How Do You Make Time to Read?

Someone asked me this recently, because I get through a lot of books, and I thought I’d take a moment to offer a multifaceted answer:

The most obvious one, that is definitely Not for Everyone, is simple: we just leave books everywhere. To the detriment of a tidy house. Some places my book show up: the coffee table, for starters. In stacks in my tiny home office, including the desk and the floor. Also, I was known to keep a gardening book on the floor outside the bathroom while I waited for the toddler to poop. (She is a methodical person who would not be rushed.)

If we are going on a multi-part trip or any kind of outdoor outing, I bring a read-aloud book to do with the kids. If I expect they’re going to play something extended and kind of boring I don’t have to participate in (wading, or building a stick fort), I bring a book for myself. Maybe you are an encouraging and active participant in these adventures (to which I say way to go!!). But I tell myself I’m fostering independence, keep half an eye on the destructive play, and dive back into snatches of my book.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks through Scribd (paid), Librivox (free) and the library’s app (free). As a result, stories are strewn around the yard, kitchen and basement so that I think of Marilla Cuthbert over by my irises and Wendell Berry by the terrible vine on the back fence.

When I have a nursling or am morning sick (a lot of the last ten years), I read many e-books through the library and Scribd on my phone — not my favorite way to read, but one can spend only so many hours lovingly gazing at the baby’s nursing head and a phone is easier to read in the half-light or while lying limp and queasy in the fetal position.

I take to heart Charlotte Mason’s idea that a well-rounded, truly educated person will have many books of different types and subjects going at once, and work through them gradually, although I think she’d encourage more discipline than I generally exhibit. Because of small children, I can’t binge whole novels the way I did as a teen, but I still find ways to tackle meaty fare gradually and can occasionally squeeze in a book that totally engulfs me. And I don’t worry about abandoning a book, which I do without shame, unless it was loaned or assigned. Life is short, and there’s always something else stacking up on our shelves.

Long time readers of my blog will remember my list of Things I Do Not Do. Remember this list when you look at the number of books I read and consider your own trade-offs — for instance, because I mostly listen to audiobooks during chores, I don’t listen to many podcasts or much music (except in the car on errands). This may or may not be a valuable change for you. What’s more, my floors could be cleaner, but then I couldn’t sprawl on the couch to mark up a book. I could do exercises classes, but then I couldn’t listen to an audiobook while running. And so on, and so forth.

TL;DR? Don’t try this at home. Or do, but be ready for a little untidiness.

2022 in Books

(2021, 2020 and beyond)

Some notables from a year of reading:

