Morning! Today: various & sundry errands. Get some boxes ready to ship. Pack up with masks & hand sanitizer and head out to post office; local game supply store; nursery; pick up prescription for MIL. School: math, Latin + English for elder; hands-on stuff, math, language work (English or classical) for younger. Fitness all around. Chores, RPG work, school planning work. Dinner: take-out date night tonight.

Evening! Taking a mellow day. Hit math + language work. 🙂 Dinner is pasta with broccoli & cheese, fresh veggies, and (barring disaster) cookies for dessert.

Afternoon back at you! 🙂 Doing okay today, though RPG took an insane amount of time. Sigh. I'm _finally_ getting a handle on prepping the adventures, and one of my players very graciously is running the game for a week or two to give me a breather so that will help. This is my boys' only non-family community at the moment, so it is worth extraordinary effort to keep the group together; but I absolutely need to cut back the time it takes each week. I've been working toward that and am making progress, thank goodness! For now: clean like mad; do a quick memory review with boys before sending them off for chores. Dinner, run RPG. Notes for tomorrow so I get going promptly: Up earlier (with DH). School: Start by working with younger on science for 1 hour. Math for both boys; languages for both boys; English too. Chores & RPG. What for dinner? and fitness all around.

Morning! Today is an assess / evaluate & plan day. I might update stuff here for my notes. Things to assess: school; school planning; fitness for boys & for me; rpg; home stuff; garden stuff; year planning, include something sort of marvelous. most urgent: get house organized and steady-state-ish. what's feasible? RPG: figure out what is feasible. I'd like get to a place of being non-urgent and with a finite amount of work per session. deliverables: campaign concept map; to-do list for each session with links / resources; basic physical maps for each place; essential challenges / adventures for each location. Feasible? school: ordered books &c. Oh my goodness that took a while, and I'd already done most of the work ... for tomorrow: contact used book store RE an installment plan for some books for DH.

Evening! After dinner here. Well, it felt like a surreal week. But we're all here, we got some stuff done, I have a much better sense of what lies ahead & how to tackle it. Also we had a new meal for dinner (a Desperation Dinner) and it was so yummy! A mongrel shakshuka with chickpeas & mozzarella + jack, and fry bread with some whole wheat flour in the mix. Rest of night: bit of exercise, get clean, tuck boys in, popcorn & movie with DH. And be grateful for the internet, which yielded a tasty & nutritious meal for my family and brings me to this forum, too. 🙂

Morning! Yesterday got de-railed, I'm afraid, by living history. !!! I'm actually sort of re-thinking this term and our foci ... So today: do yesterday's undone work. Clean like mad. Work on my gestalt for the next term, year. Dinner: breaded pork chops; salad; maybe butternut squash soup. Work on RPG, school Anki stuff, fitness all around, joy.

Morning! glad to see you today! We're up an at 'em for a bit now. Today's remaining essentials: RPG -- get a note to my players; draft game-prep schedule for week, balancing campaign building, next session work, and system mastery; spend some time on each of those things. Maybe have a sense of a deliverable for the whole campaign so I feel on top of stuff? School -- language arts focus to day. Foreign language work for boys; memory work review; grammar, writing, and spelling for younger. Math and word study for elder. Work on school planning goals for week. House -- chores, some holiday recovery, dinner tonight is takeout date night. Fitness -- aerobics + at least some "ballet" for me; run + strength with boys. Keep working on excellent nutrition & sleeping better. ETA: sometime this week, I need to contact folks RE bookshelf supplies. Putting it here so I don't forget, and: Knew I forgot something!!! I need to work on annual planning some, too.

