Graduated!

My Graduation Speech

Homeschooling takes a lot of commitment, as most of you here well know. There’s a reason that homeschooled mothers start dropping like flies and sending their kids to school around 6th grade, or High school. It isn’t easy to parent a child and also be responsible for their entire education; it’s especially difficult if your child happens to be anything like me. I admit that I did hide my cursive

What Not to Wear

You've probably seen this show, or at least heard of it. If any of these dresses made it onto What Not to Wear, I'm sure they would be in the trash bin in seconds. The retailer claims they are vintage masterpieces...I claim they are disasters!

Sentence Collection: Jane Eyre

The following passage is one of my favorite quotes from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. This takes place right after she decides that she cannot marry her lover, Mr. Rochester.


"I wanted to be weak that I might avoid the awful passage of further suffering I saw laid out for me; and conscience, turned tyrant, held passion by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but dipped her dainty foot in the slough, and swore that with that arm of iron he would thrust her down to unsounded depths of agony."

I don't know about you, but I think that that is some of the most beautiful writing I've ever heard. If you haven't read Jane Eyre, now is the time!

Sentence Collection: Gwen and Cecily

From The Importance of being Earnest. Gwendolen and Cecily have just broken off their engagements with their lovers and are watching from the house window to see if their recently-dumped lovers will follow. This made me laugh because, although many females may not admit it, this is exactly the kind of thing we like to do. We just hide it under clever sentences. Enjoy!

GWENDOLEN
The fact that they did not follow us at once into the house, as any one else would have done, seems to me to show that they have some sense of shame left.

CECILY
They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.

GWENDOLEN
[After a pause.] They don't seem to notice us at all. Couldn't you cough?

My Collection of Sentences

In my opinion, there is nothing more artful, more clever, more beautiful or more perfect than a well-crafted sentence. My next thread of blog posts are going to be on my favorite sentences and quotes from well-known literary works ranging from Great Expectations to Jane Eyre.

This week's quote is from Shakespeare's Hamlet:

(After Claudius finds out that Hamlet murdered Polonius, the King's chief advisor. Hamlet has been pretending to be "gone mad" and continues to do so in this dialogue.)
Claudius: Where is Polonius?!
Hamlet: At supper.
Claudius: (looks frustrated) At supper where?

Homeschool Class of '11

My parents decided to move when I was 3. My little brother was on the way and we needed a bigger house, but my parents also wanted to be in a good school district. Then, right before we moved we met the Harrison* family, our neighbors one street over. They were a quaint little Mennonite family who had four little children, all of which never told lies, listened to their parents, and wore traditional Mennonite clothing. Despite these oddities, the strangest thing about the Harrisons was not their clothes or the way they behaved...it was where they went to school. Matthew and David (and eventually Elizabeth and Grace) all attended school at home!

My mother was intrigued, but when Mrs. Harrison suggested she homeschool me, my mom only laughed. She and my dad had just bought a house because they liked the school system, and plus she wasn't even a teacher. Why would she ever want to homeschool? Although she allowed me to play with 2-year- old Elizabeth Harrison, my mom avoided Mrs. Harrison's strong ideas about home education.

But God, in His infinite wisdom and great sense of humor, had other plans.