• Favorite old-men-contemplating-their-lives nearly plotless novel (a micro-genre exemplified by Gilead and Jayber Crow): Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather) — I’d had this on my shelf for years, since I found it at Goodwill shortly after falling in love with Shadows on the Rock, but I haven’t much liked the other WC I’ve read in the interim. This one knocked my socks off and I know I’ll reread it someday. I was enchanted, and now have a much stronger desire to finally see the American southwest.
• Time travel/history/Catholic mysticism nominee: Sun Slower, Sun Faster (Meriol Trevor) — I talk about it here.
• Best discussion fodder: The Genesis of Gender (Abigail Favale). I read this over summer vacation and then met with a much smarter friend over gelato to grapple with it. I didn’t love the beginning or end and I’m skeptical of the veracity of the subtitle (A Christian Defense) as it relies heavily on a Catholic argument against contraception, but I appreciated Favale’s methodical building of an argument and contextualization of hot button topics.
• Most upsetting but rewarding realistic fiction: Yolk (Mary H.K. Choi)—I might not have finished this except that my sister loaned it to me, and I’m so glad I did. Both Jayne and June are prickly, broken people and it took me awhile to see what Choi was doing with her narrator and the story. But of what I’ve read this year it’s one of the books I think of most often, even if it was difficult.
• Most delightful and thoughtful literary fanfic: Miss Austen (Gill Hornby). I talk about it here.
• Best audiobook experience: Fortunately the Milk (Neil Gaiman). A friend recommended this one to us and we all guffawed our way through it on a short road trip to the monastery earlier this year. Since then, Pip and I have read it aloud together again and enjoyed the insane illustrations.
• Favorite poetry: Richeldis of Walsingham (Sally Thomas). Lovely. I am a sucker for stories that weave in and out of time over a bit of land, and these narrative poems surrounding Mary’s apparition in England and the history of that one place sure delivered. I hope we can make a pilgrimage to Walsingham this summer.
• Most pleasantly perplexing: Piranesi (Susanna Clarke). I read a tolerable number of books and while I haven’t read exhaustively in fantasy and science fiction I can usually tell what tradition a story is working out of and guess some of the reveals. Not this time! John read this aloud to me in the weeks before and after Teddy was born, and the sweet narrator kept me guessing straight through.
• How did he ever plot this? Award goes to: Cloud Cuckoo Land (Anthony Doerr). A friend mailed this giant tome to me and I read it during one cold week in January and it kind of blew my mind. There was the same beautiful prose as in All the Light We Cannot See but the disparate strands here absolutely defy categorization. There are strands of science fiction, literary fiction and historical fiction and somehow—somehow—they all work. Such a wild ride. I loved it.
• Best comfort read romcom: Very Sincerely Yours (Kerry Winfrey). I read this at the end of 2022/2023, exhausted, traveling, and, unbeknownst to me, rapidly slumping into gestational diabetes, and it was just what I want in a romance: funny, charming, with a strong sense of place, engaging side characters, a bit literary and not too explicit.
• Book I most want to live inside: The Little White Horse (Elizabeth Goudge). It took me and Scout several terms and a couple restarts to get through this, but I’m so glad we did, because we both enjoyed it so much that for her last birthday I gave her a new copy (the dog having eaten the cover off our original) and a little pink geranium of her own. Things I look for in books for Scout: strong but feminine female leads, lots of beauty, descriptions of flowers and clothes, maybe a fantastical creature or two. This delivered.
• Best sick day book: Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik). I didn’t end up liking the whole book as much as the early chapters hinted I would, but I enjoyed the fairy tale aspects, the unusual perspectives, the mysterious, foreboding tone of the early chapters. I can see how those would be difficult to sustain, though — I just wish some of the protagonists hadn’t dealt in such morally questionable behavior and been rewarded for their wiliness, even if that’s in keeping with folk tales generally.

On Receiving on the Tongue Again

I am not a demonstrative person. I have a Grimm dread of making a scene. I am also not much of a feeler. I don’t like to cry in front of people and I’m easily embarrassed.

So it was a serious decision when I resolved to start receiving the Eucharist on the tongue. At some point around Scout or Roo’s births I started, mostly motivated by a sort of obscure horror at what it’s like to receive in the hands while juggling a baby. If we are supposed to be even a little reverent, then jutting out half a hand while wrestling a wiggly baby, like a harried drive-thru customer leaning out the car window for a hamburger, cannot possibly be considered to afford the appropriate reverence.

Still, we were, and to some degree still are, Covid-cautious. (I mean, in my case, kind of cautious across the board.) So for months that became a couple of years, I went back to the practice of my childhood and received the Eucharist in my hand.

But then Teddy got here and Teddy got fractious and I was back where I’d been years ago when I first found myself in this conundrum. And I traded being flustered by my lack of reverence for being flustered receiving the Host on my tongue.

And I am flustered, almost always. I’m flustered when it’s a priest I don’t know. I’m flustered when it’s our friend, Roo’s godfather. I’m preoccupied the Eucharistic minister might accidentally touch my teeth. I’m in dread that somehow I’ll still manage to fumble the transfer. I’m self-conscious as all get out, making this Mass somehow all about me.

But sometimes I get just a snatch of the proper perspective, a whisper of the meaning of what we are all doing. And so I was dazzled recently by a passage the kids and I read in Sun Slower, Sun Faster, by Meriol Trevor.

Let me set the scene for you. Cecil (short for Cecilia) and Rickie have traveled back in time to a Mass performed in secrecy during the Elizabethan persecutions. Cecil, raised in a secular home, observes the priest placing the Host in the mouths of people receiving under the constant threat of discovery and death:

“Cecil had a very strange feeling: she felt that this was at the same time the most natural and the most unnatural thing she had ever seen. They were like little birds being fed by their mother: and yet it was grown people who knelt to receive what looked like a paper penny of bread in their tongues. She knew at once why the Mass provoked such love and such hate. Either what they believe is true, or else it is a dreadful delusion, she thought.”

