Thanks to all. I definitely think foundation is the primary issue: all the houses here are pier and beam exactly because the limestone everything sits on shifts continuously (all houses, my neighbors tell me, develop cracks in the drywall at the corners of windows and doorways) and after 20 years it certainly has to be releveled.

Our favorite children's poetry book ever is Walter De La Mare's Come Hither. We have an old Puffin two-volume set just the right size for little hands. Edward Blishen edited a lovely selection of the poems for Oxford as The Oxford Book of Poetry for Children.

Good. Professionals of what sort? Where does one find them? I hope I don't sound as much like an ignoramus as I feel....

Dh and I finally took a look around and noticed that our house is having some problems. It has at least these problems: rotted siding, paint worn through or otherwise gone, broken window seals (and windows hard to see through as a result), cracked/broken concrete skirting, cracked/ fallen drywall. Also badly needs new carpeting. And possibly, as we live on a giant chunk of limestone, re-leveling (pier and beam). Also since we moved in the City has passed laws with requirements for energy saving, and since our house is very very draughty I suspect we don't currently meet those requirements. Obviously we're not good at this stuff, and haven't been doing necessary upkeep, and we regret and repent. So now what? Mostly we need someone to assess the house and figure out what in fact needs to be done, and in what order. Before it collapses around us. Any and all advice desperately welcome.

Pretty sure that the only James with a happy ending of the usual sort (though there are plenty that have an Inevitable And Yet Somehow Unforeseen ending) is his first novel, Watch and Ward, which is so terrible that apparently he used to tell people that Roderick Hudson was his first novel.

Reading others' plans with interest. Wee Girl will be a sixth grader next year only because we held her back, having a late summer birthday and being still non-verbal at the usual Kindergarten age, which delayed her reading significantly. She's gifted in math, so we're running a combination of advanced math/ remedial reading. Reading & Writing: 1. various Baldwin Project "Level 2" stories on Accelareader 2. Junior Great Books reading group, Series 3 texts 3. Junior English Book 3 (4th grade) (hope to move on to book 4 by halfway through year) 4. Lots of cuddly read-alouds (incl. many of the BF books) Vocabulary & Spelling: Word Wealth Jr. History: Beautiful Feet Western Expansion (Hopefully finishing BF Early American History/ Texas history this year) Geography: Beautiful Feet Geography Through Literature Music: 1. Suzuki cello lessons 2. Beautiful Feet History of Classical Music Art: Phonics of Drawing Latin & Grammar: Artes Latinae Level I Science: 1. Spectrum Science Grade 5 2. TOPS Electricity; Corn & Beans; Earth, Moon, & Sun Faith: 1. St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism No. 2 2. Bible Story Library Math: Art of Problem Solving: Number Theory, Counting & Probability, Geometry

Well this is easy, looking at my upcoming 10x10 books: Finish the collection of Cardinal Newman's sermons? Some more poetry published by New Directions? Work faster through Paradise of the Holy Fathers, published by New Sarov? Or those Larry McMurtry essays, from Univ. of New Mexico Press? Okay actually this isn't easy.

I envy you reading your first James. Welcome to the cult, I mean club! 😄

Nice! I've never seen those before.

I've been using it for texts for Accelereader, which has really been helping Wee Girl wean herself off moving lips/ sounding out words in her head. We're in the middle of Alfred Church's English History, which I've found on another site, but Baldwin Project is what I've been mining for texts. So glad to hear it's not that they're defunct!

Well, we did this. For 3 + 4, start on the 3, then hop four towards the "plus end." For 3 + (-4) start on the 3, then hop four towards the "minus end." For 3 - 4, start on the 3, then hop four away from the plus end (4 is a plus number). For 3 - (-4), we started on the 3, then hop four away from the minus end. So "plussing" was going toward; "minusing" was going away from. They had no trouble with the idea of "go away from the minus end of the line." Also we didn't use "left" and "right" because they were little and that was one more thing to keep track of unreliably; we just labelled the line. We also avoided the terms "positive" and "negative," "add" and "subtract." Everything was "plus" and "minus." (Part of dh's Grand Theory of Mathematics Teaching (TM); don't blame me.) Everything seemed to make sense to them, so I suppose it worked. YMMV naturally. ETA: We used Miquon, which is heavy on the number line stuff. I especially liked their pages where the number lines are at wonky angles on the page, to get away from the "left" and "right" business. We didn't much use the rods however.

Never found a a better conceptual method than the number line. Seconding the endorsement of Key To Algebra.

Ages ago it moved from mainlesson.com to gatewaytotheclassics.com . Now it's gone. Or at least I can't get the server to respond. Anyone know anything? Is it coming back?

Limiting online time is admirable. But we're always happy to see you. ETA: Is The Coddling of the American Mind some kind of sequel to the famous Alan Bloom book?

Smallish San Damiano cross. It fit better in the tiny apartment we started out in, over the student futon, but what can you do.

