Spring-tide

Anonymous. c. 1300
The original poem and a translation is here

3. Spring-tide

Early spring is come with love in its turn,
With blossom and with birds' song,
That all this bliss brings;
Daisies in the valleys,
Sweet notes of nightingales,
Each fowl sings its song;

The thrush chides them all,
Gone is their winter woe,
When woodruff blooms;
Marvellously many fowls sing,
And whistle so in their happiness,
That all the wood rings.

The rose clothes herself in red,
The leaves on the light-colored wood
All grow all with a will;
The moon sends forth her light,
The lily is lovely to see,
The fennel and the thyme;
The wild drakes woo,
Males make their mates merry;
Like a stream that still flows,
The moody man moans; many of them do
It seems that I am one of them
Because of love that went wrong.

The moon sends forth her light,
So does the bright, lovely sun.
When birds sing lustily;
Dew makes the slopes soggy,
Lovers with their secret tales
Give their decisions;
Worms woo under the dirt,
Women grow so proud,
So it would seem,
If I can't have the will of one,
I'll forego this wealth of joy
And be banished to the woods.

A Job Well Done . . .

I'm sometimes struck with how much great minds think alike. Often I find parallels between C.S. Lewis and Charlotte Mason. And today I heard Mister Rogers say something that I've read before in Charlotte Mason's writings.

Before I share the quote, let me set the scene. Cornflake S. Pecially in the Land of Make-Believe is over-worked and is starting to make errors in his production. After getting back to Mister Roger's Place, Mister Rogers talked a little about that. Here's the quote:

"No matter what you do, you can feel so much better about it if you do it well.
~ Mister Rogers

And this is from pg 168 of Ourselves:

"We're all paid workers in some sense, and none of us are excused from the obligation of integrity in the work we do. School children and young college students are paid in two ways: the cost of their schooling, and the trust of their parents and teachers. There's another 'employer' they're working for, too. This employer might seem lenient at the time, but he'll harass the poor worker with a heavy penalty of guilt later. That employer is--yourself. Every person owes integrity to himself as much as to others. When we don't produce thorough, timely work done well, it's we ourselves who suffer the most in the end."
~ Charlotte Mason (modern paraphrase version)

Poem Paraphrase: This World's Joy

I'm a little behind; I still need to do Spring-Tide and Blow, Northern Wind. But today's looked fairly straightforward, so I went ahead and did it.

5. This World's Joy
Anonymous. c. 1300
(read the original here)

Winter wakens all my care,
Now these leaves wax bare;
Often I sigh and mourn sorely
When it comes to my mind
Of this world's joy, how it amounts to nothing.

Now it's here, and now it's not,
as though it had never been, I wist;
Many man say it, and so it is:
Everything ends except God's will:
We shall all die, though none of us us like it.

All that was around me grew green,
But now it all fades
Jesus, help us remember that fact
And shield us from hell!
ForI know not where I shall end up, nor how long I shall dwell here.

Alison

I'm paraphrasing Ambleside Online's Year 7 Medieval Poems because it's the only way I can grasp them. Here's the second one. The poem in its original Ye Olde English is here. This is very different from the Elvis Costello version of Alison that I'm familiar with.

2 Alison

Between March and April
When new growth begins to spring
The little bird has her way
And sings in her own language
I live with yearning in love
For the most beautiful of all things
She may bring me bliss
I am her devoted servant
And I've taken advantage of a lucky break
I'll wager that it's sent from heaven
My love has left all other women
And alighted on Alison

The color of her hair is fair
Her brow is brown, her eyes black
With a loving look she laughs at me
She's well-made, with a small waist
If she doesn't decide to take me
As her own mate
I'll lose my desire to live
And wish I were dead
And I've taken advantage of a lucky break
I'll wager that it's sent from heaven
My love has left all other women
And alighted on Alison

At night I toss and turn
That's why I grow so pale
Lady, because of you
I've developed this yearning
In all the world there's no man wise enough
To tell all of her bounty
Her neck is whiter than the swan
She's the prettiest maiden in town
And I've taken advantage of a lucky break
I'll wager that it's sent from heaven
My love has left all other women
And alighted on Alison

I'm worn out with vigils from wooing
Like water in a stagnant pool
Someone else might steal my mate
I've been distressed for a long time
Yet it's better to endure distress for a while
Than to mourn forevermore
Prettiest thing under any dress
Listen to my song
And I've taken advantage of a lucky break
I'll wager that it's sent from heaven
My love has left all other women
And alighted on Alison

Toddlers, TV, Books, Composition Notebooks

I've always thought it was interesting to note when my kids first were upset by something they saw on TV, and what it was. Miss M has recently started watching the old Lassie VHS tapes I taped long ago when Tim was her age. And today she's watching it (she missed her nap and I'd rather keep her up until bedtime than have her take a late nap and be up til 2am!) She came up to me and said, 'I don't like this, I want to watch Honkey Donkey.' It turns out she was disturbed by the episode where the mother is trapped in her truck after a minor accident. Lassie comes to the rescue, of course, but I guess she didn't like seeing her unable to get out, or something.