Isn’t that beautiful? I am touched, often, when I pop a chocolate chip or a berry into the delighted mouth of one of my children. There’s just something so trusting about their little sweet mouths, and I’m always transported back to when they were each my own sweet nursling. And that’s what we are, no matter what we pretend, when we receive the Eucharist, and at all other times, too: utterly dependent on the tenderness of God, the “most natural and unnatural” thing in the world.

The Queen, Cassandra Austen, and Me

In the hubbub surrounding the recent passing of the queen, the word I keep encountering in all kinds of places is duty.

It’s a concept I was already mulling over as I finished the excellent Miss Austen by Gill Hornby. The novel, wreathed in calm shot through with an old loneliness, extrapolates from a famous but mysterious incident in the Austen family—that after Jane’s early death, her sister Cassandra was known to destroy correspondence written by her famous sister.

After all, “Cassandra was the executor of her sister’s estate: the keeper of her flame; the protector of her legacy.” Our protagonist is defined by this sense of obligation. Wearily in old age, Cassandra observes to herself, “A single woman should never outlive her usefulness.” Later, she remarks, “It is as if Nature can only throw up one capable person to support each generation. In my family that has always been me. […] Our fortune is to have families who need us. It is our duty, our pleasure. Our very worth!”

Throughout the novel, then, Hornby works to valorize this humble dedication to duty, illustrating the unflashy devotion Cassandra shows her sister, Jane, and their family, even when it requires self-denial. In this way, Cassandra resembles the quieter heroines her sister dreams up: the Elinors, the Fannys, the Annes. This duty is no pitiful delusion, either, for as Cassandra declares silently, “Look at me, Isabella! I have known happiness. Without man or marriage, I found a happiness, true and sublime!” (And this, the cautious reader should note, is not revealed to be a secret anachronistic fling, either, rest assured.)

Struck by tragedy while still a young woman, Cassy resolves, “From the moment the news had been broken to her—badly, insensitively, not as she would have liked or deserved, but no matter—Cassandra had identified that as the occasion to which she must rise.”

By Doyles of London, via Wikipedia

While we can and maybe elsewhere should argue whether the late queen’s duty was one worth always following, even when it pitted her against ex-subjects in the developing world or her own family, certainly we can recognize that in her day to day life, in both its splendor and tedium, Elizabeth unstintingly gave her life to her perceived duty.

And maybe that’s what fascinated so many of us, whether we were avid consumers of royal gossip or simply casual viewers of The Crown: her duty was both like and unlike our own. In her decades of service were jewels and rich brocade, private jets and dignitaries, far from our own sometimes dull-as-dishwater domestic duties. And yet there is something recognizable, something lacking in the lives of so many public figures, who seem committed only to a life of ambition or pleasure. This may be part of Elizabeth’s enduring appeal for many, that, like the costume dramas to which so many of us kinda religious, kinda stay-at-homey ladies find ourselves drawn, in Queen Elizabeth we recognized a woman like ourselves, trying (though sometimes failing) to discern what was right and to do it — rather than just what would make her happy.

We have, of course, the purer, undiluted example of the saints. But for so many of these, the example is often a fierce and alien flame: a blazing martyrdom, a heroic triumph. That’s why we gravitate to the small and attentive dutifulness of figures like St Thérèse of Lisieux, I think, toiling away in their mundane, quiet corners, but find the writ-large duties of the royal materfamilias so fascinating.

Cassandra’s reward for a lifetime of service comes in perusing a last letter of Jane’s, in which Jane deems her the “dearest, tender, watchful sister,” and, with a rare straight-faced earnestness, proclaims, “As to what I owe her, I can only cry over it and pray God to bless her more and yet more.”

It’s all any of us can work for then—a little gratitude, a little recognition, the prayers of those around us, whether we end up as the longest reigning monarch of England or the sister in the shadows. I hope that ultimately Queen Elizabeth found those things for herself—and that I might, too.