Morning! & Happy Tuesday. Today's rule is to do as little as possible & be mellow doing it. More or less. Kicking off Official Activities with this post. Then a quarter hour of finding my garden notes, organizing them, brainstorming-the-flower-boxes sort of things: the flower boxes are in quite a sad state at the moment. Another quarter hour outside with the boys. Then some language work all around, and music for younger + math with Dad for elder. Second round of language for elder, reading for younger, maybe some math: that should see us to lunch, and lunch read-aloud. Start afternoon with half an hour outside for boys, prepping dinner galette dough & other ingredients for me, a round of school + RPG work, some cleaning & fitness & writing work. Early dinner -- pizza galette + blueberry galette, fresh veggies, salad -- and online piano for younger. Bedtime stories. AND: somewhere in there, help elder clean out off the garage "chemistry" table. + write to elder's online language provider: I've agreed to let him drop Greek. 😉

Happy First Monday! glad nobody snapped at you (yet!) despite the New Things. Well, my sleep is all shot to heck these last few weeks, is a serious problem. So fixin' that is on the list. RPG tonight: draft encounters for puzzle/orrery and have fun doing it. location, NPCs, encounter for each step of puzzle abduction encounter for a player's character abduction clues for other player characters specific actions to give a rising sense of danger/corruption encounter for solution of puzzle/orrery run game, focus on keeping strong story and adding strong combat. school: language classes, reading, some math read-aloud at lunch order new books & materials fitness boys: DareBee; try to run if not just too rainy to contemplate me: am stretch done! step, some ballet, some pm stretch nutrition plenty of protein + veggies, healthy fats for me. Everybody else's nutrition is A-OK 🙂

Morning! Today: various & sundry. Introduction to Planning Week. RPG: tomorrow's game ready to go. Focus on combat opportunities, do some rules review. School Planning: review previous, do modules 3 & 4. Sundry: find new calendar, get all laundry away, School: artist & composer time, science time with somebody, hit language review & Bible 1 Pomodoro of my year planning Dinner: ??? figure this out 🙂 use stuff in 'fridge Movie tonight: finish Little Prince tomorrow: order stuff. For this week: Module list for me: 1 (vision, complete); 2 (goals, complete); 3 &4 (subjects & resources, to do + annual schedules,mostly done); 5 (weekly & daily schedules, to do ); 6 & 7 (procedures + lesson plan list, these go together and may take a couple of days, to do); 8 (organization, may want e-book, to do); 9 (visualization & implementation tips, to do); 10 (periodic review & maintenance, to do). Best Year Yet planning for me: Question 1 (what did I accomplish); Question 2 (what were my biggest disappointments); Question 3 (what did I learn); Question 4 (how might be limiting myself, how to improve); Question 5 (personal values); Question 6 (roles); Question 7 (which role is major focus); Question 8 (goals for each role); Question 9 (top ten goals); Question 10 (how to makes sure am working toward top goals). Engaging boys school for me: develop year plans for A. & N.

Well, I just purchased Pam's Morning Time for us. So maybe I can report back later! She actually suggests aiming Morning Time at the older ones, and she does (if I recall correctly) mention that some children could leave morning time sooner. And: one thing that has worked fairly well for me, in rounding out morning time, is the fine arts plans from Harmony Fine Arts. She has free samples. I bring my laptop over to the table (several years ago we invested in a large-screen laptop for pretty much this reason) and we look at & discuss a painting. Then I find a YouTube performance of some of the suggested music (I often spend a few minutes searching for a performance that is more interesting to watch than the one HFA links) and the boys can draw or mess with Thinking Putty or whatever while we listen. When I do this regularly, it adds a hard-to-define depth to our lives. Very CM in influence, I think. Daily poetry was similar, when we did it, but I've fallen off the wagon. 😉 Ditto with Shakespeare, Plutarch ... am trying to get back on it again ...

