Best laugh of the day: right here at Amy’s blog. Classic.
Hey Danielle Bean, this one is right up your alley!
Monthly Archives: April 2006
Sorry About That
Our internet was down this morning. My site meter suggests that a bunch of you are checking in first thing in the morning to see if we’re still here….Well, no baby yet! Just a cranky modem.
Have to rush now to get Jane off to her weekly nature studies camp, but you’ll have plenty to read at this week’s Carnival of Education. This has been a great week for Carnivals!
Tags: education
Tuesday Carnival Time
The new Carnival of Homeschooling is up!
Exploring Scotland with Martha Morse
Angela writes:
My daughter is currently in love with all things Scottish, and we have just ordered your Martha Books. (and LOVES that a homeschooling mom wrote them!!!) Can you recommend any websites/ book lists for upper elementary, so I could put together a little unit for her?
Happy to!
(Consider this a work in progress, and I’ll update as I am able. I’ll also put together a resource list for the Charlotte books, as soon as I get a chance. Suggestions from other Bonny Glen readers are welcome!)
Spinning and Weaving
In Martha’s day (late 1700s Scotland), every woman in the household, from the laird’s wife to the lowliest kitchenmaid, was expected to spend every spare minute spinning wool or flax into thread. The spun wool and linen thread was taken to a nearby weaver (weaving was a man’s trade, at this time), who would weave the fabric to order. As a housewife in early-nineteenth-century Massachusetts, however, Martha would have done her own weaving.
Here are some picture books about spinning, weaving, wool, and such.
Ox-Cart Man
A New Coat for Anna
The Rag Coat
Warm as Wool
Pelle’s New Suit
If, like Martha, your child has a hankering to try his or her hand at spinning with a drop spindle, Halcyon Yarn has a very nice beginner’s kit. (Unlike Martha, I never did get the hang of it, though!)
UPDATE: Jane begs to differ about Halcyon’s kit being “very nice.” She agrees that the Harrisville drop spindle and the colored, combed wool are quite satisfactory, “But Mom, the instruction booklet was terrible, don’t you remember? Impossible to follow!” I stand corrected. Fortunately, a kind reader has just emailed me a link to this informative site: The Joy of Handspinning. Many thanks to Christine for the suggestion, and to my ever-vigilant junior editor, Jane.
Music
Gi’me Elbow Room: Folk Songs of a Scottish Childhood
Folk Songs Index—click on Scotland and listen to dozens of songs, all for free! (This is how I selected many of the songs I quote in the Martha books.)
Poetry and Literature
Robert Burns, whose work was just becoming popular in Martha’s day.
Sir Walter Scott. Rob Roy takes place not far from the fictional valley where Martha’s family lives.
Fairy tales by Sorche nic Leodhas
Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland
Kidnapped
The King’s Swift Rider: A Novel on Robert the Bruce
(More Scotland-themed middle-grade and YA novels to come.)
UPDATE: How did I forget? The Scottish author George MacDonald is one of my lifelong favorite writers, ever since I read The Wise Woman
The DHM also suggests The Scottish Chiefs 
Useful Websites
EdinPhoto Archive—printouts of old engravings from this site are taped up all over my office wall.
Costumer’s Manifesto—all about period clothing. (Check the “ethnic costumes” section.)
All about tartans. (Specific clan tartans, as we know them today, did not come into fashion until the Victorian era, when Walter Scott’s books brought all things Scots into vogue. In Martha’s day, a hundred years earlier, families would wear whatever tartan plaid pleased them—or the weaver.)
More to come!
Tags: Scotland, Little House, unit studies, Martha Morse, Laura Ingalls Wilder, children’s literature, kidlit, children’s books, books, picture books, George MacDonald
Then Again, It May Be a While
Saw the midwife today…she said her guess is that I’ll do my usual deliver-a-week-after-the-due-date thing. (I am less prompt with babies than I am with manuscripts. Usually.) So looks like we might have time to finish that quilt we’re working on before this little one makes her appearance. And I reeeeaaaalllly have to get cracking on our taxes….
I can’t wait to see her face. (If she throws us a curve ball and turns out to be a HE instead, we will be mightily shocked.) Back in November when I had an ultrasound, we got to see her in both the regular 2-D image and the new 3-D. I was stunned to see how familiar she looked—this was somewhere around 19 weeks, I think, and yet I recognized her face. She looked just like newborn Rose and newborn Wonderboy, who clearly come from the same mold. That little nose, the shape of her mouth, the tilt of her chin—Jane, Scott, and I were awestruck at how well we knew her face.
