Water, water, water. Wash in plenty, soak in plenty (with some baking soda), rinse in plenty, resoak in plenty, rinse again and cook in plenty. This takes a while so we do big batches. The more times you reheat 'em, the better. Don't forget the comino.

Yes, well there's a reason Hippie Hollow is in Travis rather than Williamson. Not to mention Thong Man, whose exercise regime takes him near our house. My mom, who had her farm-girl consciousness raised in Berkeley in the '70s, still did a double-take the first time she saw him pedal by. http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=9vju2Y-NoDM&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D9vju2Y-NoDM

Curious George (and Babar) are so absurd that it never occurred to me to think they might be conveying any kind of messages at all, good or bad. For pete's sake, a monkey gets put in a dungeon for prank-dialing 911. A baby elephant copes with grief by visiting a Parisian department store conveniently near the jungle and buying a fashionable suit. I think they're excellent preparation for reading Beckett or Murakami later on.

I finished The Wasp Factory, one of dh's books. Will I never learn?

Unfortunately, Bolchazy-Carducci's annual $100-off coupons for AL seem to have ended now that B-C has a new Latin program they're pushing. I wonder how long until AL is just unavailable. :(

Most of these are Guilty Pleasure names that are almost certainly unusable, but my literary picks: Clarissa Pamela Camilla Dido Wealhtheow Britomart Lolita Bradamante

Another vote for the Mazda5. We have the bench seat, so Great Girl fits neatly sideways (which she likes) in the Wayback when dh and I are both in the front. It really is a faux-van, being actually the Mazda3 chassis built up to look vanlike. Good gas mileage, good reliability. A few negatives, but a very nice "minivan."

We are the last homeschoolers in the universe using Artes Latinae, I think. It still works very well for us. http://www.umich.edu/~cfc/rosslatin.htm

We went to a cold turkey rule of No Moving Screens. The iPad and desktop get used only for Google Books, Alcumus, Artes Latinae, and the odd painting that we can't find in any of our art books. No more YouTube anything, typing instructor, math games, nothing. The addictive behaviors only seem to attach to screen movement. This was matched by parental vows not to have our eyes flicking to little screens when we're with the children. When we're always glancing at our own screens, we're teaching them that those screens are more interesting than the real life around us. There's been massive improvements in attitudes and choice of leisure activities all around.

Wee Girl hums her cello pieces incessantly. When her older sisters object, she replies smugly, "It's lesson work." Sometimes she moves them down a fifth, like she's playing them on a different string, which I wish I could do. I've come to hear Suzuki Book 1 even in my dreams now. If I ever meet Aunt Rhody I will strangle her.

An English colleague gave me a copy of that book when I was pregnant with Great Girl. There were some parts that were culturally bewildering, but it was very good. Infinitely closer to how dh and I wanted to raise our children than the then-popular What to Expect baby and toddler books.

Completed 16. Aldous Huxley, Music at Night A collection of essays, some reasonably good, many quite dull. I think I'm not a Huxley fan. I was also quite bothered by the frequency with which an essay on some social problem or other would conclude with a nod toward eugenics as probably the way the problem would be solved. Maybe he was just a creature of his times, but his fellow essay-writing Englishman and exact coeval C. S. Lewis had no time for "selective breeding" as the future of progressivism. Now finishing The Wasp Factory, which is just becoming sordid, and then back at least a century. Neither the present one nor the one recently past seem to agree with me.

Dh credits the Mathemagic volume with his taking on logic as a career. My favorite is the art volume, "Look Again," which makes for a lovely preschool/elem. introduction to art, including a great deal of modern art.

Are these the old edition, with orange covers, or the later ones, with different colors for each volume?

Reader Rabbit 1 http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XKO86AUwsWw&feature=relmfu Reader Rabbit's Interactive Reading Journey http://archive.org/details/reader_rabbits (Wee Girl accidentally learned to read while we were working with her in overcoming her apraxia, but also enjoyed Reader Rabbit.)

Middle Girl is the same age as your cutie (and bears an amazing resemblance as well). For her science reading, she's delving into a stack of Golden Guides. These are engaging and conveniently pocket-sized, and though a tad dated (there are more zoological kingdoms now), their science is sufficiently basic that the information is still good. These were cheap and easy to find on bookfinder.com and the used bookstore. They're somewhat like those DK Pocket books, but more organized and thinner. She's reading Weather Geology Zoology Botany Ecology Evolution Rocks and Minerals Landforms Now and then she gets distracted by a more specialized volume (though I don't permit her to take Hallucinogenic Plants out of the house; I'd rather not be explaining to the APD that my child isn't in school because she's busy learning what illegal things you can do with bindweed). Venomous Animals, Bats, and Insect Pests are popular.

My girls liked Song of Robin Hood at that age. It's the Robin Hood ballads, old and less old, with either their proper traditional melodies or other tunes from the period that fit the meter. The language is modernized just enough, and the art is beautiful. http://books.google.com/books/about/Song_of_Robin_Hood.html?id=NJmA4oNseRMC

There's a thread on Site Discussion about it. SWB posted; it's part of a bigger problem, and they're working on it.

I just spent my evening reading most of the manual for the Whirlpool Quiet Partner II dishwasher and watching dishwasher repair videos onn YouTube, instead of the book I wanted to read. While everyone else went out for New Orleans Snowballs. Can I have the manual on my list?

Bumping out of oblivion, since I can't get My Content to work....

Look out for the old Educator Classic Library series. Good annotations at an appropriate level. Usually a dollar or two per. http://www.valerieslivingbooks.info/classics.htm

Reported

Paisley Hedgehog, Jane in NC, melmichigan - I'm in for Anna Karenina. It's been a long time since I read it, and it wasn't a particularly good translation. Great Girl was assigned it last semester and I think it was the Pevear, so I will steal her copy. I'm happy to wait until it's a good time for everyone.

I read Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae, John Prebble's The Highland Clearances, and am part way through a very disturbing book dh gave me called The Wasp Factory. So there is my Scottish trifecta. Plus some Stephen Spender poems from a collection, and most of a collection of essays by Aldous Huxley. I did much of this on the ten-hour plane flight. Now I am so jetlagged that I can barely type. And the temperatures are 100+ instead of barely 60, and I don't even want to acclimate. Maybe I'll say something about these books when I can tell night from day again.

Oh yes, I'll try anything that can get her to keep an ID on. She already likes to wear her religious medal on a chain around her neck, and seemed receptive to the idea of my adding a tag with her name on it to the chain. I'd considered getting a medal with ID engraved on the back, but for some reason that's desperately expensive - except for St. Francis medals, which can be cheaply engraved with ID information. Because they're for dog collars. Too bad she doesn't want to change out her medal for St. Francis. She doesn't have any sensory issues - she just dislikes bracelets or sleeves that dangle, because they get in her way. I think the Livestrong-style ID bands might be permissible, however.