The Involuntary Vow of Silence

My days are in no way silent. I have never done a silent retreat. When I go on my mama retreats I find myself chattering to myself all weekend, narrating my actions like I do day in and day out when I’m shadowed by a little tribe of children. It’s a habit I can’t shake, and one I think of when I encounter monastic rules of silence occasionally in novels.

So, it was a big change when, recently, I got the first case of full blown laryngitis I can remember, right on the heels of my first bout of mastitis.

I didn’t see it coming, hadn’t realized I’d even caught the kids’ cold until the mastitis misery lifted, and by then, there was no saving my voice.

Homeschooling, as it turns out, is mostly talking, at least the way I do it, but we were already behind from the colds and mastitis so we limped along. It turned out Pip, now in fourth grade, can do almost all his work independently, but that second-grade Scout can do basically none of hers. It turns out lots of Ambleside Online books can be found on LibriVox or Scribd or YouTube, but very few of Mater Amabilis’s books. So John did a bit and the internet did a bit and some of it just got rolled over till later.

The more important lessons of my involuntary silence for me came outside of school hours, though. When I can’t speak, I listen more to my kids. I enjoy their conversation more when I can’t hustle them along or shape the conversation.

I have to go with the flow a lot more. So much of managing and adjusting to life with four kids has been me raising my voice and delegating, coaching and guiding us all through the grocery store aisles, or unloading the groceries. But when my coach voice failed me, mostly the kids rose to the occasion, even without my minute management.

Being rendered voiceless, more than anything, reminded me of those long mornings with just a couple small kids, when in my exhaustion I’d convince the kids to play doctor, so I could lie limp and sneak-sleeping on the floor of their bedroom as they flitted around me with their plastic stethoscopes, their faux-concerned voices. There was nowhere to go; we were just together, passing the time in each other’s company. As one murmured to the other, as the other inspected my wounded knee and dropped it with a professional cluck of disapproval, I’d doze off.

Nearly a decade ago, it was just me in the winter light of our silent New England apartment, staring in to the inscrutable blue eyes of our firstborn. Now, improbably, I am surrounded by a murmuration of starlings, a murmuration of my own making, the happy chatter and endless complaints of these little people God has called into the world. It is overwhelming and it is beautiful, both. It took being silent to remember that.

2021 in Books

Total: 60. Comparable to last year’s record-breaking year, likely due to the two P’s, pandemic and pregnancy. Woohoo.

Fiction Favorites:

• Crossbows and Crucifixes: A Novel of the Priest Hunters and the Brave Young Men Who Fought Them (Henry Garnett): what a subtitle, right? Despite the hokiness of the title, this was a fun one to read aloud to Pip — genuinely engaging and not overly didactic. I don’t know if I’d recommend it broadly to adults and I doubt I’ll read it aloud to Scout, but I’m glad we found it for him.
• St Patrick’s Summer: A Children’s Adventure Catechism (Marigold Hunt): I promise not to choose only sectarian children’s books!!
• Once Upon a River (Diane Sitterfield): See? A delightful audiobook centered around a pub on the Thames
• None Other Gods (Robert Hugh Benson): OK, another Catholic thing but for adults! An engaging story of one young man’s self-abnegation — funny and challenging by turns.
• The Midnight Library (Matt Haig): just a really fun audiobook
• Very Sincerely Yours (Kerry Winfrey): just likable people falling in love. The sort of thing you want in a rom com but I (for one) can rarely find.

Nonfiction Favorites:

• The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom (Corrie ten Boom). I talk about this one, which everyone except me has read, back here.

Notes & Trends:

I was all over the place; you can see the different threads of aloud-with-kids, passing morning sickness time, pre-pregnancy, etc.

