A Few Thoughts

1.  This post at Copperlight Wood.  Read it.

2.  The Ambleside community.  I am continually blown away by their graciousness and generosity.  Each time I visit the robust online forum, or read one of the many blogs by Ambleside users, I come away blessed and informed. These women have helped shape not only my homeschooling but also my life over the last many years–I have tended to read and glean rather than post and share, and I am wanting very much to change that.  They are such a blessing.

3.  10 year old boys.  Are they always this emotional?

4.  Poetry. My (emotional) 10 year old boy enjoyed this stanza of a Kipling poem today (from A Boy Scout’s Patrol Song):

Look out where your temper goes
At the end of a losing game;
When your boot’s too tight for your toes;
And you answer and argue and blame.
It’s the hardest part of the Law,
But it has to be learnt by the Scout–
For whining and shirking and “jaw”
(Chorus) All Patrols look out!

5.  And that boy’s Mama loved reading, as she always has, Kipling’s If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

6.  Sons.  I’m lucky to have ’em.

 (Day 21 of the Writing Challenge; where I’m “Just Writing” daily for 31 days.)