Morning! Am at the planning today. School, life, RPG. Wish me luck! Yesterday I squished my thumb and it is okay, if blue-ish, now but put me out of commission for cooking & especially for baking. So we thawed some pulled pork & had quick sandwiches & veggies. Tonight's dinner is family take-out & my MIL will come downstairs to join us. I think that next week will be some sort of holiday/school hybrid. The boys' language classes pick up, so I'm thinking of something like morning time, languages, math, reading & then writing thank-you notes, getting out some last-minute cookies, working together to brainstorm & plan for the year ahead. ETA: whoo-hoo, finished Module 2 of my planning. I'll aim for a module/day on average this week and that should see me through; I might try to double up tomorrow so that Monday is clearer for first day back at online classes + my RPG. Module list for me: 1 (vision, complete); 2 (goals, complete); 3 &4 (subjects & resources, to do + annual schedules,mostly done); 5 (weekly & daily schedules, to do ); 6 & 7 (procedures + lesson plan list, these go together and may take a couple of days, to do); 8 (organization, may want e-book, to do); 9 (visualization & implementation tips, to do); 10 (periodic review & maintenance, to do).

Happy New Year's! Today is planning, planning, planning: school, year, RPG. Get some exercise, too; do some chores; spend some time with family. Dinner: pizza galettes, salad + fresh veggies, some sort of dessert would be nice. maybe order French.

One quick suggestion for Bible stories in elementary/middle school: The Action Bible. I care about Bible, and this version gets some tricky things astonishingly right (like the book of Job, which is really hard to make sense of). It is my agnostic children's favorite version. There are some others I'll try to post later. I haven't found resources yet that I really love for studying Islam or Buddhism, though we've touched on these; or for studying native religions. Mainly, though, I want to encourage you to engage with the process of understanding people of faith. For better or worse, people of faith are no improvement on (and no degradation of) the average person. So you will finds lots of foolishness, stupidity, and even cruelty in their writings and their lives. But there is something to the religious worldview that is worth understanding, and in its better incarnations something that can lift up the spirit. It would be a mistake, for example, to teach one's children that the ancient Greeks believed the stuff in D'Aulaire's "Greek Myths" and the modern Christians believe the stuff in "The Action Bible". Though most secular parents do this. To round out this example, let us consider Socrates: he is an ancient Greek who appears to have taken the concept of the divine quite seriously. And yet is rather hard to imagine him worshiping D'Aulaire's gods. I can't begin to understand what Socrates believed or thought, but I do know that the ancient Greeks tended to have a very deep sense of the immortality of some things that clearly transcended the human scale. Love, for example; or war; or a spring and the stream it fed. There was some particular quality to such things. They had existed long before Socrates was born and would endure long after him: there was immortality, something that lasted beyond the mortal timespan. There was power. And even the modern person can feel something of this, today. With this perspective we can also begin to relate to claims like this one: Alexander the Great was a god. He is one of the relatively few figures whom his own associates suspected of really being "divine". Some were convinced of it. And (from a modern perspective) why? Not because they were ignorant; but because to those who knew him well, Alexander was quite literally a force of Nature and it was obvious that his legacy would transcend the "mortal" by orders of magnitude. He was not just more than most humans; he seemed of an utterly different kind. The Greeks also had some of the, well, I'd say the "overhead" of religion. The administrative & cultural baggage. For instance: the root of the social order was supposed to be divine, and this was rather important for getting people to be decent citizens. So Greek city-states had origin stories firmly based on divine grace -- like Athens and Athena. We now have evidence that when Greeks started new settlements, they deliberately crafted origin myths and then everyone treated those stories as if they were, essentially, historical. Though obviously the folks who designed them had at least some inkling of the mundane reality. Relating administrative and cultural baggage to our example of Alexander: while there were people who knew him well and were convinced of his divinity, this was not always the case of leaders hailed as "divine". By the time we get to Nero I'm pretty sure nobody thought they were dealing with an extraordinary individual who transcended the usual limits of humanity. But also by that time the functioning of the Roman state required that the emperor be divine. And there was a probably a sense that Nero was somewhat divine simply by virtue of being emperor of the Roman Emperor, itself an entity beyond the mortal. I expect the ancients developed ceremonies to imbue the origin stories of their cities -- and I know they had ceremonies to imbue the divinity of emperors -- with a sense of dignity and to encourage the people designing them to do so from an appropriate frame of mind. That's all pretty analytical. The average Greek may well have had a sense of the gods that was close to the D'Aulaire's version, if more earthy. 😉 One can do this with Christianity, too. There are strong elements of my faith that my academic friends can relate to, others that they don't. There are Christians who attempt to take their holy books as literally as possible and those who bring a historical and literary context to the table. There are impulses within Christianity that nearly anyone of good will and decent imagination finds sympathetic; there are impulses that are nothing but administrative baggage, or ways to keep people's behavior in line. But in general, when you run into something religious in your studies, it is worthwhile to just take note of what seems alien or offensive to you. State it clearly, label it, sit with it. Then take the time to find something sympathetic, something worthwhile. Check the claims being made against your own sense of what works and is true. Occasionally, read a bit more or dip further into something that catches your imagination. Or that offends you mightily. Or that enchants you. Remember that no religious institution is utterly corrupt: there are always individuals within who believe that their religion enhances human wellness and who are dedicated to service. No religious institution is utterly benign: there are always individuals within who are hungry for power, for authority, and some who take their deepest joy in demeaning other persons. And, finally, work to make clear your own basis for morality, for ethics, and for civic behaviors. How do you decide what is right? What concessions to you make to practical necessities, how do you smooth the edges of your beliefs so that you can live comfortably with others? Hope something here was helpful. 🙂

