True that.

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”
― Robert Frost

Gus, Gus, Gus...

Half-artist, half-musician.  All wild man, all the time...  Here he is reciting Hamlet.

More Maddy-Lion.

Maddy (she's the one in pink) still wants to be a writer, despite all my warnings--haha!  She loves composing stories and poems (she even read a poem of hers publicly last week at the monthly poetry reading I host!), and weeps at Robert Frost's poetry.  She is gentle and mischievous--a real little imp. 

Stellastar.

Stella is obsessed with birds, art, needlework, fashion, and period movies.  She is a stunning, strong, and spirited girl, and she turns 13 in just eleven days!  I think for her birthday we're going to make a trip to the Jane Austen Festival in Louisville--in full dress!  She and Madeline are also having a big birthday celebration here at home toward the end of July.  The theme?  Gone With the Wind, of course!

Teenagers Are Amazing.

So, Ezra (second from the left--gray shirt) was accepted by the Health Science Institute this summer.  He made lots of new friends, and had a blast shadowing health care professionals, attending lectures, and traveling to visit larger hospitals in Indianapolis.  He was even able operate a Da Vinci Robot, and he was asked to represent the student body as a speaker at their banquet--what an honor!  He's been busy preparing for the college application process, and he's narrowed his choices down a bit.  Antioch College is first (of course!), then Earlham, and The University of the Cumberlands.  He's currently working on an organic CSA farm, which is run by the Daughters of Charity, the nuns I work for part-time as a nurse.

Wow, It's Really Been That Long.

The last post I wrote was about Clara's college application process. 

She was accepted at Antioch College on a full tuition scholarship!  She loves it.  She's majoring in Psychology, minoring in French, and she just returned from her first work co-op (required at Antioch) herding sheep for Black Mesa Indigenous Support on the Navajo Nation/ Hopi Lands in Arizona. 

Fall Update, 2010

Clara is preparing to take the SAT exam in January. She is such a hard worker and so motivated! She has made a list of all the colleges she's interested in and they include places like Earlham, Vanderbilt, Rhodes, Centre, Berea, etc. I'm excited to see where she is accepted! She's also thinking about taking a job in food service at the nunnery where I work (as a nurse), in order to save a bit of college money. She's reading the classics (still). Smart girl...

Ezra is loving, loving, loving Civil Air Patrol. They meet every Monday night, and he looks forward to it all week. He is also working on SAT preparation--especially in math, since his math scores will have to be fairly high for him to be accepted to a good aviation/ aerospace engineering college. He is studying the effects of the Civil War on contemporary society through various periodicals and Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic. He's also reading Tolkien's Ring Trilogy.

Stella is a sewing fiend! She has a sewing table set up in her room, and hardly a day passes where she doesn't sit for hours working on a new project. She is reading Conan comics, the May Bird series, and Anacaona, from The Royal Diaries series. She has been practicing her writing, because writing is especially challenging for her. She loves playing the piano (especially God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen), and doing the animals with Daddy.

Madeline is my writer and fellow yogi. She writes poetry and stories daily. She says, "I'm writing a story called A Scary Halloween and a poem called Love, and I think I'm going to start something new today." She is reading the Clarice Bean series and the Emily Windsnap mermaid series. She and Gus use their imaginations to create incredibly involved games all day long, every day.

Gus has become a regular reading machine! He practices reading every day in early readers, on soup can labels, billboards, junk mail, etc. He still wants to spend half the day drawing and half the day in play, and we generally oblige. We have been doing a family unit study on Dickens, and he has been traumatized by the life of poor Oliver Twist--no loving parents, no comfort food, every day in a workhouse... Gus has said quite frequently that he is so grateful he is not an orphan, and that he finds the idea "terrifying." Poor baby!

The order of our days generally follows a pattern, though not necessarily a schedule. The babies wake when they're ready, have breakfast, and play. (Clara and Ezra I wake if they're not up by nine, generally.) Clara and Ezra check their emails, and either hang laundry on the line or load the dishwasher. Ezra usually walks the dogs. Afterward, we do collective school time where we read or watch a related movie together, or if it's a math day, we work for several hours reviewing harder problems together (if it's Monday, we plan out our week together), and then we split up and work individually on whatever is lighting our fire at the moment. All the children spend a good chunk of time outside every day, and I cook all our meals from scratch with locally-grown (ours or the CSA's) vegetables, so that takes some time. Clara and my girls are a big help in the kitchen. The boys, not so much--though Gus does love kneading bread :) We generally have several outings each week to birthday parties, Grandma's house, and the occasional field trip, but mostly we just like being home on our little farm. It's a wonderful life!