Sprung

I have been a bad blogger. But this time I think I'll just be bad and not wig and erase everything. Rather, I'll let it sit and do what I can. This all or nothing thing of mine has got to go.

I didn't know yesterday was the first day of spring. It was quite chilly. I took a few walks, one with Stan for our exercise and two, to and from the church for my quartet practice. I was chilly, but there is something in the air that's promising. One of my very favorite things to do is to sit out on my back porch, that faces southish and let the spring sun bake into me on the first warm spring day. It's like melting off winter all the way through. Nothing feels so good. Sometimes I wonder if everyone does this and think if some don't, they're missing out on a treasure of life.

I guess it's time to start thinking about my gardens. I'm looking forward to it. It's been a hard winter, not weather wise, just emotionally. I need dirt on my knees and under my fingernails. I need to see sprouts and pull weeds. I have a new patch of ground where my pyracantha used to be. I'd been toying with pulling it for years because it comes out from under my house and leans sidways and it sort of in the way. But the berries are gorgeous and a bird invariably makes her nest in it every year. We peek into it from the porch and hear the sweet babies when they hatch. However, this winter we had a rather big heavy snow that layed on the bush too long. The bush slowly lowered itself to the ground and never got back up. So we cut it down and yanked it out and now I have some space between my crape myrtles to plant.

Things are going merrily on the homeschooling front. After the tvs turned off, the kids found some wonderful things to do in addition to their normal curricular stuff. The above picture is Luke's attempt at Kandinsky's work. We have this neat collection of some masters that my parents passed down to us, and Luke enjoys pouring over them and trying some himself. Sean has been working through a Explode the Code phonics book and I'm enjoying seeing his progress. Until now (he's four and a few months) he couldn't really hold a pencil. We began doing a letter a day, following this book and its various activites, and now he can make a 'b', an 'f', and an 'm'. Doesn't sound like much, especially remembering that Luke was learning cursive at his age by himself, but Sean is still ambidextrous and holding a pencil does not come naturally to him. He is mostly left-handed like his brother Seth (and no one else in either family!) but occasionally he switches hands. I sometimes ask, "Which hand do you like to use more?" He invariably answers, "Boaf".

Yesterday Seth gave an oral report at school for Communications. (I was going to write "English" but I don't think that class exists any more in schools. It's Communications, or some other all encompassing word.) They were to choose a person to report on and he did Bob Marley. Then we talked him into doing something he had toyed with, but was afraid and hesitant: sing the Redemption Song while accompanying himself on the guitar. I would hear him upstairs in his attic playing and singing it at night and his voice sounded beautiful. He's always resisted singing, but he's in a band and one boy insists that he, himself, is the singer and Seth is rather disgusted because the kid can't sing. (He can't.) So I think this has made him find his own voice. Anyway, he gave his report last, after many weeks. He was nervous when he left home, but light and happy and proud when he returned. He gave his report, explained the significance of the song, sang his song, played a couple wrong cords in the beginning and began again having the class chuckling and breaking the ice, and then many of them gave him the only standing O of the reports. He got an A+ (which he sorely needed!) and has gained a little bit of confidence about something he was unsure of doing. No better lesson than that.

Before he left yesterday morning I said to him, "You know, Eleanore Roosevelt once said, 'You must do the thing you think you cannot do.'" He replied, "So what? Just because she said something doesn't make it significant." ~Sigh...14 year olds. "I know Seth. I wasn't telling you because Eleanore Roosevelt said it. I thought what she said was significant!"
He knew what I meant, the bum.