Indiana Idylls

I taught a class on iconic short stories this spring at our homeschool co-op. I don't know how many of my former English teachers may have passed since, but any that have are rolling in their graves at this news. I find teaching especially stressful but this class exceeded my expectations in basically every way and that might have made it worthwhile. We read 20 short stories, which I was free to choose primarily on the basis of how much I liked them. I organized them based on loose associations. Table of Contents (We never officially read this, but it was so short, I included it in case I needed to read it aloud during that first class.) One Summer Night , by Ambrose Bierce Short Story Elements To Build a Fire , by Jack London Irony The Necklace , by Guy de Maupassant The Gift of the Magi , by O. Henry The Ransom of Red Chief , by O. Henry Irony - American The Veldt , by Ray Bradbury The Lottery , by Shirley Jackson Setting - Irony - Foreign The Sniper , by Liam O'Flah...

Nothing comprehensive, but I have a few episodic resources. A Home in the Woods: Pioneer Life in Indiana https://a.co/d/cNWIwvj Alone: The Journey of the Boy Sims https://a.co/d/agmeabw , Saturday, October 28 2023, 8:36 PM. This is a 20 minute immersive learning documentary from Ball State about George Rogers Clark. https://youtu.be/itVP1VDebNM?si=Vou4OrHU9n5raOeC The diaries of George Rogers Clark and some of his men are available online -- follow their trek in real time in February by reading the passages. Let the kids go muck around in their socks in the snow and mud. https://indianahistory.org/education/education-resources/educator-resources/ The Student Resources section is good, too -- has all state plants and animals and the song and poem at https://indianahistory.org/education/education-resources/educator-resources/fun-facts/ . Look elsewhere for the fantastic story about the state seal. The Indiana Geological Survey  https://igws.indiana.edu/ The junior history publications ar...

For this Halloween of 2022 I dressed up as a spartan warrior. My plan for the costume was to focus on the helmet and shield and then go on to make leg and body armor. I had had no experience with making anything like this before, but I still had a general idea of how to go about making the shield, so the helmet was going to be the main challenge. After watching some videos, Mom and I got to work making a cardboard frame for the helmet, planning to paiper-mache over it, but the shield and leg armor would also need to be paiper-mached so we decided to do all the paiper-macheing at once. The shield was made out of cardboard with a paper plate in the middle to give it a curve, the leg armor was also made out of cardboard curved to fit my legs. Once everything that needed to be paiper-mached had been made Mom and I began paiper-macheing. After two coats of paiper-mache I them dry and then primed them, after letting this dry I painted them with bronze spray paint. We used red tul...

Imagine you are exploring Bloomington for the day and you have unloaded your boys at a playground on the first nice sunny day of March and you are enjoying a quiet moment alone in the car. You have barely begun to savor the silence and your homemade trail mix when you become aware of a son running urgently back to you, calling out to get your attention. MOM! MOM! In that moment, you take a deep breath and begin to wonder who could possibly have gotten hurt already and steel yourself for what will come and consider what options are handy in the car for blood or injury or what-may-come in a city you barely know. You resolve to be calm and brave. The son now reaches the car and launches himself into the front seat MOM! and mere inches away from your face THERE ARE CADDIS FLY LARVAE in the CREEK and they are EVERYWHERE and you have to go see them RIGHT NOW because it is AMAZING. You take another deep breath because -- it is a relief to see -- he is brimming with excitement and not alarm -...

A reading from the Gospel of Peter Jesus said to his disciples:  Go, and give the poor all that they need,  for they do not know that I am here.  They think that I am dead and crucified.  Go, in Jesus' name, we pray. The Word of the Lord

After he'd been singing for a while in the car on the way home from Michigan, I grabbed some scrap paper and did my best to write down what I could hear from the front seat. "...Everything that would be on a plane it has four propellers 80 hundred until 1900 hundred and he died in the early 94s Those tanks except they shoot guns right out of their guns There was a war and they changed to real weapons, real gunpowder And in the early 94s those that were different my bones fat... a gravestone of Kentucky ...and I saw what a gravestone looked like and I liked it. And in the early 94s an early broken neck Covered with a new... the wheels go around and round, round and round, I can show you the tractor... it was a really good tractor, like the one in my hand ... Went to the hospital and then I got better and the war began again and I got my uniform

This is what the boys remembered shortly after our 2014 trip to Baltimore, Colonial Williamsburg, and the Farm outside Shenandoah Park on our first Gestwicki Getaway. Baltimore Listening to music on the TV (at the Olivers') Williamsburg hotel splash pad Farm playing with Damien and Vella King of Town (King of Tokyo) Incan Gold playing Wizards Gramma & Pa were there It was not an exhaustive list.

Peter: My uncle the baron glued exploding cheese to the guys. 20160508_123304.jpg 82KB Download Someone (probably Leo), 10/16/14: I love that your tummy is getting bigger. It's like a pumpkin!

Cleaning out a box in my office, I found my handwritten notes, transcribed from a conversation with (ha! more like a short excerpt of a monologue by) Leo, on his 4th birthday, in the bathroom by the Dinosphere at the Indianapolis Children's Museum. There were two sci-fi movies posters up, one from 1959's Journey to the Center of the Earth , and one from 1979, The Land that Time Forgot . I wrote: Leo first noticed the T-Rex underwater fighting the submarine. "That monkey has a spear. I know what kind of monkey that is. It's a Monkey Knight. I've been one of those before, in Marvel Super Heroes. That monkey has a spear. None of the other monkeys have spears, so that's how you tell that one is the king. Did you know that?" Then he saw the volcanoes in the sky. He thought there were "red cracks" in the sky, but they were just pteranodons. L: Look at how big my legs are! Me: Oh, yes. Like tree trunks. L: Yeah, mostly. [I think that last...

