Quotable Kids

 "Hey, what's in this bag?"

"It's a bag of money for your fish banks, but don't touch it. It's just in a ziploc, and there are probably five pounds of coins in there, so if you take it out then they are going to spill everywhere."

"This is our to KEEP? We're rich!"

"No you aren't. That money is to put in your fish banks so that you can give it back at the church fundraiser."

"Well, we don't have to give away all of it, right? Can we keep most of it for buying LEGOS?"

"We're going to give away all of it."

"Owen isn't letting me have a turn holding the bag of treasure!"

"Stop grabbing it, Felix! Besides, we're only going to get to keep some of it!"

"You aren't going to get to keep any of it. And put it back in the grocery bag, please, or it's going to spill all over."

"But why did you get us a bag of this treasure if we couldn't keep most of it?"

"I didn't. But Ms. Christy from church thought it would be a good idea for you to have some coins to put in your fishbanks for needy kids."

"I need LEGOS..can some of the money be for me?"

"Owen stole the treasure back from me! My turn wasn't very long!"

"Neither of you should be touching it. Please put it back in the grocery bag."

"Hey, we're home! I'll bring it in the treasure and keep it in my room, Dad!"

<Ziploc bag, which he is holding upside down, bursts and scatters coins all over the garage as soon as he steps out of the van.>

........................

"Dad, can I write this letter in cursive?"

"You could, Felix, but I don't think that you know how to write in cursive."

"Right, but I don't want to write the letter in regular writing, because that isn't fancy enough. So I'll fix it into cursive once you write it for me in regular."

........................

"Dad, look, I made all of my numbers clockwise in my math!"

"Okay, Felix...does that mean that you are starting to make all of your numbers by starting at the top and going down, like we've talked about?"

"No, it means that I wrote them clockwise!"

"I'm not sure that you can make all of the numbers clockwise and still write them correctly."

"Well, I did!"

<Holds up a sheet of paper in which he has printed all of his math answers using only even-length horizontal and vertical strokes...just like the digits that appear on the digital clock in his room.>

...................

"Wait, so the Mandalorian never takes off his helmet? But what about when he needs to take naps? How does he suck his fingers?"

.....................

ME: "Boys, tonight is a special treat. Mom and I were going to have a date and eat a very fancy meal called Beef Wellington. You were going to have a frozen pizza and be sent to bed early, but then Mom got a stomach bug. I didn't want to waste this cut of really expensive beef, so I'm inviting YOU three to share this fancy meal with me. I put out candles like Mom and I usually have, and we are using real napkins and our best gold spoons, forks, and knives. I expect you to act like gentlemen, and we're going to have a fancy meal...beef wellington with a horseradish cream sauce, and blanched asparagus. Are you boys read to have a nice, grown-up meal?"

JAMES: "Hey, here's a challenge! Do you think I can blow out one of those candles using only my nose?"

Quotable Kids

 James: "I'm thinking about a career in science. I might be an engineer. Or I might do something where I'm working with chemicals and using some chemistry."

Owen: "I think when I grow up I'll just play video games. Or, even better, I'll be a taste-tester! But I'll only try stuff that tastes good."

Me, wanting to know why the bracket to a heavy curtain rod was badly bent: "Boys, what happened here? Did someone hang on the curtain, or try to climb it or something? Is that why the fabric is pulling apart at the top? Was someone swinging on this?"

James: "I would never do that! But...Felix is my number one suck-spect."

Me: "Suck-spect?"

Owen: "Yeah, I bet he did it. He's my number one suck-spect as well."

Me: "Your number one suspect?"

James: "Exactly."

Owen, upon hearing the story of King Solomon and the baby.

"Wow, he WAS smart. I probably would have just done eeny-meenie-miney-moe."

Owen: "Did you know that yellow is my favorite color?"

Me: "I didn't know that. Since when has yellow been your favorite."

Owen: "It's because it has two of my favorite words. Yellow is 'YELL!!' plus 'OW!!'"

Felix: "Daddy, read this book I wrote!"

Me: "Felix, this is great! Look at all these words you spelled, and you drew pictures as well!"

Felix: "Yes, read it!"

