J Went to a Christmas Party . . .

J went to a Christmas party this evening. When he came home, he described the setting and the events of the party with us. Later he repeated his description with Tim when he came home from another outing: "They had a million figurines . . ."

L cut in -- "Earlier you said a hundred. Charlotte Mason herself says, 'Don't exaggerate' in Ourselves."

I read that with him last year; I didn't know he still remembered! And I didn't know she carried so much weight with him!

Good King Wenceslas

We taped this years ago from the Family Channel (which I think became PAX). It's our favorite holiday movie; we watch it every year. I wish they'd release it on DVD, but it's not even currently available on VHS.

Wenceslas (played by Jonathan Brandis) is the crown prince, but his father the king is dead and his wicked stepmother (Stefanie Powers) wants her own son to be king. Wenceslas has been raised Christian, and the stepmother is trying to make the uneducated citizens hate him by burning churches, raising taxes, and passing cruel laws forbidding the people from hunting the royal game, chopping the royal trees for firewood, etc. She arranged for Wenceslas to marry a German princess for her money, then she plans to kill both the princess and Wenceslas.

The Queen and her son Boleslav (Oliver Milburn)

The movie is about Wenceslas fighting to free his people from the evil Queen, his stepmother, in the name of Christianity, and winning the love of the German princess in the process.

Wenceslas and the princess Joanna (Charlotte Chatton)

I don't think it's very factual, but it's a great story. Actually, according to this site, it's not too far off the mark. I really wish it would be released for purchase. It's listed at imdb.com, but the cover shows the wrong movie. Amazon.com lists it, but says it's unavailable - however, it looks like it was released at one time. (Even if this release was dubbed into German. Tim's Note: I also have a high opinion of this movie. It has its weaknesses (inauthentic swordplay, for instance, but then what movie doesn't fail there?) but after watching it every year for nearly ten years I still love it.)

Books Finished in November

Some of my favorite Other Bloggers have posted their lists, and this month I actually finished a couple of books, so I have something to post!

I finished The Mouse and His Child for the Stacks Challenge. I'm still working on Just David--I've had other things to do and haven't gotten to it in a week.

And Tim and I finished Mozart by Marcia Davenport. Now we feel like we know Mozart, and we added a couple of CD's to our collection because sometimes the author would talk about a particular thing he wrote, or the circumstances surrounding it, and we'd have to hear the work she was talking about. We really did need to add to our Mozart collection--all we had were some piano pieces he wrote, and I've only just discovered that it's his chamber music I really like.

The book does mention some indiscretions of some characters, so it needs editing if a student is going to be reading it. I read most of it aloud, so I was able to edit on the fly.

We've started The Christmas Mystery by Jostein Gaarder. I finally bought a copy last January and determined to read it this year, and I didn't forget on Dec 1.

I'm also reading Parents and Children, volume 2 of Charlotte Mason's series. I'm going through that slowly and don't expect to finish before March.

The OEDILF

The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form

"It is an expression of passion for the English language with each limerick representing a love letter addressed to a single word."

A dictionary's fun to read through,
But for this that's especially true:
Though it isn't complete,
What is there is a treat--
(Contributions acceptable, too.)

(But unfortunately not all the entries are child-friendly. Caveat emptor.)

Happy Birthday Jack!

C.S. Lewis was born 108 years ago today, November 29, 1898.

"Those of us who have been true
readers all our life seldom realize
fully the enormous extension of
our being which we owe to authors."

- from An Experiment in Criticism

The Unschooling Conspiracy

Spunky posted on her blog - lately the media has been "creating a little negative buzz about unschooling (and by inference homeschooling) as a legitimate educational choice for parents. . . . Going after a homeschooling subgroup creates a path to further limit all homeschoolers."

We don't unschool, but it might be my first choice if we weren't Charlotte Mason homeschoolers. Anyone who thinks unschooling doesn't work hasn't read Homeschooling for Excellence by David and Micki Colfax. They unschooled their four sons and three of them went on to Harvard.

Pictures from today

Golden-crowned kinglet. It's hard to tell here, but she's a tiny little bird--less than four inches long. She also has a bright yellow stripe atop her head that isn't visible in the picture.

Sycamores and barns with the old farmhouse at the end of the street.

Our Thanksgiving

I always enjoy reading how others spent their day and what recipes are traditional for them, so I thought I'd post about our day. We had a quiet Thanksgiving, we didn't have family to visit, and our best friends were out of town, so it was just us - which is fine, Mr. B is rarely home, so a day to just be together is always special. He played Scrabble with the boys, we had WDAV playing (classical internet radio), and Miss M made a pest of herself trying to get into everything by pulling up a chair so she could reach the counter while I was trying to work in the kitchen.

In the evening we usually watch a Thanksgiving video - we have a few things we taped off TV years ago - The Mouse on the Mayflower cartoon, a cartoon about William Bradford, a 1950's movie called Plymouth Adventure with Spencer Tracy, and a special from the Discovery channel about wild turkeys. I like to read something like Margaret Pumphrey's Stories of the Pilgrims during the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, but it didn't happen this year.

I did not stay on my raw diet. I planned beforehand to allow myself some turkey (plain, not even salt on it), stuffing-flavored rice (gluten-free), and a plain baked organic sweet potato, and I stuck to my plan.