what a sweet image! and a delightful way to get going this New Year's Eve. I am a great fan of babies' heads ... they are little bits of heaven. Today: Planning: draft a rough daily plan / schedule / list Planning: month / microterm planning Planning: year planning Fitness all around RPG: 1 hour of work; 2 is my stretch goal. Home: do my chores. Lunch video with boys is Cosmos episode 1 (has some stressful stuff so we're knocking it out early in the day) then Cosmos 2 Totoro for family movie night. Tomorrow maybe some Little Prince at lunch ... ETA: well, y'all, I surely have tomorrow's work ready to go, startin' with all the stuff I didn't get done today ... 😉

Yup, it's morning', darlin'. Okay! list of stuff to do for RPG (maybe I'll insert that here) + begin game-prep essentials week/holiday review, month review, plan week/month ahead. begin yearly planning. fitness for boys, me. catch up with DH -- we've been busy lately! Monday chores, spend some time on outside chores.

Hope your foot heals soon, Critterfixer! Today was fairly successful, and the boys did some Bible reading, hurrah. To think of tomorrow: RPG prep; work on school plans for elder and younger; fitness all around; house cleaning; do some fun stuff with family. It is a vacation week, though younger needs to practice piano and elder will be working on a Christmas kit.

Good afternoon! Today is general organizational stuff, enjoy my family, get some exercise, draft my game. I was trying to save time with a pre-written adventure but that has turned into rather a morass. So I'd like to make sure the players & I have a goal/motivation/reward for this chunk of the adventure; that the goals they've already given can be met (or worked toward) in this chunk; and that I have some specific events in this chunk, plus a meaningful & interesting exit from it combined with an interesting re-entry into the main world that is consistent with the story and includes an incentive to action (note to self: perhaps C's loose lips sink some ships?) And work on year planning.

what .... no school??? 🤣🤣🤣 Here either. And no piano practice. Merry Christmas! We had a lovely morning, hurrah! and it is raining now, hurrah! Today's list: read & start to memorize "quick start" DM rules get info for my players on locations, activities, items, and encounters for Monday clean cooking is pretty null today; I got my hands on a lot of cold cuts, bread & crackers, and cheese. So just prepping some fresh veggies & slicing the meats. 🙂 spend some time planning for the next year. family movie night is finishing "The Princess Bride"

Afternoon! !!!!! Merry Christmas Eve! Today's goals center around engaging various stuff, moving forward with grace. Also migraine management.

