There is a Season
As a homeschool mom there’s a constant struggle for designating specific “school times” through out the day. She is learning that education is a life pursuit, and at four can tell you that. I can’t tell you how adorable it is to have a four year old look at someone when they ask her about school and tell them, “Education is a life pursuit.” Every day, every moment, is a chance to learn something – and she is extremely aware of this as we stop to read information along trails, get sidetracked by research projects after asking a simple question, and discuss the scientific reasons things are happening in the kitchen as I cook. But sitting down for specific lessons, that’s a bit harder to grasp. We open our reading book and she thinks that crazy silly time shall commence. She has a stubborn nature she gets from me combined with her father’s joy of watching me fume with frustration, seriously, I get angry and she laughs at me. It’s a problem.
Someone from one of the homeschooling forums on Facebook gave us a great idea, though. Read Ecc. 3:1 before every lesson. Don’t know that one off the cuff? The “lyrics” were made famous in the 1950’s by The Byrds.
The concept of there being a proper time and place for every activity and emotion, is a necessary lesson to teach toddlers (and kids, and teenagers, and humans at large). Emotions, feelings, and attitudes toward chores can be intense. There is a time to feel those things and a time to suck it up and do what you have to do. Just like a gardener has “a time to plant and a time to uproot” there’s also “a time to weep and a time to laugh.” We end the reading of these verses with, “there is also a time to be silly and a time to focus on your lessons.”
Needless to say, both little girl and I were excited to find this book at the public library last month.
This picture is beautiful. It reveals art styles from all different regions, cultures, and time. It gives a child a great sense of the impact these words have on every human throughout history. Everyone must learn this lesson, the fact that everything has a time and place. That feelings can and will be embraced and (if we want to be overly bookish and quote An Imperial Affliction – a book by a character imagined by John Green in The Fault in our Stars) and say, “Pain demands to be felt,” but as every grown person has learned at some point, sometimes it can’t be felt right now. For a four year old, the wiggles must come out… but they can’t always come out right now either.
And everyone must learn this lesson. Whether you are from China, Russia, Germany, Egypt, or Ancient Greece. Whether you are Native American or from the heart of Mexico. Whether you hail from the Ukraine or Australia, Japan or England. Humanity is united in this one all encompassing lesson of life: “There is a time to mourn and a time to dance… a time to search and a time to give up… a time to love and a time to hate… a time for war and a time for peace.”
Old Souls
Title:Been There, Done That, Really!
Author: Paulette Camnetar Meeks
Publisher: Xulon Press
Genre: Memoirs/ Short Stories/ Christian Living/ Large Print
Length: 496 pages
Paulette Meeks stood at the table of books at the bookstore after her signing, “Pick one you think you’ll like.” She is in her seventies, has several titles out, and has recently become a writing machine though she’ll tell you, “I never thought I’d be a writer, but God gave me these stories.”
Paulette and her friends. (Ms. Meeks is on the far left.)
I looked over the books. One is fit for a Sunday School class, one looks fun and spunky featuring a nun zooming by on a motorcycle. I picked Been There, Done That, Really! It has an elderly couple, the sort you imagine have grown old together, looking off into the distance over what I presume is a cup of coffee (could be tea, but I’m partial to coffee drinkers). Obviously, this appeals to me.
I always thought there were two kinds of people in the world – those that prefer the very young and those who prefer the very old. I’m of the old variety. I love my child, but I’ve never been a natural nurturer to children. To me they are just little people who haven’t learned how to function well in society. They don’t yet look beyond their own noses, they are selfish and self-serving. Thanks to hormones and motherhood that view has changed a bit – my daughter is indeed a little person, but I can see the wise woman she will one day be. And the cute, snuggly factor helps.
This picture was taken about thirteen years ago, but I remember this woman vividly.
The elderly, though, have always intrigued me. Even as a very small child, I preferred white hair and wrinkles to the company of my peers. I learned to count by playing SkipBo with a woman who was born at the turn of the century – the 1899 to 1900 one, I realize I have to specify these days. In high school when I did community service projects, I always opted for cleaning homes for assisted living homes in low income neighborhoods over playground session with tiny people. I enjoyed the conversations. Then and now, I like hearing the stories.
