My Weekly Amble: February 17-21, 2025
Tomorrow is the Winter Warmer so I’ll be quite busy all day.
I’ve struggled more this week to get my reading done. The routine of waking up and getting started is a struggle to even get to my books.
Cooking breakfast has become a priority, which is a great thing. I want to feed and care for my family and breakfast seems to be the best way right now. (I’m interested in any breakfast ideas you may have!). My habit for years were to get up and start without checking my phone, but I seem to be struggling with that these days. For some reason, there’s a draw now that there didn’t used to be. So between cooking breakfast and getting on my phone – I’m not getting started reading until nearly 8:30. That wouldn’t be so bad except I’m not nearly as efficient or focused once people are up and moving about – or Jason is talking on a call. Ah, distraction.
I have been reading more than the AOY0 books, including Charlotte Mason’s book Ourselves and have been reading about will, willfulness, self-will and that idea has been showing up in my other reading.
I need to go search around the house for a few of the AO books I already own – Robert McCloskey, The Little House, The Little Engine that Could, and more. Also, the Pooh Bear books. They’re around here somewhere … but I do have a huge hurry to gather them because I do have plenty to work through.
The two anthologies – The Golden Books Family Treasury of Poetry and The World Treasury of Children’s Literature are interesting to compare. Anthologies always make me wonder why the anthologizer chose the selections they chose. The different nursery rhymes are the clearest way to compare. But also the way they’re presented is interesting – The Golden Treasury has them listed together back to back with stars between on just a couple of pages while the World Treasury includes more art and one to three rhymes on a bunch of pages. Untermeyer (Golden) and Fadiman (World) have different purposes and directions, so I don’t know that there’ll be a lot of comparison going forward.
I am further into the Golden Treasury and have moved into the section on animal poetry. I’ve enjoyed that. Untermeyer does a good job of picking silly and serious poems – and also introducing them. Sometimes introducing a poet, like Ogden Nash, after already including one of his poems.
I’ve been reading the Uncle Remus tales. I still struggle with the dialect. The different ways Brer Rabbit escapes seem fun at first, but sometimes he’s becoming more malevolent in his trickery. I do think it is interesting to see the enemy of my enemy might still be my enemy even though they have a tenuous alliance.
The Beatrix Potter books have simply been a delight. So fun. I’m sorry I didn’t read all of them to my kids when they were small. I’m sorry the little books weren’t available then. From the dedications to the art to the stories, I have loved making connections between the stories and other stories I know. Little Red Riding Hood, Country Mouse and City Mouse.
I love that you are starting at the very beginning. (I think I said that last time .. lol!) I have delighted in reading nursery rhymes and poetry to my children.
I can see that part of that is from my mother. She always recited RL Stevenson’s “The Swing” while pushing me on a swing. Mother Goose and various other books were around the house. It definitely formed my childhood, and formed the way I approached my children.
With my two littlest ones, homeschooling has been different than with the four older ones. The youngest is our only girl and she wanted to do “baby school”. I love what we did for our YO. I took the author/illustrators Beatrix Potter, Robert McCloskey, and Virginia Burton and each term read primarily from their oeuvre. I felt like it was similar to AOs approach of one artist/composer/poet during a term, to become intimately familiar with their work.