I haven't been on the HS forum because my biggest miss this year was: high school. 🤣 <---- that's me either laughing 'til I cry or crying 'til I laugh. 2019 saw some very serious health problems for my elder, so I'd pushed my latest high school "start date" to Jan 2021; and 2020's challenges were compounded at our house, so I'm giving myself until Feb 2021 to make it official. We're bringing a puppy home that month, though, so staying focused will take a lot of grace + discipline. But a lot of my elder DS's work is high school level, so we do have some hits + misses to share. Hit: CLRC Latin. He doesn't love Latin, but this class is great for him. Hit: CLRC Greek. He is first-year in this, and is learning to work regularly and study well. Hit: AoPS math. Finally! Again: doesn't love, but is doing well. He outpaced me, so he meets with DH 2x week to look at stuff. Hit: homegrown coding with DH during his math check-ins. Child is learning to code up math problems + problems he invents. Hit: Artistic Pursuits sculpture program. We don't get to it as often as I'd like, and he doesn't always like the assignments at first, but he gets caught up once he's going. Hit: not starting high school level literature. He's wrapping up the WTM 8th grade reading list + doing suggested writing for the literature and is having, on average, a blast. What a shock to me! he kept laughing out loud at Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" and now is taking a rather ironic view of "Hiawatha". Hit: not starting high school level writing. He's doing well in, and having some fun with, WWS2. Miss: Zumdahl's chemistry. Though was partly our fault since I had to focus my energies and so I let science and history lag. I'm going to try a more historically-contextualized program next, maybe Centripetal Press, and try to read some of the classic papers together. Miss: piano. He is not destined to like this instrument. And didn't want to try a different one. We found an astonishingly wonderful teacher, and he still didn't care, so he gets to drop music performance! okay: Harmony Fine Arts art + music study. Again, mostly the troubles are caused by me not having time to commit. This program has helped keep our feet in the arts, which is great.

@Critterfixer: those are wonderful to look at! The expression on your cat's face is captivating, and I enjoy the way light/dark balance keeps my eye moving around the picture ... and the tree just makes me feel happy, happy, happy in meditative sort of way. Thank you for sharing these: what a holiday treat.

Oh sweetie, hang in there. Hmm. That may sound patronizing: it isn't meant to be. I mean, I'm sort of in awe of the stuff you juggle on a normal day. Hoping all the sick ones in your home recover well & soon. Today: younger: Greek final plus plenty of music, I'd like to spend just a quarter hour or so jotting down notes on his educational plan. elder: helped younger study; is doing math/coding with DH. Write up his lit. crit. for "The Importance of Being Earnest". Ideally, finish his art project (he finished, it just needs a more stable base). And I'd like to spend just a quarter hour or so jotting down notes for his plan, too. me: fitness, prep for tree decorating with MIL this afternoon/evening, catch up with DH, take elder on an errand to get materials for the Christmas gift he's making for his brother. house: clean, wrap a few presents (one for each boy, ideally one for MIL + DH too). RPG: try to get PDF into Kindle format, work on rules review.

oops! double post ... so, just for kicks and to fill in the space, here's a link to a lego version of Hokusai’s iconic wave painting. 🙂

Morning! Oh my, the week has flown by -- sorry I've been away. Today we're doing a language & music push for younger: he has a test tomorrow; focus on art with some math + some literature for elder: his tests are done; fitness for boys: run, strength fitmess for me early dinner before younger's Zoom music lesson -- his teacher is in China right now. Will be ready-to-eat pulled pork; salad of some sort; bread item; fresh veggies. make kettle corn to munch on just for the holiday heck of it tree decorating "party" with my MIL (she lives in attached apartment) after piano lesson bedtime stories for boys (following a couple nights of watching "Elf" before bed) work on RPG: read over part 2 of adventure, clean up notes, work on session prep list + check Reddit post, add what I've learned extra credit: get wreath on gate