 19,999 cats they met were too strange. They would only walk on their back legs. (They did buy one for Dr. Strange and took it to his house.)

Finally, they met Cat Number 100,000. She was a dilute tortoiseshell named Princesshead. She did not toot, she was not too hungry, she was just the right size, she only liked the TV program “Cat Food Around the World,” and she walked on all four legs. She was very sweet and soft. They decided to buy her and rename her Marsha.

And the boy and the girl and the dilute tortie lived happily ever after. (And Doctor Strange and his cat went to fight Dormomu and his cat, Dormeowmu.)

The End

So other than the house becoming a gingerbread construction site, our week was pretty much par for the course? How was your week, school-wise?

Curious about what homeschoolers do all day? Check out more homeschooling adventures at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers!

Current events

Reactionary reactivism

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Poppy and her friends were emailing each other practically all night on Tuesday, first with hopeful messages and then increasingly with disbelief and fear. But eventually they came back to hope, because they figured it out before I did: We can get through this.

I spent a good deal of yesterday crying or trying not to cry. Not because my side lost but because the future looked so angry and bleak and so dangerous for so many people, and because the kind, generous America in my head turned out to be an illusion. I felt betrayed, and I was scared. I read about what to do now and about how to talk to your kids about the election. I grieved with friends who have more to fear from this rising tide of anger.

Then in the evening we went to a poetry reading and then out for drinks and dessert with good friends. And it helped me to remember that we are still ourselves. The world may not be turning the way we’d like right now, but we’re still here, and we can do everything we can to Make America Kind Again. So today I’m laughing at my sweet, summer child self (see: Area Liberal No Longer Recognizes Fanciful, Wildly Inaccurate Mental Picture Of Country He Lives In) and preparing for winter by looking for ways to help.

I don’t know what the next four years holds. But I do know this: The only thing I can control is how I react to the situation.

Flotsam / Jetsam, Reading

When in doubt, read poetry

Tonight I’m going to see one of my favorite poets do a reading, and I’m going to have him sign a couple of his books for me. Here’s a good (if slightly unsettling) one from Billy Collins.

“The First Night”
by Billy Collins

The worst thing about death must be
the first night.
—Juan Ramón Jiménez

Before I opened you, Jiménez,
it never occurred to me that day and night
would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

but now you have me wondering
if there will also be a sun and a moon
and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

then repair, each soul alone,
to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.
Or will the first night be the only night,

a darkness for which we have no other name?
How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,
How impossible to write it down.

This is where language will stop,
the horse we have ridden all our lives
rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

The word that was in the beginning
and the word that was made flesh—
those and all the other words will cease.

Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,
how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?
But it is enough to frighten me

into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,
to sunlight bright on water
or fragmented in a grove of trees,

and to look more closely here at these small leaves,
these sentinel thorns,
whose employment it is to guard the rose.