Me: "So, let's see. FROGGY GOES TO SCHOOL. I see Froggy goes to school...and Froggy is learning. Oh, Froggy is learning is ABCs. <notes that Felix wrote the alphabet but left out the letter I.> And on this page...someone is a tattle-tale. And on this page...Froggy kicks?"

Felix: "Yeah, and I drew a picture of Froggy kicking him. 'Cause he is a tattle-tale."

Me: "And that's the end of the story?"

Felix: "Right."

Me: "So the story ends with Froggy beating up a snitch?"

Felix, as if explaining something very obvious: "Well, it's a dramatic story."

Felicisms

 Felix is our artist. 

He leaves caches of scissors and crayons in every place that he inhabits (including his bed), and often disappears for an hour at a time to make some new project. 

He cuts an entire stack of napkins into 8ths to be placemats for stuffed animals.

He colors and cuts out clothing for his teddy bears. 

He draws a flag, tapes it onto a broken dowl, and then stands outside waving it. 

He cuts out and colors a crown for himself, then staples it onto a construction paper headband.

He meticulously copies the logo of each NFL team, then binds them together in a "book" made from a shipping box.

He raids the printer for more and more paper. He builds makeshift ladders to get at the stores of adult scissors, tape, and staplers that have been put out of his reach.

He'll be playing outside, and then is suddenly struck by the need to make houses out cereal boxes and runs back in.

He makes a poster for the Battle of the Bands. (The winning song, having just watched "Back to the Future," is "Johnny B. So Good")

He calls himself King Felix now. He has decided that he wants to be a King when he grows up. He says that he will allow me to be one of his guards.

He builds a throne for himself on top of the kitchen garbage can. The throne is approached by a series of steps made from stepstools and couch pillows. One must not tread on the steps to the throne with one's shoes on. Only King Felix is allowed to sit on the throne. 

He builds a racetrack for his matchbox cars using colored pencils lined up end-to-end through the living room. 

And all the while, more paper is spilled, more broken crayons are discarded, more bits of cut-up napkin are dropped haphazardly throughout the house.

It's a lot of work to clean up after an artist.

2022 Reading

 January

The Family Romanov (Fleming)
Call for the Dead (LeCarre)

The River of Consciousness (Sacks)

The Case of the Vanishing Blonde (Bowden)

Timeline (Crichton)

My Brother Sam is Dead (Collier)

Animal (Taddeo)

All's Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare)

Old Cookery and Ancient Cuisine (Hazlitt)

Macbeth (Shakespeare)

Trajectory (Russo)

Othello (Shakespeare)

My Struggle, Book 1 (Knausgaard)

Love's Labor Lost (Shakespeare)

Whose Body? (Sayers)

Angela's Ashes (McCourt)

Jesus and John Wayne (Du Mez)

Odyssey Book 15 (Homer) in Greek

Catch-22 (Heller)

Hamlet (Shakespeare)

The Beautiful and the Damned (Fitzgerald)

The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach (Schikele)

The Narnian (Jacobs)

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Jacobs)

Watership Down (Adams)

Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village (Cooper/Johnson)

February

Norse Mythology (Gaiman)

Can You Forgive Her? (Trollope)

Clouds of Witnesses (Sayers)

Empire of Pain (Keefe)

How to Raise a Reader (Russo/Paul)

Julius Caesar (Shakespeare)

Bridge to Terabithia (Paterson)

Skink-No Surrender (Hiaasen)

Good-Bye to All That (Graves)

March

Pride and Prejudice (Austen)

Asinaria (Plautus) in Latin

Peril (Woodward)

The Day of the Pelican (Paterson)

Animal Farm (Orwell)

Murder on the Orient Express (Christie)

Odyssey Book 16 (Homer) in Greek

Book of House Plants (Lee-Faust)

The Art of Shaving (Zaoui)

Unnatural Death (Sayers)

Johannes Brahms (Swafford)

The Inimitable Jeeves (Wodehouse)

When the Buddha was an Elephant (McGinnis)

All Our Happy Days are Stupid (Heti)

The Garden of Eden (Hemingway)

The Whore's Child (Russo)

The Lightning Thief (Riordan)

Death on the Nile (Christie)

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (Sayers)

Metamorphoses Book 6 (Ovid) in Latin

To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)

Shakespeare (Bryson) 