1. Crossbows and Crucifixes: A Novel of the Priest Hunters and the Brave Young Men Who Fought Them (Henry Garnett): aloud for Pippin’s school as a sub for an AO choice.
2. Home (Marilynne Robinson): re-read
3. Beach Read (Emily Henry): recommendation from my sister
4. Burning for Revenge (John Marsden): comfort re-read
5. A Killing Frost (John Marsden): comfort re-read
6. The Dead of Night (John Marsden): comfort re-read
7. Tomorrow When the War Began (John Marsden): comfort re-read
8. Harriet the Spy (Louise Fitzhugh): re-read, aloud to Pip for fun
9. Evvie Drake Starts Over (Linda Holmes)
10. The Switch (Beth O’Leary)
11. Still Life (Louise Penny)
12. The Atlas of Love (Laurie Frankel)
13. Dragons in a Bag (Zetta Elliott): aloud with Pip
14. Barren Among the Fruitful: Navigating Infertility with Hope, Wisdom and Patience (Amanda Hope Haley): loaner from my friend Lindsay
15. The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
16. A Thousand Acres (Jane Smiley)
17. First Frost (Sarah Addison Allen); audiobook
18. Garden Spells (Sarah Addison Allen); audiobook
19. The Light Invisible (Robert Hugh Benson)
20. None Other Gods (Robert Hugh Benson)
21. The Moonlight School (Suzanne Woods Fisher); audiobook
22. The Bride Test (Helen Hoang); audiobook
23. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (Barbara Kingsolver); re-read, audiobook
24. The Modern Cottage Garden: A Fresh Approach to a Classic Style (Greg Loades)
25. Lemons (Melissa Savage); audiobook, recommendation from Pip
26. The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom (Corrie ten Boom)
27. Patron Saint of First Communicants: The Story of Blessed Imelda Lambertini (Mary Fabyan Windeatt); aloud to the kids for school
28. The Thirteenth Tale (Diane Sitterfield); audiobook
29. You Have a Match (Emma Lord)
30. The Vanishing Half (Brit Bennett); audiobook, recommendation by Beca
31. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (Gail Honeyman); audiobook
32. The Midnight Library (Matt Haig); audiobook
33. The Half-Acre Homestead: 46 Years of Building and Gardening (Lloyd Kahn)
34. In the Time of the Butterflies (Julia Alvarez)
35. Mandy (Julie Andrews Edwards); re-read, read aloud to Scout for school
36. St Patrick’s Summer: A Children’s Adventure Catechism (Marigold Hunt); aloud to the kids for school
37. The Long Winter (Laura Ingalls Wilder); aloud to the kids
38. Once Upon a River (Diane Sitterfield); audiobook
39. On to Oregon (Honoré Willsie-Morrow): audiobook with kids
40. The Little Duke (Charlotte Yonge); aloud with Pip for school
41. The Bone Clocks (David Mitchell); audiobook
42. Real Learning Revisted (Elizabeth Foss)
43. An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz); audiobook
44. By the Book (Amanda Sellett); audiobook
45. Even as We Breathe (Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle)
46. The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (Wendell Berry); audiobook
47. Musical Chairs (Amy Poeppel)
48. Green Dolphin Street (Elizabeth Goudge)
49. The Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis); re-read
50. Catastrophic Happiness: Finding Joy in Childhood’s Messy Years (Catherine Newman)
51. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky); re-read
52. Jayber Crow (Wendell Berry); re-read
53. Teaching From Rest: A Homeschooler’s Guide to Unshakeable Peace (Sarah Mackenzie); re-read
54. Anne of the Island (L.M. Montgomery): audiobook, re-read
55. The Life Intended (Kristen Harmel)
56. Anne’s House of Dreams (L.M. Montgomery): audiobook, re-read
57. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee): re-read
58. The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame): re-read, aloud to Pip for school
59. Yours Very Sincerely (Kerry Winfrey): gift from my sister
60. The Guest List (Lucy Foley): audiobook

Incremental

So, what we’ve been doing since radio silence in July:

The answer is the usual thing. I found out I was pregnant and took to my bed like a Victorian lady, as per usual, but with extra trepidation and gratitude after our 2019 loss.

I had just finished my second annual Mama Retreat planning our 2021-22 school year and you know what they say about God and plans. The week we were meant to start (so that we could be done in time to lead study abroad, which we immediately canceled) happened to be Week 6 of pregnancy: When Things Get Real.