Things pulled out of Daniel's mouth this Christmas season: old ham, large piece of a foil Torrone wrapper, garlic clove, twist tie, Tegu block,Tegu wheel, Duplo block, clump of mud, a (spice) clove, and a peanut.

I asked Alex to write five sentences about our experience raising tadpoles. (I do believe they were toads.) Our tadpoles lived in an aquarium. You should put sticks in it before they turn into frogs. Hopefully, that will reduce the amount of dead frogs. It was sad to let them go. When you have them turning into frogs, you should cover it with something.

At the Indianapolis Children's Museum on Leo's birthday, we participated in a science workshop where the boys made a kind of plastic out of cornstarch. We learned about George Washington Carver (who did NOT invent peanut butter), and the proper names of some scientific tools, like a graduated cylinder and a pipette -- when the kids guessed things like "eyedropper", Science John tried to lead them to the right answer with a clue: There was a French name for it. So the next day, during lunch, Leo says this: "N. E. I. E. It's a French word for "knight". Is that a good French word? N-e-i-e.

Tonight, after reading Leo's bedtime story, I was lucky to remember that it was the Feast of the Guardian Angels. I really like the idea of Guardian Angels, but it was only two weeks ago that I learned Guardian Angels are officially sanctioned by the Catholic Church. They're in the Catechism , that God sends each of us an angel when we are born! I have always liked the idea of Guardian Angels, but if pressed, would have said they were sort of a fancy. I was grateful to learn that it was right to believe in them. Anyway, so I taught Leo the Guardian Angel prayer I know: Angel of God, my guardian dear,  to whom God's love commits me here,  ever this day be at my side,  to light and guard, to rule and guide.  Amen. "Leo, did you know that when you were born, God sent a special angel just to watch over you and keep you safe?" "Angels have wings, right?" "Well, I think so. I've never seen a picture of an angel without wings, so I do think of th...

Leo and I started reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , as Alex and I did when he was three. Tonight, Alex joined us for chapter 5, in which Dorothy and the Scarecrow meet the Tin Woodman. Scarecrow and Woodman debate whether it is more important to have a brain or a heart, and so I asked the boys what they thought. Without skipping a beat, Leo said, "A heart." I asked if he was sure, if he thought it better to have a brain for thinking or a heart for loving, and he confidently replied, "A heart for loving." When I asked Alex, he looked ponderous for a moment. Then he replied, "A heart. You might be a little bit crazy, but at least you wouldn't hurt anybody, because you'll love them." Neither one will ever make it in politics.

Tea, once hot, twice warmed, sipping intermittently nice morning with boys

Paul and Alex are at Game Day at the library. I am playing pretend with Leo. He's wearing a glove of finger puppets and I am a Playmobil horse. I was talking about the weather, and I asked Froggie and Chicken where they go when it rains. "Cincinnati." "What do you do in Cincinnati?" "There's a rope and... and robots and butterflies." "A rope? What do you do with the rope?" "You swing on a rope into the water... on a skateboard!" I think I want to go to Cincinnati when it rains, too!

This articulated something I like about planning, better than I think I've been able to. "Plan in advance. Don't expect to get up Saturday or Sunday morning with no plan and say "ok family, let's spend the day together". It's fun to look forward to the day and it's important to structure the week to get our work done (laundry, bills) and plan the activity so we can make it happen." It appeared here .

I have been cleaning out my box of college notes, and wanted to preserve the Film Lists from my various Media Study classes. Non-Fiction Film, Fall 1999 Best Boy, 1979, Ira Wohl Lumiere Brothers' First Films, Thierry Fremaux, ed Nanook of the North (restored), 1922, Robert Flaherty Trimph of the Will, 1936, Leni Riefenstahl The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, 1994, Ray Muller Olympia, 1938, Diving Sequence, Leni Riefenstahl Excerpts from early social documentaries: Drifters, 1929, John Grierson Housing Problems, 1935, Edgar Anstey & Arthur Elton The Plow that Broke the Plains, 1936, Pare Lorentz The River, 1937, Pare Lorentz Night Mail, 1936, Watt & Wright Night and Fog, 1955, Alain Resnais Salesman, 1968, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin Don't Look Back, 1967, D.A. Pennebaker Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, 1963, Drew Associates (Robert Drew & Richard Leacock) Blood of the Beasts, 1949, Georges Franju Titicut Folli...

Yesterday at a friend's house, Leo bumped his head and came over to inform me. "Leo bonk head." "Awww," I said, "That's no fun. Are you OK?" "Yes," and he started to walk away but soon changed his mind and returned. "Need kisses." Kisses were happily applied, and achieved their purpose. "Feel better now!" It was the first time he had requested kisses for an alleged injury, and it was pretty adorable. A similar scene played out this morning. Lucky mom!

Lego KidsFest, Cincinnati, OH, March 24, 2012 Mom: What did you do at the Lego party? Alex: Build lots of things. Mom: What kinds of places were there to build things? Alex: First, there was a big pile of bricks on the floor. There were probably 200 legos ! I built a Droid battleship. A lot of people were sitting in this giant puddle of legos. PILE, not puddle. What if it was a puddle? Who would make a Lego puddle? It would be hard to make a lego puddle. Who would have thought of that? I don't know. I built things out of only green blocks that were very thick and there was only one kind of them. There were only thick four pieces, so there were two dots on one side and four on the other. Eight dots. That was the only kind of block they had in that area. I don't remember what I made. Dad made a Lego toilet. We saw lots of Lego sculptures. There were a lot of Star Wars sculptures. They were made of all Legos and they were like two feet tall or something. Mom: Were they bigg...