Summer '08

As usual the summer went by all too quickly, and for us it's effectively over this week. Students are back and classes are starting at WFU and HPU, which means that Stratford School had better get its act together too. But we had a good summer, as you'll see from the following recap.

In MAY we wound up the semester with the usual flurry of activity, then headed up to Chicago and Grand Rapids for Memorial Day weekend. Had a good time with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins (both human and canine).



JUNE arrived, and with it swimming pool season and Medieval Camp. This year's camp theme was Viking Invasion. As a result we had an enrollment of 17 boys and 1 girl. A very high-energy group! But they were very enthusiastic about all things Viking. Spear-throwing, archery, and other forms of faux violence were predictably popular. But the little Vikings were also fascinated by Beowulf and Norse mythology. Professor Head Viking was very tired by the end of the week!




In JULY Dagfari went to a couple of camps not taught by his parents. DVD copies of this year's Stars of the Silver Screen production, Illinois Johnson and the Pirates of the Prairie, are available on request. We also had our dog cousins visit us, as the brave Aunt Ann and Uncle Rich drove down from Chicago with the pooches (who were actually very well-behaved). So Dagfari had a week of dog training and woodworking camp, and we now have two new bookcases in the living room!

After Simon and Donovan left, Dagfari started lobbying for his own kitten (the four family cats apparently not being cute and cuddly enough for him). I had no intention of adding to the feline family immediately. But since the Humane Society is just down the street, D and I figured there was no harm in stopping by one Saturday morning, just to look.... with the result that kitten siblings Avril and Oliver joined our family the next week.

They are as cute and cuddly as anyone could wish, and they both sleep with D on his top bunk. So we now have six cats. Good thing we don't have a bigger house and yard, or we'd end up like this lady.

Anyway, here are a few cute kitten pics. Oliver is the black/white one, and Avril is the tabby.

AUGUST found us heading north-- way north-- to Isle La Motte, Vermont. We spent a week there with extended family, enjoying Lake Champlain (no colder than Lake Mich) and exploring and visiting friends in the area. We highly recommend Vermont as a vacation spot, the only drawback being that it takes forever to drive there.

We especially enjoyed Shelburne Museum, which combines a restored 19th century town with an excellent small art museum. An impressive Mary Cassat exhibit was there when we visited, which Dagfari liked very much. We also paid another visit to the small museum and gift shop devoted to Wilson A. "Snowflake" Bentley, of award-winning children's book fame.

As soon as we got home, the beginning-of-semester events started to fill our calendar. Summer is over; our second year of Stratford School is about to begin. The first big event is the 2008 BookMarks book festival, for which ProfDad and I are members of the planning committee, and Dagfari is a de facto member, since he comes along to all the meetings (fortunately two of his best homeschool pals are there too). We're all looking forward to meeting some interesting authors and reading some great books!

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.