Rather than postponing the school year, I faithfully downed a Zofran each morning with breakfast and slogged through our year from my couchside nest, abandoning Spanish and most of music appreciation, neglecting any science that required anything as taxing as standing, vocally resenting the excellent Kate Snow math that required me to (gasp!) use manipulatives and games to make math fun. (But I did do that, at least.)

I got sick, and got sicker, and felt better because that suggested the pregnancy was ok, but also, bleh.

First trimester, homeschooling was all I did. And I mean all. Laundry? Extra credit! Any kind of food prep beyond microwaving a frozen pretzel? Kudos to you, good woman! And it felt like nothing. The best and worst part of my day, maybe two or three hours total for both kids, and the rest of the day just killing time between naps.

But here’s the thing. A trimester of four-mornings-a-week school is actually not nothing, once it accumulates. Ideas were introduced. Facts were learned. I even had fun with some of the readings! They even did fine on their end-of-term exams with J.

It turns out most of the important things are incremental, difficult to measure. I grew eyeballs for this here baby, and I can’t tell you how or when, though I could tell you, less usefully, how often I threw up in the process. Pip learned about the Tudor era and his penmanship gradually became less murderer-y, and, kicking and screaming, he learned how to do double narrations with Scout. Scout built up familiarity with addition facts (just to be betrayed by subtraction) and heard a couple fairy tales she’d somehow missed, and attained the Drinking Game Stage of Literacy.

They also learned important things like what is worth waking Mama from a pregnancy nap, how to make lunch on their own, and gestational development.

I am better now, 20-some-odd weeks in, but not dramatically. I am glad I didn’t wait to feel better but began the difficult slog when we did. It gave structure to our days and distracted me, a bit, from the misery of this process. God willing, this spring our baby boy will join us, with all the associated return to health and energy that usually brings me — not to mention J’s glorious parental leave. Maybe we will do grand projects then, in-depth nature studies where I hobble farther than the backyard park, catch up on those dozen lessons of science and try a bit of family Spanish. Maybe we will just stare at the baby in wonder and get to know him. But incrementally, I trust, we will work our way to where we need to be.

Our school is a combination of Ambleside Online, Mater Amabilis, and my own odd brain.

Interdependence and the Single-Car Family

The road to Kasese

In the upper-middle class suburban sprawl where J and I grew up, most of the kids at least had access to a car through high school. J and I entered marriage with two cars, but pretty immediately we spent six months in an impoverished corner of Uganda with no car at all, so when we got home and J’s dad talked about how much he’d enjoyed driving J’s little Echo, we sold it to him. (I recognize how privileged this is from a global perspective, but then again, our position was hardly unique.)

Boda boda life in Uganda

In over a decade since that initial decision, we’ve kept just one car, even as we upgraded from my gramps’s Accord to a hatchback, from the hatchback to a minivan. When we went to buy our first home, we intentionally chose one in town, close to campus, allowing J to easily walk or ride his bike to work, and with a park out back so we had plenty of at-home entertainment.

Still, here and there over the years the only way we’ve been able to attend certain things is through the generosity of friends who do own two cars. We would have missed parties and out-of-town events without these other people being willing to give one or the other of us a lift. At least once I would have missed work if a neighbor friend hadn’t loaned me back the Accord we’d sold him. I used to feel guilty because our choice means we rely on others, but then I decided that might actually be a strength.

Four wheels and freedom (from others)

There have been seasons, when we were low income in grad school, or when I was laid low by pregnancy, when we relied more heavily on others. Sharing a van now helps us maintain that reliance. Just because the system would be much less tenable if everyone we knew dropped down to one vehicle doesn’t mean it’s foolish (or worse, arrogant) of us to do.

Instead, we who are in the rare situation not to have so much vulnerability thrust upon us should look for opportunities to trust. Maybe your exercise in interdependence, in trusting in God’s Providence, is waiting to borrow kid snow gear from friends instead of just buying it, or trusting you can borrow camping supplies from your neighbor. Maybe you do something that terrifies me, like cohousing, or leaving your doors unlocked as a matter of principle, like friends of ours in New England. Maybe it’s as small as building your weekly menu off a farm share or the close out grocery instead of controlling every aspect and getting huffy when the big box store doesn’t carry that one ingredient, in or out of season.

