I read the novel within the last year and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. The new PBS film is delightful, capturing the heroine's overwrought imagination quite well. I loved it.
Home Schooling Dream vs. Reality Our initial home schooling dream had the kids studying Latin and Greek, speaking German fluently, finished with Calculus and starting college courses by the time they were 14, and running their own successful business selling artisan cheese made from the milk of our goat herd. Also, they would never watch TV or play video games. Then the kids were born. It turns out that, in the interest of maintaining my sanity, I’m more of a Relaxed Home Schooler. This is also why I’m a Relaxed Housekeeper. We didn’t even teach the kids German, which both Jon and I speak fluently, although I maintain that the main reason for this is not laziness but our reluctance to give up our secret language. The kids are on track to do Calculus before they start college at or near 18. We never got the goats, although we have plans to get some when we return to the US, and we did have chickens for a long time. The chickens laid eggs for us, but we didn’t sell them. We just ...
It's been interesting learning to balance Vacation Life with Regular Life. Normally when you visit a place, you're there for only a short time, so you pack in as much stuff as possible. For us, that means visiting historical sights and museums, walking miles and miles around a city, eating out, etc. Our Vacation Life speed is actually pretty relaxed, as we've learned that with our large family, it's better to lower expectations than to push ourselves too hard and end up exhausted, cranky, and ready to kill each other. I'm a big fan of lowering expectations! But even with our comparatively relaxed Vacation Speed, we still get tired and it can be quite expensive. It's not a sustainable way to live for more than a few days at a time. So for our Home School Field Trip, we balance the Travel/Sight-Seeing/Culture Days with days of Regular Life. Gittin' history at Scarborough Castle: Until fairly recently, a Regular Life day consisted of the kids doing sch...
This is the first movie I've seen with Harrison Ford in it since I met him . (Yes! I met him! How cool is that? We did not have a meaningful conversation or anything, but it was still pretty neat. And my kids' got his signature. Han Solo's signature! Sorry to all of you who've heard enough about this already.) This movie totally sucked me in. I was tense pretty much the whole time, even during the opening credits, which is a montage of black and white surveillance photos of main character, Jack, and his family. (I also felt a little uncomfortable watching these creepy photos and realizing that I was doing the same thing when I took pictures of him at our little airport here. I'm not planning to use them for some evil purpose, but wouldn't it be weird if everybody wanted to take pictures of you? Weird and creepy.) Yeah, so like I said, it totally sucked me in. For an action movie, it was surprisingly believable, with a minimum of "yeah, right" m...
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