If you’re one of those people too, the kind who likes to hear about a lifetime of adventures from someone interested in sharing them, Paulette Meeks’ collection of stories are for you. They are sweet, simple tales from people who just want to talk about their lives a little bit. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
My favorite story was Paulette’s own: Never Too Old to Be Smitten. There is a picture at the start of the story of Paulette and her husband Bill on their wedding day June 29th in 2001. I found the idea of finding love in your sixties so wonderfully sweet. Bill was a widower before Paulette, and I hope that if I die first, my husband finds someone to keep him company before he leaves this world. (We wives like to believe our men can’t live without us. ) More than anything, the word ‘smitten’ is a magical word and it is easy to get caught up in the romance of the meaning while you read the story of their first meeting and first date.
Reading through these stories reminded me of another book I’ve reviewed here before, Rich Fabric
How Alcott Raises Little Women
Title: Little Women
Author: Louisa May Alcott
Publisher: Little, Brown
Genre: Young Adult Classics
Length: 502 pages
I don’t remember learning to read, as I did it from such a young age. I do, however, remember the first books I fell in love with and the first books I read that were difficult for my limited vocabulary. Laura Ingalls Wilder I fell in love with first, I read the entire series several times by the end of first grade. Little Women, however, I fell in love with and learned from in second grade. Little Women taught me new words and phrases, culture, and how I wanted to live.
Josephine March has been one of my heroes since I was seven and first read about her chopping off all her luxurious hair. As a young girl, I identified quite well with her “one beauty” (that amazing hair) and tomboyish ways. I myself, was a ruddy, freckled girl, often found either playing tag football with boys at recess or perched in an oak tree reading a book, hair flowing every which way that my mother did not allow me to cut. My first significant hair cut, I donated two feet to locks of love, and who else was on my mind? Jo March.
I re-read the book multiple times before I left elementary school, getting more and more out of it each time as my reading skills improved. And despite cherishing it always, I set the book aside and did not read it again until my twenty-seventh year, this year, to my one year old daughter.
I opened it up a week or so before Christmas, not realizing it would spur a desire to re-read it every Christmas with my kid for the rest of her life if she likes it as much as I do. It’s such a great Christmas book! Upon this fresh re-read, I also discovered many other things that my brain had forgotten, but my soul must have internalized. For instance, the girls are all distraught and Hannah, bless her soul, “came to the rescue armed with a coffee-pot.”
Like every good American, I am wholly addicted to that black magical brew, it’s in our veins and culture, look at how well Starbucks has taken off. But my family did not keep coffee readily available, my dad won’t touch the stuff and my mom’s mother died of cancer the doctors blamed on her caffeine intake so she never kept it around growing up. So part of me wonders if Alcott played a role in my introduction to it, as I don’t remember a time when I did not love it. I remember sneaking cups of it from the employee break room at the bus barn where I waited with my bus driver between routes in elementary school. In hindsight, I believe it was the reverence that writers hold for it, the way it is talked about in books, that drove me to love it so much, and it very well may have begun with Little Women.
Then, there is Theodore Laurence. I believe every guy friend’s worth that I ever had my whole life was measured against the character of Laurie. He is whimsical, gallant, a rascal and a gentleman. Theodore Laurence is handsome, a friend, and all around a good time. Every girl needs a Teddy-Dear in her adolescent life and if you can’t get one in the real world, its time for yet another read of Little Women so you can live vicariously through Jo!
Jo March taught me to love, to read, to pursue life with a fiery passion, and how to pick my friends. It was Jo March that sparked the first desires in me to be a writer. It was Little Women, and the romance of Jo and the Professor, that set the stage for me to fall in love with the art of Jane Austen and the Brontes. It was the pen of Louisa May Alcott that taught me how to really enjoy books and the thrilling life they have to offer.
Anakalian Whims 