• Miscellany

    Winter Wonderland

    Ahh, the pristine blanket of the first snowfall… …looks like this by 8 A.M.: That’s because we homeschool. When the girls see that snow out there for the first time this year, and…

  • Novels

    Dr. Thorne

    Dr. Thorne is the novel that precedes Framley Parsonage in Trollope’s chronicles of Barsetshire. I read Framley first, and though I wish I’d gotten to know Dr. Thorne beforehand, he didn’t suffer any…

  • Literary Study

    On Stories — C.S. Lewis

    I’ve been thinking about the title essay of this collection. In it, C.S. Lewis ponders what we’re really after in our reading, and takes issue with the notion that there is a certain…

  • Education

    Random School Musings

    I used to do “Homeschool State of the Union” posts in which I wrote about all of the resources we were using, and evaluated how things were going. The longer I’ve schooled, the…

  • Novels

    Framley Parsonage

    It’s been awhile since I ventured into the 19th century with Anthony Trollope. I’ve read The Warden and Barchester Towers, and I thought Framley Parsonage came next. Turns out I was wrong; I…

  • Current Events,  Education

    State Capitol

    My daughters and I were fortunate enough to accompany some other homeschoolers on a field trip to our state capitol in Albany. The field trip included a program for the kids at the…

  • Poetry

    Mortimer Minute

    Ruth at There Is No Such Thing as a God-forsaken Town tagged me for the Mortimer Minute. Here are the rules: 1) Make up three questions you’ve always wanted to be asked in…

  • Chapter Books

    Pinocchio

    It seems like we’ve been reading Pinocchio aloud forever, but this week we finished it. The story is hailed as a classic, and it’s a very different animal than the Disney movie —…