Morning Notes

Aelred's van is still in the shop, so he took mine to work this morning. He also took Epiphany, who has Latin class today. Her professor has tracked the class into sections of better- and less-prepared students and given each "track" a day off: instead of Monday/Wednesday/Friday, Epiphany -- who I think is in the more-prepared group, thanks to Fr. Victor and Henle last year -- now goes to the college only on Wednesdays and Fridays, which gives her a bit of a break and makes the long days in the library a little more palatable. She does get a fair amount of work done in that setting -- it helps her to be away from home, with all home's distractions (though to be entirely truthful, I fear that Facebook, to which she has access on the college computers, provides a substantial distraction at times). Still, she's written an outline and a rough draft for her Beowulf paper this week, done a good amount of math and biology, and read her history, so I can't complain. I meant to suggest to her today that if she got tired of the library, she might go over to the beautiful and recently-completed Adoration chapel on the campus, and spend some time with the Lord. Adoration would be a good thing to work on -- good for her soul, and we can count it as religion class, too . . . Aelred and I will have to pull together some readings for her to take with her. This could be a very good thing, now that I mull it over.

Here at home, we're carless, and it's raining, so we may or may not carry through on our plan to walk to the library later on. So far today I've done more Miquon Math with Helier and Crispina -- we concentrated on the many ways of making 4 (4+0, 3+1, 1+3, 2+2) using the rods and practicing writing the numbers in the answers, while Amicus began work on a chemistry notebook, going back and drawing the atoms for the elements in the first Latitude. Another day we'll carry on with the copywork we began the other day -- I won't make him go back and copy ALL the entries for ALL the elements, because he'd be sure to see that as cruel and unnecessary punishment. Now he's reading Malory's Morte D'Arthur in a prose translation.

He picked it up off the porch, where I'd been reading it. We had a very Arthurian weekend with a friend who had brought along Tennyson's Idylls of the King to read to me, so the legends are very much in my mind. After math this morning I began to read aloud to Helier and Crispina, who were busy coloring and putting pages of art in binders, from Rosemary Sutcliff's The Sword and the Circle, which is a beautifully-wrought retelling of the legends managing to keep both the sense of the primal Celtic origins of the legends and the medieval chivalric overlay created by Malory and others. It's not really a little-children's book, and I have edited and abridged here and there as I've been reading, but it is very well-told, as all Sutcliff's stories are, and what's in the legends as she tells them is pretty much in any telling which isn't utterly bowdlerized and sugar-coated. You can't get around Uther and Igraine, for example -- though we did spend some time talking about David, Bathsheba and Uriah, and the way that God both levies consequences for sin and exacts penance, AND turns human evil to His own purposes (ie raising up a king like Solomon in the wake of David's sin). If you think you can't have conversations like this with kindergarteners, well . . . I dunno. I kind of think you have to. Anyway, the story is compelling, and it's in a very great sense a foundational epic for Western culture, in the vein of the Iliad, and I think that one can't begin internalizing the great stories too early, or thinking about the ways in which they point to the Truth.

So we did all that. In a while, Amicus is going to pick up with the chapter test on division which he's been doing in the MCP book, while Helier and Crispina and I are going to make gingerbread. They want to make men, but I'm going to make some hearts, too, for Saint Margaret Mary on her traditional feast day. Meanwhile, Crispina's playing with Moon Sand on the porch, and Helier's building with Legos upstairs. If the rain stops, we'll walk to the library -- otherwise, I'm not sure what we'll do to occupy the day. Read some more Arthur, possibly . . .

Oh, and I've been trying to pray an abridged and edited form of the Office, as found in this prayer book --

Helier and Crispina joined me voluntarily for Lauds this morning, and we prayed Terce at the beginning of our schoolday; I imagine we'll say Sext, with the Angelus, at noon. So we really are playing home monastery today . . . somehow I think that meshes with reading about Arthur, though I'm not sure at this moment that I can articulate exactly how.