Sorry we’re stealing Grandma from you on your special day. We all miss you!

Journey North has posted its latest Monarch Butterfly Migration Update. Seems Jane’s friends have been sighted in Oklahoma and North Carolina. That means we Virginians should be seeing them soon…

Big sale today on a package of ebooks & mp3 files. Cookbooks, radio shows, science experiments, lots of other stuff. Just spreading the word.

Yesterday really and truly felt like spring. Great friend Lisa came over and helped me clean up my front flower border; now I can just sit back and watch it bloom. Okay, so the “just sit back” part is meaningless cliche: I have tons of other work to do in the next few weeks, before the baby arrives. But let’s not go there right now…

Anyway, this springtime urge to spruce and tidy is the reason for the blog makeover. I needed to see some green inside the house as well as out.

Looking for ways to keep the little ones occupied while you’re working with your older kids? Here’s a great suggestion from a homeschooling mom of eight.

One modification that has kept my girls entertained for stretches of time is a rice table or bucket. We use a plastic storage box, filled halfway with uncooked rice and add kitchen utensils, cars, small toys, or anything else that catches our fancy. All this goes on the kitchen floor atop an old tablecloth for easier cleanup.

Whenever I drag out the rice bucket, I am greeted by squeals of delight. I tell myself they are engaging in science experiments to keep myself from worrying about some of the more creative things they find to do with rice. After a couple bites, they decide it isn’t worth eating and get back to sifting, digging and pouring. I can count on this activity giving me a half hour or so to spend instructing the older kids without interruption.

HT: Daryl

When Jane and Rose were little, I used to keep a little baggie of cut-out construction paper fish for them to stick on a big blue pond (also construction paper, with wave lines drawn on and some clear contact paper slapped over it). Haven’t thought of that in years…poor Beanie, she’d have loved that game at age three. Heck, she might still love it now. And this time around I could put Jane and Rose on fish-cutting duty. Little loops of tape on the back of each fish heighten the fun—because, you know, ANYTHING having to do with tape is magical for the preschool set.

This post from Missey‘s blog, written in December, cut straight to my heart, and I wanted to share it with those of you who did not know her either in real life or from homeschooling discussion lists.

“Life has been so laid-back and relaxed that I don’t know how we’ll ever get back on track come January, but I’m not going to think about that right now. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now, I’m enjoying making memories with my family and letting all the worries and stresses roll right off my back. They’ll be there for another day. But for today I’m going to get my Love Bank filled back up with kisses and hugs and quiet conversations (while making those same kinds of deposits into each of my loved one’s Love Banks) and regain the strength to face all those worries and stresses that will still be waiting for me come January. I think that by then they won’t seem so big anymore anyway.”

I need to go hug my children now.

Tributes to Missey: here and here.

To all of you who emailed about or commented on my “Quiet Joy” post, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your kind words and especially for sharing your own stories. I have been so moved by your outpouring of delight in your own wonderboys and wondergirls, and I have enjoyed “meeting” some of your beautiful children at your own websites.

Yesterday I was holding a sleepy Wonderboy on my hip while I prepared his morning smoothie, and for no particular reason he lifted his groggy little head and planted a kiss on my cheek. It washed over me again, as it does a hundred times a day, how blessed I am to have him. It has been a real pleasure to hear about all of your blessings too. Thanks.

No new post this morning because I’ve been getting the Carnival ready for Monday. Last call for submissions, folks—get them in by 6:00 (Eastern time) this evening (more or less). And if you’re running late, no worries; Susan at Chicken Spaghetti has kindly offered to host the second Carnival of Children’s Literature in March. Hooray!

Some great submissions have come in for the Carnival of Children’s Literature—keep ’em coming, folks! We are looking for all sorts of posts about children’s books: book reviews, kids’ narrations, the joys of “living books,” you name it. Here’s how to submit.

(And a big thank you to all of you who are spreading the word on your own blogs!)

So my Mr. Putty post got a trackback today from our neighbor, Steve the Llama Butcher (and thank you very much, Steve), and naturally I popped over to his site (which I visit regularly) to see his whole post. Which I must say amused me mightily. Someday Mrs. Llama Butcher and I will have to get our husbands out of their respective basements to volley political barbs over a pizza. But I digress.

I noticed that the post right above that one is about a movie Scott and I are enormous fans of: Groundhog Day. And this review Steve shares, I’ve got to pass it along too.

When I set out to write this article, I thought it’d be fun to do a quirky homage to an offbeat flick, one I think is brilliant as both comedy and moral philosophy. But while doing what I intended to be cursory research — how much reporting do you need for a review of a twelve-year-old movie that plays constantly on cable? — I discovered that I wasn’t alone in my interest. In the years since its release the film has been taken up by Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and followers of the oppressed Chinese Falun Gong movement. Meanwhile, the Internet brims with weighty philosophical treatises on the deep Platonist, Aristotelian, and existentialist themes providing the skin and bones beneath the film’s clown makeup. On National Review Online’s group blog, The Corner, I asked readers to send in their views on the film. Over 200 e-mails later I had learned that countless professors use it to teach ethics and a host of philosophical approaches. Several pastors sent me excerpts from sermons in which Groundhog Day was the central metaphor. And dozens of committed Christians of all denominations related that it was one of their most cherished movies.

When the Museum of Modern Art in New York debuted a film series on “The Hidden God: Film and Faith” two years ago, it opened with Groundhog Day. The rest of the films were drawn from the ranks of turgid and bleak intellectual cinema, including standards from Ingmar Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. According to the New York Times, curators of the series were stunned to discover that so many of the 35 leading literary and religious scholars who had been polled to pick the series entries had chosen Groundhog Day that a spat had broken out among the scholars over who would get to write about the film for the catalogue. In a wonderful essay for the Christian magazine Touchstone, theology professor Michael P. Foley wrote that Groundhog Day is “a stunning allegory of moral, intellectual, and even religious excellence in the face of postmodern decay, a sort of Christian-Aristotelian Pilgrim’s Progress for those lost in the contemporary cosmos.” Charles Murray, author of Human Accomplishment, has cited Groundhog Day more than once as one of the few cultural achievements of recent times that will be remembered centuries from now. He was quoted in The New Yorker declaring, “It is a brilliant moral fable offering an Aristotelian view of the world.”

I know what you’re thinking: We’re talking about the movie in which Bill Murray tells a big rat sitting on his lap, “Don’t drive angry,” right? Yep, that’s the one.

Read the rest right here. And thanks for this, too, Steve.