Nursing Blankets

I'm not quite sure how to post this, so I'll post a link to the picture directly from its location on somebody's blog.

Goethe in Sicily

More quotes from Italian Journey.

"Today we were shown Prince Torremuzza's collection of coins. I went there almost reluctantly. I understand too little about this field, and a merely inquisitive tourist is the bane of the true connoisseur. But, after all, one has to begin somewhere . . ."

This relates to a Prince collecting money for a charity:
"'If, I said, 'instead of spending vast sums on follies for his villa, he had used them for this cause, no prince in the world would have accomplished more.' My shopkeeper disagreed: 'Aren't we all like that? We pay gladly for our follies but we expect others to pay for our virtues.'"

Berating himself for allowing himself to get side-tracked from a scenic walk in order to solve the puzzle of finding the 'promal plant' from which all other plants came:
"Why are we moderns so distracted, why do we let ourselves be challenged by problems which we can neither face nor solve?"

"Under the shelter of an airy pergola attached to a miserable inn, we took a light midday meal. Dogs greedily gobbled up the discarded skins of our sausages; a beggar boy chased them away and hungrily consumed our apple pairings until he, in his turn, was chased away by an old beggar. Professional jealousy is to be found everywhere."

"On the higher slopes of the mountains we still found olive, carob and mountain ash. Here cultivation follows a three-year cycle - beans, corn and rest. Manure, the peasants say, works greater miracles than the saints."

And there's that word again:

"In the detritus of the river, more quartz, some plain, like breccia."

The Temple of Concord in Sicily, where Goethe raved about a sarcophagus.

Caring for Your Introvert

I found this article while looking for tips on writing college entrance essays. I looked for one thing and found another.

"Remember, someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts. It pays to learn the warning signs."

Goethe Visits the Hamiltons

An interesting rabbit trail in Goethe's Italian Journey--

"Sir William Hamilton, who is still living here [in Naples] as English ambassador, has now, after many years of devotion to the arts and the study of nature, found the acme of these delights in the person of an English girl of twenty with a beautiful face and a perfect figure. He has had a Greek costume made for her which becomes her extremely. Dressed in this, she lets down her hair and, with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations - standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose following another without a break. She knows how to arrange the folds of her veil to match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a headdress. The old knight idolizes her and is enthusiastic about everything she does."

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I was intrigued, so I looked up Sir William Hamilton to see if he'd ever been painted with his young wife, and discovered that she was famous in her own right. She was later the famed long-time mistress of Lord Horatio Nelson, had a daughter with him, and was devoted to Nelson until he died. But she squandered everything he left her and died in poverty in her fifties. She and Nelson had always pretended that the daughter was adopted (because they weren't married) and, even years and years later, the daughter herself refused to ever admit that Emma had been her mother. Emma is the subject of the Vivien Leigh/Laurence Olivier movie, That Hamilton Woman. When she so impressed Goethe, she probably presented an image similar to this painting of her:

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And here's another interesting quote from the same book, Italian Journey, by Goethe.

"The storms of the last days have presented us with the picture of a magnificent sea and allowed me to study the motions and the forms of the waves. Nature is, indeed, the only book whose every page is filled with important content.
"The theatre, on the other hand, no longer gives me any pleasure . . . To me the theatre is merely a peepshow on a larger scale. I seem to have lost my taste for such things."

Spanish Living/Classic Books?

I'm going to start trying to collecting some classic and living Spanish booklists for a friend. who has a really cute picture of Miss M playing with her little girl on her blog.

This is only the start (I hope - not only are these not so easy to find, but I'm less familiar with Spanish books to know whether a booklist is worthy or not!)

UPDATE: Javamom has posted some Spanish language helps, including Spanish songs, poems and etexts, on her blog here and here. You can view all of her posts on Spanish Lessons here.

http://educandoenfamilia.com/ General homeschool site
They also have a message board (although it's not very active)
and an active blog Educando en Familia

When I do a search for great Spanish writers, these are some names that come up. I have no idea whether their works are worthy of a CM education.
Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Pio Baroja.

Wikipedia has an entry on Spanish literature. "In the Romanticism (principle of the 19th century) important topics are: the poetry of José de Espronceda and other poets; the prose, that can have several forms (the historical novel, the scientific prose, the description of regional customs, the journalism —where Mariano José de Larra can be mentioned—); the theater, with Ángel de Saavedra (Duke of Rivas), José Zorrilla, and other authors. In the latter romanticism (post-romanticism) some appear: Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro. " Some names offered:
18th century:
Benito Jeronimo Feijoo, Jose Cadalso, Juan Meléndez Valdés, Félix María de Samaniego, Leandro Fernández de Moratín.
19th century:
Duque de Rivas, Mariano José de Larra, Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (Rhymes, Legends), José de Espronceda (El estudiante de Salamanca, La canción del pirata), José Zorrilla (Don Juan Tenorio)

They have a more extensive list of writers from the realist and modern periods, but I don't know how those would be at instilling the kind of character Charlotte Mason had in mind - so much of modern literature has a different goal, and hispanic literature might even have its own focus altogether.

Wikipedia has a list of Spanish authors divided by country. But, again, I don't know what the quality of their works is, and how usable they'd be in a Christian-based education. I'm suspecting that a person looking for a classic books education would have to rely heavily on world classics translated into Spanish. I know they're widely available. For starters, I'm sure Aesop's fables, Fairy Tales are available in Spanish translations - even the English versions are translated from a language other than English. The standard literary classics that seem to make it on everybody's booklists (Swiss Family Robinson, Jungle Book, Little Women) must surely be available in Spanish.