This week I finished Henry James, Watch and Ward Poems by Edwin Brock, from Penguin Modern Poets 8 Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters Brock goes into the Lyric, Dramatic, & Epic 10x10 category; Pascal into the Bad Catholic category. If you, too, have had enough of double-tongued priests and hierarchs all full of moral and financial corruption, and are getting especially worried about the Jesuits, Pascal's Provincial Letters are for you. The Letters are like a series of snarky blog posts but in the 17th century. And yet somehow, timely. Edwin Brock may be familiar to those who were assigned "5 Ways to Kill a Man" (included in my collection) in school, which is one of his most accessible, if weakest poems and certainly hasn't aged well. A better poem: Currently reading the Henry James story collection In the Cage and Other Tales, and The Paradise of the Holy Fathers, by various monks and hermits.

I agree. Another objection is that the female lawyers the men would be marrying now aren't some new breed of brilliant but autism-prone women: they're the women who were the secretaries in earlier generations. Like I say, not the most convincing argument.

The most interesting theory (possibly not the most convincing one) I've seen for the increase in autism diagnoses is "assortative mating": briefly, where my lawyer grandfather back in the day married his secretary, my grandmother, today he would marry a female lawyer of a more similar educational level. Across a society, this sort of thing increases the likelihood of two sets of genes predisposed to autism and an increase therefore in diagnoses. (More convincing, though less intriguing, is the proposal that increased autism diagnoses match decreased diagnoses for other conditions, a thing you would expect since autism used to be blamed on "refrigerator mothers": a doctor who didn't feel mom was a Bad Mother would be less likely to think therefore that the child could be autistic. My own child's diagnosis (not autism) was much rarer a couple decades ago when it was attributed to trauma--and in the absence of known trauma, to parental sexual abuse. An accurate diagnosis effectively became evidence of child abuse. Even in The Current Century, I had to deal with one medical professional who was convinced she must have experienced some kind of trauma I wasn't mentioning.)

No books finished this week due to book abandonment and a spontaneous weekend family vacation. But I'm almost done with Henry James' first novel, Watch and Ward, which I suppose would count for this week's "romance" theme. It's evident why it's not often read today. First, James is just finding his feet, and despite a yeoman attempt at character complexity, he makes his villains too openly villainous and his heroes/heroines insufficiently nuanced. But besides that, the plot itself makes the book nearly unreadable. A young man, freshly refused by the woman to whom he offered marriage, becomes through incredible circumstances the unofficial adoptive parent of an eleven-year-old girl, whom he decides to raise to be the perfect wife for himself. All one can think throughout is, "Was this as creepy in James's place and time as it is now?"--and it creates too much of a distraction to let the reader really enjoy the early James promise. I keep wanting to put down the book and notify CPS.

Seconding RoadID, especially if there's any concern a child won't want to wear a bracelet full-time. Wee Girl wore one for years when she was unable to speak, and she wouldn't wear jewelry but would wear the wristband. It had her full name, "NON-VERBAL", "MOM (phone number)", "DAD (phone number)." We got it after an over-officious TSA agent nearly didn't let us on a plane because Wee Girl "didn't know her own name." 🙄 Anyway she really liked the bands: one in pink, one in purple, depending on the day's mood!

Absolutely! Reading is for you. I just gave up on a second book for this year, and I almost never give up on books: J. Frank Dobie's The Voice of the Coyote, for the Don't Mess With Texas category. Dobie is great when he does his folklore thing, but when he writes about animals it's just boring. Rattlesnakes had the same problem. Guess I'm not going to read his classic Mustangs then. But this means I'm not going to finish a book this week--though this has cleared some shelf space! Some books just don't spark joy. Back to Henry James.

First abandoned book of the year! Why do I read dh's recommendations? For thirty-five years I've been trying books he recommends and regretting it. Anyway after nearly 200 pages, How Late It Was, How Late wasn't getting any better. "Is this book going anywhere?" I asked. "No, not really." "But it did win the Booker Prize." "Yes.... Though one of the committee members resigned after it won." "Resigned why?" "He said 'This book is c**p.'" So I've switched to a collection of Henry James stories. Such a relief. Every time I read him, I ask myself, Why do I ever read anything besides Henry James? Maybe this should be my new challenge. Read all of Henry James.

On Paradise Lost: you might try getting Stanley Fish's classic of Reader Response Criticism, Surprised By Sin, which is very readable and makes PL more readable. I need to re-read PL myself soon. For the Swiss Alps, surely Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain? When dh attended a conference in the Swiss Alps and brought me, neither of us skied so we hit the snowy hiking trails, and it was fantastic.

Finished this week Thomas Szasz, The Age of Madness. Sort of a source book for the psychiatrist-author's crusade against involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in general and corporal treatment methods (particularly electroshock therapy) in particular. There's an enraged account of mistreatment from the son of a Victorian prime minister who was institutionalized unwillingly; there's a bit from Sylvia Plath's Crossing the Water; there's an abridged Chekhov story, "Ward 6." It's all a bit dated in its anti-psychiatry-industry fury (published 1973), but it's such an unusual compilation on a theme as to be worth reading. Also, a good cover by Edward Gorey, in his Anchor Paperbacks days, which makes it 2019's first entry in the A is for Amy Who... 10x10 category: Also read an Elizabethan chronicle play, Edward III, by the prolific "Anonymous" but (they think) probably partly by Shakespeare. So that's another one for The Hollow Crown category. Currently reading Nikolai Gogol's Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, which I suppose keeps up last week's theme of madness and institutionalization.

Thanks for the update, Kathy.