Thirteen Lessons from Thirteen Years

Well, an even dozen is too unexciting.  When we buy new dishes we always buy 13 in case one breaks.  (For some reason this does not work with bowls. A dozen or so years ago we bought 13 bowls.  We now have one left.) And as my twelve year old daughter said about turning twelve last year, “Twelve is the most uninteresting of numbers.  Eleven was fantastic; thirteen will be a new era; but, well, twelve is…just twelve.” 

Thirteen years of home schooling is actually what I am talking about.  It’s also why this blog grows a little scarce around September.  All those lesson plans I should have done all summer long?  Well, we were kayaking underneath waterfalls and jumping off cliffs and celebrating anniversaries and growing gardens.  We’re still doing those same things but the 200 foot waterfall coming down on us is made of words and facts and figures and brain force, the cliff jumping is landing us in pools of pages and protractors, the anniversaries are more “can you believe it’s another school year again!!! Where did October come from, anyway??  Didn't we just have one of those?” And the gardens are the fertile minds that keep growing.  It is a cacophony of learning, with the music playing and the lights on and the brains whirling.

So I got it in my head that when I had nothing better to do (why, half of my ironing will just disappear once I put away summer clothes and bring out winter!!) I would write down thirteen things I’ve learned from these wonderful thirteen years.  They are not in order of importance, because I only know what three of them are yet.

First lesson:  Build a family identity of Books.

Don’t leave home without a book; teach them not to leave home without a book.  That wait in line or dentist office, why, you can get through 10 pages.  It adds up.  Two hours of work are done at piano lessons waiting for siblings.

When the kids were little and I was worried about airport layovers and car rental waits and long drives, we always had new books.  We’ve travelled a lot, and books defined our trips.  The kids can remember what we were reading aloud when we were where.  The memories of the places are enhanced by the adventures of the mind they were experiencing while feasting the eyes on amazing things.  It makes the senses more alive.  Some of these times would have been tedious, long, and very trying, except that their minds were in the lands of Hans Brinker or Treasure Island or The Golden Goblet.  Many of these were books on tape I loaded on an Ipod before we left.

When we are waiting for our food at a restaurant, which always takes forever when you have five, six, or more, ordering, we feel robbed if we don’t have a book to read aloud.  If we do, the time passes quickly.

One year when we drove an hour to church, we read Doug Bond's excellent youth trilogies on the Covenanters.  We'd roll into the parking lot amidst cries of protest about stopping at a cliffhanger.  And the pleasure of it was, he himself was there, and when we'd walk in he'd ask, "So where are you now?" 

Many characters from books have been memorized for repeating classic lines, or for some shorthand mutual understanding in our conversations.  We have family jokes taken from our readings.  Calvin and Hobbes are an integral part of our viewing of daily life.  Shared experiences.

We read broadly; theological books and missionary biographies are littered like most families’ pop cans through our home, our years, our family worship and our conversations.  Traveling calls for a gripping story or a hilarious one.  When the kids were little we read those fairly silly Enid Blyton mysteries with Kiki the parrot, on vacations.  This last summer we read “A Dog’s Life” – occasionally irreverent or inappropriate but vastly funny, (along with “A Year in Provence” and “Tujour Provence”); and Kisses From Katie, about a young woman from Tennessee who moved to Uganda and adopted thirteen orphan girls (recommended).  And the kids have finally learned that when my voice encounters a certain brief hesitation and vagueness that there was something I found necessary to skip right on over if it was not suited to their intake.  We also have loved the Swallow and Amazon series by Arthur Ransome.  All twelve.  The classy little sailing skiff we built one year as a family at the Center for Wooden Boats is, of course, named Swallow, and our people named themselves after the characters, hoisted the flag and rowed to far flung adventures on our little pond.

Our son worked all summer for neighbors, doing landscaping and yard work.  The carharrt gear doesn’t go with the Ipod image, does it?  But he got through Moby Dick, Count of Monte Cristo, The Robe, three or four WWII books, and half a dozen others I can’t remember.  Then we went through Veritas’s Omnibus discussions of some of the books – priceless to understand where the author was coming from and his worldview.  Our younger daughter does the same while ironing or cooking.

Some of those things that fall through the cracks yearly but are really important, can be read aloud daily over lunch.  This year we are covering three or four daily, as our eldest is a senior and all their book lists are already too long.  I just read from each one for about 15 minutes.  One we are immensely enjoying is GK Chesterton’s In Defense of Sanity.  Talk about having a root beer float for lunch!!