When Tim was little, he didn't like an episode where some robbers trap Lassie in a shed and threaten Timmy. He used to run out of the room when that part came on. And Kahoa used to be scared of a Donut Man video because the puppets freaked him out. I don't think Keola was ever bothered by anything.

I always think that when they see something that bothers them, it shows that they've reached a certain level of understanding--the ability to imagine what they see on the screen, and the attention span and comprehension to follow a storyline and make some kind of sense of it.

Yes, we do read books, too! LOL! Miss M has been into Beatrix Potter's Tale of Two Bad Mice lately, she reads it to me now. And today I bought her a miniature composition notebook because she wanted a school book like her brothers' copywork books. She's been having me write things down for her, most of them don't make sense, they're just words assembled in a Jabberwocky kind of order that she thinks makes a sentence. One page says, 'It's about my Dad has ruined a bake someday.' She made me write a few pages and then she read it to me very dramatically as if it was a story: 'God has ruined the end of the day. God and Mary and they said, Go away! And that's the end of that.'

And then she turned to me and said, 'Now, you narrate.'

Fall Room and Shelf

The shelf above the doorway is finished and loaded up!

We put fall colors on the couch and chair, too. We decorate with sheet sets - the bottom fitted sheets covers the cushion of the futon, the top flat sheet makes a cover for the rocking chair, and a pillowcase covers the footstool. This sheet set is a Tshirt knit the color of pumpkin pie. I buy print fabrics to make pillow covers for the futon. For Christmas, we have a red sheet set - you can see the rocking chair in its red cover here.

Here's the futon with a napping toddler on it.

Armor from PVC Pipes

Pam asked about the chainmail that the kitten slept on... (this post, if you're wondering)

The rings were cut from 3/4" PVC pipe using a pair of ratcheting PVC cutters. We tried using a high-psi 1/2" pipe, too--it works well for small pieces (like mail vambraces) but it takes a lot longer because you need so many more rings.

There are instructions for how to weave the rings together on the net. We used the ones at ArtofChainmail.com. About half the rings are split so they can snap on; the rest are left closed. You can glue the split rings together again after they've been woven, to make it stronger, but we didn't glue them and it still stays together fairly well (just drops a ring now and then).

A mail-shirt (or hauberk) can be constructed several ways. The method we used isn't the most historical, but it's the easiest, especially when you're working with thick PVC rings.


It's woven in eight separate pieces: trunk, shoulders, two sleeves, and four skirt pieces. The trunk is a large cylinder (a flat piece of mail with two edges connected); the shoulders are a flat piece with a squareish hole in the middle for the neck; the sleeves are smaller flat pieces; and the skirt pieces are long flat pieces. Two edges of the shoulder-piece connect to the front and back of the trunk, and the other two edges connect to an edge of a sleeve. The skirt pieces (which are optional, and just add length) connect to the bottom edge of the trunk.

You'll end up with sleeves that hang over the arms but aren't connected underneath (as in the picture). They can be connected, but it limits mobility more; we've tried it both ways. (There will also be gaps at the armpits; I don't know of any way to close those. It would be almost impossible to move if you did.)

After the pieces of the suit are connected, you'll want to make a split in the front of the neck (as in the picture) so it can be pulled on something like a T-shirt. "Something like" because it's stiff and weighs 10-20 pounds--we usually need a helper to get it on. Taking it off is easier, if you make the neck-hole big enough--you just slip out of the shoulders, let it drop to the floor, and step out of it.

We painted the suit after it was all put together using a metallic spraypaint. This seems to work well, although you have to use more than one coat: paint all the visible surfaces, shake the suit to turn the rings, paint again, and repeat as necessary. The site whence we got the idea suggests that you paint the rings first and then assemble them. We've not tried this, but I expect this method scratches the paint a lot. If I were to do it again I might weave the separate pieces of the hauberk, paint them while they're flat, and then put them together.

Right now I'm working on adding a gold dagged edge to my suit. I'll try to get some pictures up when it's finished.


Some more links:
The site that got us started
More mail weaves (some of these are too tight to do with PVC)
My page on our chainmail

More Dancing

She picked out the outfit herself. :)

Still Dancing

Miss M still loves to dance - whether the steps bear some ballet or Riverdance influences depends on which tape she watched last. Tonight, it was Riverdance, complete with kicks and leaps, but with a few ballet twirls thrown in. The right music, a frilly dress, an attentive audience, and she's off!

Girls will be girls

This is what happens when boys with little sisters leave their chain mail laying around . . .

The armor is for a project the boys have been busy with (the project that's kept Tim too busy to post). They made it from PVC pipes and spray painted it. It looks much more impressive when it's on and not being used as a cozy little bed for a Beanie Kitty.