For the rest of the family, I made everything traditionally. I'm a simple cook, we don't have gourmet tastes, so there's nothing particularly unusual about any of our recipes. Most of them are like what my mother always made. Turkey, simple bread stuffing (from the Better Homes and gardens Cookbook, my mother says), canned sweet potatoes with a little bit of margarine and drizzled with just a little maple syrup, mashed potatoes (dairy-free; I use rice milk), gravy from a jar (almost fat free!) and canned jellied cranberry sauce. There was also apple cider, frozen microwaved corn, baby carrots with margarine and tarragon, frozen green beans which I heated in the microwave and added grilled onions, a dark green salad, bread, and pies for dessert - pumpkin and apple bought frozen and baked the day before, served with Cool Whip (Lite).

I forgot to make biscuits the day before and realized I wouldn't have the oven to bake them on Thanksgiving day, so I went online and found a recipe for a Thanksgiving Bread that goes in the bread machine. My family liked it, so it's going to become our new Thanksgiving tradition. I made a few alterations because I didn't have corn meal, sage or minced dried onions, and I used partly whole wheat flour. Here's the recipe I used with my alterations:

1 cup warm water
1 egg
1 Tablespoon softened margarine
2 Tablespoons brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/3 cup cornbread mix
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups unbleached flour
2 teaspoons dried onion powder
1 1/2 teaspoons celery seed
1 teaspoon poultry seasoning
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) active dry yeast

Place everything in the bread machine in the order listed. Use basic white bread setting, 1 1/2 pound loaf size.

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And here's my gluten-free substitute for stuffing. It's the same recipe I've always used for bread stuffing, but with rice instead of bread. Miss M and J love it. They won't even eat bread stuffing any more. Too bad, since I made a huge batch of bread stuffing, and now Tim's the only one who will eat it. I'm making a second batch of rice stuffing today, and doubling the recipe. It won't fit in the rice cooker, so I've got it in the crock pot. I expect it will take 6-8 hours.

Stuffing Rice

Saute:
1 minced onion
1/4 c margarine

Add:
2 teaspoons poultry seasoning
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Throw in the rice cooker with:
1 1/2 cups brown rice
4 cups vegetable broth

This was done well before the turkey, so it warmed in the rice cooker for about an hour, which might have made it even better. This was the only part of the meal that Miss M went for in a big way. She wouldn't touch the bread stuffing.

This is the same recipe I use for bread stuffing - except that I use a loaf of whole wheat bread, toasted and cut into cubes, instead of rice, and less chicken broth.

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I also found an online site that praised the benefits of roasting a turkey frozen instead of defrosting it first. My turkey was already half thawed, but next year I'm just going to leave it in the freezer. There's no thawing raw juice to leak, and the white meat gets less dry because it's still thawing while the dark meat is baking.

Beware: Homeschoolers are a Threat!

The homeschool movement is growing. A large percentage of homeschoolers aren't teaching evolutionary science. Homeschool graduates are going to college. And not everyone is happy about that. In fact, this article makes it sound like some are alarmed and appalled. What is this world coming to when you can't guarantee 100 percent compliance to the accepted view of mainstream "truth"?

This article made me laugh. I pulled out a few quotes; the way they were arranged in the article really brought home the point that it's all about indoctrination, not education.


For these parents, religious instruction and science are often intertwined. This bothers Brian Alters of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who studies the changing face of science education in the US. He is appalled by some home-schooling textbooks, especially those on biology that claim they have scientific reasons for rejecting evolution. "They have gross scientific inaccuracies in them," he says. "They would not be allowed in any public school in the US, and yet these are the books primarily featured in home-schooling bookstores."

[I agree that some Christian science texts have inaccuracies. But so do public school texts. The texts that homeschoolers use would never be allowed in public schools - but not because they're more inaccurate than public school texts. It's because they don't teach the right dogma.]


"Poll after poll shows that approximately one out of two people in America reject evolution. They think the scientists, teachers and textbooks are wrong," he says. An even higher proportion of home-schooling parents may reject evolution, Alters thinks. "And they're going to be teaching science?"

[Scary, isn't it?]


However, not all home-school parents have a religious agenda. "There are probably some wonderful home-school parents, some of whom may be evolutionary biologists themselves. But I have a feeling after talking to a lot of home-schoolers that this is the minority," says Alters. Indeed, evangelical Christians do dominate the home-school movement. "It's disconcerting, to say the least," he says.

[I guess only non-religious evolutionary biologists should be granted the right to teach children.]

By 2004, Patrick Henry College (which caters to graduated homeschoolers) students held seven out of 100 internships in the White House, a number even more striking when one considers that only 240 students were enrolled in the entire college. Last year, two PHC graduates worked in the White House, six worked for members of Congress and eight for federal agencies, including two for the FBI. "Patrick Henry is something to worry about because these kids end up in the administration."

I found this article here by accident while I was cruising new blogs.

Overheard

Miss M was playing with a stuffed Bambi - a rare treat, since it's usually kept up. They must have been playing house, and Bambi was The Baby. First was a pathetic, pleading whine: "Pleeease, Mama, can I have milk outside? Please?" And then the Mommy, in a very fierce voice: "NO, Bambi! You can't have milk outside! People will be mad!" Followed by whimpering and more pleading from Bambi.

I've been explaining to Miss M that people don't like to see a big girl like her nursing, so we only nurse in private. It's interesting seeing how this concept might look to her three-year-old mind, and from the two different perspectives of the sad, pitiful nursling, and the non-yielding authority who controls the supply.