10 Years

Dagfari celebrated a birthday this week, the big one-oh. Celebrations were fairly subdued this year, since we're all tired out from a busy few weeks. I took the day off, so that we could stay home and relax. D enjoyed his birthday presents, including many books, an artist's desk (I'm hoping this will keep the art projects in his bedroom, rather than all over the living room floor!) and a tiger puppet who can play Hobbes when he and his partner in crime make Calvin & Hobbes videos.

There was also a birthday cake inpired by Jackson Pollock.

Asked to recount memories of his first decade, here's what D came up with:

• Wailing in the church nursery until the keepers got Mom out of the service


• Playing trains with Dad while Mom was at work and being a train engineer in a cardboard engine for Halloween


• Giving a tour of the house to visiting Grandpa and Grandma Bos, and being told not to linger on the cat beds because of Grandpa's allergies (this was upsetting until Mom distracted him with his Fisher Price kitchen) (Mom does not remember this incident at all)


• Switching interests from trains to dinosaurs after seeing a dinosaur book at Target (this would have been age 3)


• Creating a Walking With Dinosaurs type show for home video and getting frustrated with Mom's amateurish camera work


• End-of-year program at Montessori preschool, during which D refused to go on stage


• 4th birthday party, with plastic dinosaurs on cake


• Starting JrK at Summit School and meeting friends Dylan and Katie


• Transition from dinosaurs to mythical beasts, which made for some confusion among teachers and friends, who couldn't discern between dinosaur and dragon drawings


• Learning lots of fascinating things at school, like life cycle of Monarch butterfly


• Being William Brewster in class reenactment of Pilgrim voyage


• Demanding that Mom read the first Harry Potter book shortly after 5th birthday; then insisting on her reading all 5 existing books over the summer, even though she found them too scary


• Having a crazy teacher in first grade


• Being Thomas Jefferson for Famous Americans Day


• Becoming interested in Shakespeare and getting a Shakespearean costume for Christmas from Grandma Mulder


• Starting second grade and deciding that his main goal for his education was to avoid math as much as possible (poor Mrs. Standerfer had to disabuse him of this notion)


• Beginning social studies class and becoming fascinated with different cultures


• Native American Day, favorite part of which was writing Wise Eagle story


• Helping Mom and Dad with Medieval Camp in the summer


• Starting third grade and learning Stoeri Language


• Being Prince Percy in the third grade play


• Studying vampire bats and writing the Bloody Bat Bulletin


• Deciding to start homeschooling after third grade


• Becoming interested in modern art after taking class at Sawtooth Center


• Visiting New York City and becoming extremely inspired by MOMA and especially the Metropolitan Museum of Art


• Coming home and turning the house into an art museum


• His latest interest: museum design


• 10th birthday: sleeping in... until 6:45 a.m.

Clearly it's been an eventful ten years. Who knows what Dagfari will do in the next decade? Stay tuned...

Field Trip: Manhattan

We were blogless in February, mostly because there wasn't much to write about, other than lingering cold viruses and unpleasant weather. But March got off to a more interesting start last week, as we spent two days of ProfDad's spring break in New York City. Dagfari is still very much into modern art, so he was itching to see MOMA and the Met . Fortunately for us, Skybus now flies out of Greensboro, so we flew into "New York" (actually Newburgh) for under $100 each.

Dagfari has promised to post his own account of our trip, but suffice it to say that we saw a lot of art and did a lot of walking. D loved it all. His only disappointment was being forced to admit that it is not humanly possible to see all of the Met in one day!

We also managed to squeeze in a visit to FAO Schwarz , which D found nearly as interesting as the art.

Snow Days

OK, so there is one undeniable disadvantage to homeschooling: no snow days. We had one of our periodic ice/snow storms last week, and all of the county schools, including Dagfari's alma mater, were closed. But not SGS! In fact, since my campus was shut down for the day, we had extra time for lessons!

Granted, one of these lessons involved sledding down the big hill across the street, and observing how one's velocity is affected by the amount of grass and mud poking through one's sled trail (this is about as far into physics as I can go!).

Our winter term is off to a somewhat creaky start, as always seems to be the case in January. It's never as easy to get motivated for the spring semester as it is in the fall. We're tired out from Christmas travel and festivities; the weather is nasty; colds and flu are going around. A snow day or MLK weekend seems to put us right back into vacation mode, from which it's hard to drag ourselves back out. But classes have started at ProfDad's and my colleges now, and Dagfari's various "extracurricular" classes are starting up. So we're getting back into the swing of things.

D is taking another acting/improv class, a homeschool drama class (we hope), and he has started ballet class. He's really into the ballet, and has taken to dancing around the house and making up his own ballets. Last night he did one inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights , which was interesting, to say the least.