Of course in twelve years of single cardom we’ve quarreled about whose need for the vehicle trumps the other’s. I have no idea if we’ve saved much money than keeping an old second beater, as we’ve spent comfortable spending more on our house location, really good soles for J’s shoes, and (too) many bikes. Certainly we’ve spent more time in the car together so we can drop someone off. (Probably not the worst thing, actually.) Quite possibly we’ve annoyed a person we’ve asked for a ride by our importunate request.

Inter-reliance runs those risks. The fortresses we build ourselves to protect against ever appearing mendicant prevent those risks, but introduce others: loneliness, a lack of resilience and flexibility when disaster and need do inevitably strike. We can pretend toward independence when everything is going well and never ask for any help, believing we never will need it. Or we can take baby steps toward trusting others with our needs, one rideshare at a time.

Low-Bar Homeschooling: Music Study

A music appreciation study by someone who doesn’t understand music for people who also don’t understand music!! What could go wrong?

For the last two years, I’ve been trying to create my own vaguely Charlotte Mason-esque music study units with varying degrees of success. This one, on Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” is the one that has gone best without running out of steam mid-term. I’m a librarian by trade, and librarians are all about saving effort and sharing their projects, so in this spirit, I offer you what I’ve done.

It helps to think of this piece as a guide in the sense of a tour, as described here, like you enter the lobby of a building and are led through it all, ta da, ta da.

• Vocabulary (For me, the music-naive — I don’t dwell on the terms with the kids, just mention them in passing.) Definitions from this site:
  • Theme: main tune
  • Variation: alterations to the theme or “the tune in different ways— faster, slower, happy, sad, even upside down!”
  • Fugue: a melody with many voices entering at different times, a little like a round.
• Versions of “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” We Watched
  • Trippy cartoon — I led with this to give them some visuals when listening to this piece, which is longer and less narrative than Peter and the Wolf and The Nutcracker, which we’d studied before.
  • Performance. We usually just watch several performances of our piece, one per week, because it seems to help all of us to have something to look at while we listen. I know some families listen while driving but my kids are usually already looking at books or chattering, so this works better for us.
  • Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra — empowering because kids! Filmed during lockdown, so you really see how the pieces fit together as they were all filmed separately.
  • Royal Philharmonic — also filmed during lockdown.
  • Really lengthy but helpful recording from the New York Philharmonic — lots of good explanations (like using the “Happy Birthday” to explain variations) and some funny parts. There are also interactive features.
  • Truly insane rip-off Muppet tour — ok, so my girls loved this, but I’m pretty sure it would fall under Charlotte Mason definitions of “twaddle.” Still, it taught me that a spit valve just has water from respiration (probably still spitty but STILL), which is a huge relief and something I wish I knew earlier so I wouldn’t have spent so many years haunted by the idea of spit valves.
• Purcell’s Original
  • Scene from 2005 Pride and Prejudice featuring Purcell’s original rondeau, which Britten wrote his variations around. My early music expert brother-in-law pointed out the instrumentation elsewhere in this movie doesn’t reflect historical reality (I guess they’d still be playing harpischords rather than piano fortes? IDK), but I think it still gives a taste of the stripped-down look at the smaller piece of music that informs Britten’s larger piece. (And I love to show movie clips featuring our music selection because it really emphasizes how music literacy plays into other media and art forms — like the references to Peter and the Wolf in A Christmas Story. You can ask, “What does knowing this music tell you about this scene?”)
  • You can also see Purcell’s original performed as Purcell would have composed it in this clip.

What I don’t do in music study:

• the aforementioned car listening
• worksheets of any kind
• sitting or lying still just listening, because no one is that good at concentrating among my littles and I for one would fall asleep

How has music study looked in your family?

Luxury and Freedom in Travel

We spent a full third of 2019 traveling with our children on trips mundane and ambitious alike, short jaunts and long hauls, with extended family and on our own.

Along the way I learned many things — how to rig an iPad video monitor for hotel naptime; how to hang a rubber laundry line almost anywhere; how to pack incredibly lightly for a family of five (and more importantly, be mostly calm and nice while I do it). But I also learned about myself, and one of the things I learned is that I really don’t much like to be pampered.