I guess one solution for coming up with a Spanish version of a great books list would be for someone who knows both English and Spanish to convert a list of standard great books (perhaps starting with Ambleside Online's list) into Spanish by finding the titles in Spanish.

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I found this at the Online Books Page - book sites in foreign languages. These are Spanish etext sites:

• Biblioteca Electronica Cristiana (Christian electronic texts in Spanish)
• Biblioteca Virtual de CLACSO (social science books in Spanish)
• Biblioteca Virtual Miguel De Cervantes (Spanish texts; JavaScript-dependent)
• Comedia Library (Hispanic classical theater texts)
• Elaleph (Spanish-language PDF texts)
• Memoria Chilena (Chilean historical books and other materials in Spanish)
• Textos Lemir (medieval Spanish texts)

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Here's a beginning list, thanks to Mama Squirrel's comments.

Imitacion de Cristo por Tomás Hermerken de Kempis

Poesia por Fray Luis de Léon (not sure of the quality, but the text is listed on a Christian site)

Mujercitas por LouisaMay Alcott

Desiring God by John Piper pdf file

El Progreso del Peregrino por Juan Bunyan pdf

Vintage Books online in various translations at The Rosetta Project, including Aladdin, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Bears, (click on the "Spanish" button for the translated text)
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A Goethe Quote About Drawing

This is another quote from Italian Journey.

"The artists like giving me lessons because I am quick to understand. But understanding is not the same as doing. Quickness of understanding is a mental faculty, but right doing requires the practice of a lifetime. However, feeble as his efforts may be, the amateur should not despair. The few lines I draw on the paper, often too hasty and seldom exact, help me to a better comprehension of physical objects. The more closely and precisely one observes particulars, the sooner one arrives at a perception of the whole. One must not, however, compare oneself with the artist, but proceed in one's own manner. Nature has provided for all her children: even the least of them is not hindered in his existence by the existence of the greatest. 'A little man is still a man.' Let's leave it at that."

I like how this parallels with Charlotte Mason's method of reproducing natural objects in drybrush as part of nature study: "The few lines I draw on the paper, often too hasty and seldom exact, help me to a better comprehension of physical objects. The more closely and precisely one observes particulars, the sooner one arrives at a perception of the whole."

The purpose of a nature notebook isn't to become a skilled artist, but in order to observe, comprehend and perceive.

An Abhorrent System

I'm posting this for Tim. It's about beauty and art from a blog about music.

And here's an article about New St Andrew's.

Homeschoolers Qualifying for the National Merit Scholarship program

Found on HomeschoolBuzz.com. This is from an article in the Washington Times:

"...Home-schooling has developed an impressive track record. In particular, home-schoolers are consistently achieving in the arena skeptics believe should be out of the range of average parents, which is preparing students for college.

If parents can successfully prepare children for college, then the rationale for heavily subsidizing public schools weakens significantly. Recent results from ACT show home-schoolers have scored above the national average for the past 10 years, which helps show that home-schoolers are well-prepared for college.

But there's another program in which home-schoolers are making their presence known — the National Merit Scholarship Program.

The NMS program has seen a dramatic increase in the number of home-schoolers who place as finalists. Of the 248 home-schoolers among the 2003 semifinalists, 129 of these students advanced to finalist standing, receiving the National Merit Scholarship.

As noted by Kate Grossman, a reporter with the Chicago Sun-Times, the number of home-schoolers receiving National Merit Scholarships has increased more than 500 percent: from 21 in 1995 to 129 in 2003. Recently NMS announced that for 2008 there are 237 home-school semifinalists..."

Read more here.

Now I Can Read On My Treadmill!

I haven't been on my treadmill for awhile - months. First, I stopped because of leg cramps. Now that isn't as much of an issue, but I'm so busy and I need to have something to do while I'm on there. I usually watch a DVD for 30 minutes or so - we've seen the Pride and Prejudice miniseries in 30 minute installments more times than I can count, as well as episodes of All Creatures Great and Small, Christy and The Waltons. But it's hard to justify the loss of productive time every single day to watch movies. If only I could read on the treadmill . . . but the book holder I have attaches to the bar on the side of the treadmill with a screw thing, and constantly looking to one side to read is hard on the neck, plus the bouncing motion makes it hard to focus.

Finally I hit on an idea of removing the book holder from the screw-on post, and tying it onto the treadmill with a long shoestring. It rests on the dash so that it covers the digital display, but that can be seen by lifting the book. It seems to work well, the bouncing is lessened, and I can see the book straight ahead instead of to one side. Now my treadmill time isn't just wasted video time, it's productive reading time.

I think this is going to change my life.

More Goethe

From his book Italian Journey.

"The art of mosaic, which gave the Ancients their paved floors and the Christians the vaulted Heaven of their churches, has now been degraded to snuff boxes and bracelets. Our times are worse than we think."


Charlotte Mason tells about how Goethe grew up looking at some prints of Venice, and hearing his father talk about Italy, all his life. He had read about Italy, but hadn't yet visited it himself. The yearning to see it for himself became so strong that he had to limit what he read about Italy because it made him miserable. But now he's finally in Italy:

"My passionate desire to see these things [Italian sites] with my own eyes had grown to such a point that, if I had not taken the decision I am now acting upon [the decision to travel through Italy], I should have gone completely to pieces. More historical knowledge was no help. The things were in arm's reach [from Germany], yet I felt separated from them by an impenetrable barrier. Now I feel, not that I am seeing them for the first time, but that I am seeing them again."



"I have spent the day well, just looking and looking. It is the same in art as in life. The deeper one penetrates, the broader grows the view. In the sky of art, countless new stars keep appearing . . . "