In the car on the way home, a funny thing happened. The tech had given me printouts of both kinds of image. We were driving away from the hospital before I had a chance to look at the pictures. Puzzled, I stared at the 3-D closeup of the baby’s face. It seemed ridiculous to say so, but this didn’t look like the right baby. It was a different face, one I did not recognize.
Scott noticed my bewildered scrutiny. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said uncertainly. “It’s just…this doesn’t look like our baby.”
“Um, honey,” he said, glancing at my belly, “I’m pretty sure it’s impossible for someone else’s baby to be in there.”
“I know it sounds crazy,” I said. That’s when I noticed the name printed in the upper corner of the image. It wasn’t my name.
I checked the other pictures, the 2-D images. Yup, there was my name, the correct date, and a miniature version of Rose’s newborn nose. I looked back at the 3-D picture. Different mother’s name, wrong time stamp. Not my baby. The tech had given me the wrong set of 3-D photos.
“In your mother’s womb, I knew you” indeed.
Can’t wait to see that face for real!
It’s Here!
No, not the baby. It’s the new Carnival of Children’s Literature, brought to us with poetic flair by Sherry of Semicolon. I for one cannot wait to spend some time exploring this cavalcade of poetry-themed posts. Bravo!
Tags: children’s literature, kidlit, children’s books, books, picture books, poetry
Why I Love Becky
Because of posts like this. Go feast yourselves on her poetry links!
Spring in the Bonny Glen
We can’t stay inside.
The crocuses are gone, and the daffodils are just barely past their peak. The grape hyacinths are up, and lots of our neighbors seem to have gone in for the breathtaking pairing of these sweet blue fairy-bulbs and the sunny, amiable daffies. The combination is the epitome of cheerfulness, and I can’t get enough of it.
Last winter’s pansies have returned to wave like brilliant orange and blue flags in the April breezes, enlivening the sparse brown flowerbeds where the perennials are just beginning to shake themselves awake. I always love to see the re-emergence of my yarrow, for its feathery, gray-green foliage is exactly the color of spring according to my Secret Garden-trained sensibilities.
And our strawberries! We were astonished yesterday to see that they are already blooming. Dozens and dozens of the delicate white blossoms embroidered with yellow-green, like something off an old-fashioned sampler. We’ll be feasting by early June, for sure.
I am pointedly overlooking all the weeds. I cannot possibly uproot them now—as it is, I seem to be giving the neighbors panic attacks when they see me out in the mulch hacking down last year’s dead flowerstalks. No, I assure them, I am not trying to jumpstart labor; it’s just that if I don’t do it now, it won’t get done, right? I may be a baby-sling enthusiast, but tackling early spring garden cleanup tasks while toting a brand-new newborn—that’s a bit beyond me. So the gang and I got out there yesterday and chopped out all the brush. Now we can relax and enjoy watching the plantain and thistle columbines and shasta daisies emerge.
No trace yet of the milkweed Jane is raising to lure her monarchs. And we still haven’t planted our peas!
Tags: spring, nature study
Rose’s Favorite Poem
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
There it was I saw what I shall never forget
And never retrieve.
Monstrous and beautiful to human eyes, hard to believe,
He lay, yet there he lay,
Asleep on the moss, his head on his polished cleft small ebony hoves,
The child of the doe, the dappled child of the deer.
Surely his mother had never said, “Lie here
Till I return,” so spotty and plain to see
On the green moss lay he.
His eyes had opened; he considered me.
I would have given more than I care to say
To thrifty ears, might I have had him for my friend
One moment only of that forest day:
Might I have had the acceptance, not the love
Of those clear eyes;
Might I have been for him in the bough above
Or the root beneath his forest bed,
A part of the forest, seen without surprise.
Was it alarm, or was it the wind of my fear lest he depart
That jerked him to his jointy knees,
And sent him crashing off, leaping and stumbling
On his new legs, between the stems of the white trees?
Penalizing SAHMs
Should women educated on the government’s dime be punished for later choosing to stay home with their kids? A Dutch politician thinks so.
“A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work – that is destruction of capital,” Dijksma said. “If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at the cost of society, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished.”
Toddler on lap, so commentary to come later. Really, though, this one speaks for itself.
Tags: SAHM, Parenting, Education, Women, Motherhood