Dagfari's current reading list:

• The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett
• The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
• The View from Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg
• Shakespeare After All by Marjorie Garber
  

Christmas Eve

Hello from snowy Michigan! Dagfari got back to his viking roots this morning, playing in the aftermath of yesterday's big snowstorm at Grandma's house. Presents tonight, more presents tomorrow, and lots of snow and cousins to play with. Life doesn't get much better than this when you're nine years old.

Christmas Preparations

Lots of holiday preparations going on at SGS this week. The Christmas tree is up and decorated, and E.B., the little cat, is having fun whacking at ornaments and drinking out of the tree stand. We're reading Dickens's Christmas Carol for our literature study this week. My favorite CC trivia so far: in Dickens's early drafts, Tiny Tim was called Tiny Fred, after one of Dickens's own siblings. Dagfari finds this quite amusing, since our Fred is a very chubby guinea pig. I fear D may be inspired to film a piggie version of CC!.

Lost Colonies and Nutcrackers

Field trip weekend at SGS! Dagfari and I accompanied ProfDad and some of his Honors history students to the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, where we saw the Lost Colony exhibit. Most impressive for D were the 70 John White watercolors and Theodor de Bry engravings on loan from the British Museum. I found White's (completely fanciful) paintings of ancient Picts and Britons especially interesting, since I'd never seen them before, and since we're reading up on ancient Scotland for our Macbeth study.


White's Pict has no basis in historical fact, but he puts modern tattoo enthusiasts to shame! White supposedly included these pictures in his album on the Algonquin to show his British audience that their ancestors were even less civilized than the North American "savages". Whatever you make of his premise, the pictures are fascinating.

On Sunday night D and I attended NCSA's production of the Nutcracker (poor ProfDad had to work). Tchaikovsky's holiday confection is wonderful performed by young, talented, and energetic NCSA students. Dagfari staged his own version next to our Christmas tree when we got home. Unfortunately he only got to do the first half, before his philistine parents insisted on going to bed. He was most indignant, but the suffering is probably good for his art.

November

It's been a busy month here at SGS. A few of the highlights:

• Dagfari finished his drama class with a performance of a very short play, written by the kids in the class, and very loosely based on Fiddler on the Roof. The community theater group which sponsored the class was doing FotR this fall, so we got tickets to the real performance too. A decent performance, with some good singing talent... and a Cossack sheriff played by what looked and sounded like Barney Fife's first cousin :). D is now taking another acting class, this one in W-S, with a Commedia dell'Arte theme. It seems to involve a lot of improv and boys being silly, so of course he's having a good time.
  
• D's art class has also finished up for the semester. He had a really good instructor and has been inspired to do a lot of drawing and painting recently. His current interest is the Surrealist movement, especially Dali and Rene Magritte.
  
• We're winding up our study of Beowulf with a foray into Monster Theory. D is greatly enjoying this, as you can imagine. We won't bother seeing the new Beowulf movie, however, since my favorite Anglo-Saxon expert says it's not very good. Next up in literary studies: Macbeth, King James, and witchcraft in 17th century Britain.
  
• History studies have been eclectic this month. We've done some research on prehistoric humans (I guess this is technically anthropology), and have also dabbled in study of the Crusades. Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame, has a good series out on video.
  
• I still want D to start piano lessons soon, but the piano repair person stopped answering my emails after I told her the make (Remington) and condition of our piano. Apparently the Remington is kind of the Yugo of pianos. So I guess we got what we paid for there (it was free). From a musician's standpoint, we should probably chop it up for firewood. But since it's here and it sort of works, we'll use it for beginner lessons anyway.
  
• Math is still done infrequently and under protest, but D has decided that his new pre-algebra workbook is much better than the multiplication/long division he had been doing.
  
• Dagfari's current reading list:
• Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann. I'm reading this aloud as our bedtime book. It's about a flock of intelligent sheep who try to solve the mystery of who killed their shepherd. Very entertaining, not really a kids' book per se.
• Valley of Secrets by Charmian Hussey. I haven't read this one, but D says its good. The cover says it's an "ecological adventure fantasy".
• Macbeth by You-Know-Who (no, not Voldemort!). A re-read, but always good. The American Shakespeare Theatre is doing a production this winter.
  
• Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. D just started this. He says it's good, although it's got the ubiquitous Dead Mother theme. This doesn't bother D at all, though. Indeed, he claims that killing off, or at least dispensing with, the main character's mother is necessary for a good kids' book. Agree or disagree?
• Cats in Ancient Egypt by someone whose name I can't remember. This is research for a proposed documentary on Cats In History. If this project comes to fruition, we'll at least have plenty of actors.