Right Ho, Jeeves (Wodehouse)

The Power of Regret (Pink)

The Color of Magic (Pratchett)

April

Burnout (Nagoski)

The Same Stuff as Stars (Paterson)

Elsewhere (Russo)

Fried Green Tomatoes (Flagg)

Mating in Captivity (Perel)

Damned (Palahniuk)

The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde)

Taste (Tucci)

Strong Poison (Sayers)

The Golden Couple (Hendricks/Pekkanen)

Deliverance (Dickey)

Bittersweet (Cain)

The Sea of Monsters (Riordan)

The Five Red Herrings (Sayers)

Very Good, Jeeves (Wodehouse)

A History of Men's Fashion (Storey)

Hamlet (Shakespeare)

From Warsaw with Love (Pomfret)

Love and Saffron (Fay)

Odyssey Book 17 (Homer) in Greek

Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)

May

Have His Carcase (Sayers)

French Lessons (Mayle)

Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)

Across the River and Into the Trees (Hemingway)

Bonk (Roach)

Joy in the Morning (Wodehouse)

Worst Class Trip Ever (Barry)

Sticking it Out (Niemi)

The Night Manager (LeCarre)

A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)

HMS Surprise (O'Brian)

Winner Takes Nothing (Hemingway)

Motherhood (Heti)

Murder Must Advertise (Sayers)

The Titan's Curse (Riordan)

The Man Who Was Thursday (Chesterton)

Mozart in the Jungle (Tindall)

June

Odyssey Book 18 (Homer) in Greek

The Gospels and Homer (MacDonald)

Home Improvement for the Busy and Broke (Salway)

Dear Mr. M. (Koch)

The Mauritius Command (O'Brian)

The Steal (Bowden)

Into the Deep (Ballard)

Breakfast of Champions (Vonnegut)

The Monuments Men (Witter/Edsel)

Farewell, Titanic (Pellegrino)

Pirate Latitudes (Crichton)

The Longest Race (Ayres)

Jaws (Benchley)

The Archaeology of New York State (Ritchie)

The Decameron (Boccacio)

Phedre (Racine) in French

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Abelard and Heloise)

The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare)

Hero (Korda)

Battle of the Labyrinth (Riordan)

The Internet is Not What You Think It Is (Smith)

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (Wilkinson)

Sink the Bismarck! (Forester)

A Year of Biblical Womanhood (Held-Evans)

We Came, We Saw, We Left (Wheelan)

Secrets of the Great Pyramid (Briar/Houdin)

Radium Girls (Moore)

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (LeCarre)

The Martian (Weir)

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (LeCarre)

July 

The Wisdom of the Myths (Ferry)

Lost Classics (Ondaatje)

The Writing of the Gods (Dolnick)

Mindfuck (Wylie)

Rationality (Pinker)

Ending Parkinson's Disease (Dorsey)

Odyssey Book 19 (Homer) in Greek

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (Dave)

The Mismeasure of Man (Gould)

Turn Right at Machu Picchu (Adams)

The Cuckoo's Calling (Galbraith)

Nasty, Brutish, and Short (Hershovitz)

The Perfect Storm (Junger)

Loch (Zindel)

Digital Minimalism (Newport)

The Silkworm (Galbraith)

The Pastor's Bookshelf (Carty)

Our Man in Havana (Greene)

The Right Stuff (Wolfe)

Career of Evil (Galbraith)

August

Lethal White (Galbraith)

Apokalypsis in Latin

Troubled Blood (Galbraith)

The Art of Loading Brush (Berry)

Euthyphro (Plato) in Greek

The It Girl (Ware)

Odyssey Book 20 (Homer) in Greek

A Shropshire Lad (Housman)

A Cabernet of Plants (Mabey)

Pontoon (Keillor)

The Lake Wobegon Virus (Keillor)

Erebus (Palin)

North Korea Journal (Palin)

A Thousand Ships (Haynes)

The Maid (Prose)

The Storm (Buechner)

Breaking the Male Code (Garfield)

Odyssey Book 21 (Homer) in Greek

Charlie Wilson's War (Crile)

September

The Ink Black Heart (Galbraith)

Alexandria: City of the Western Mind (Vrettos)

Don Quixote (Cervantes) 

Cloud Cuckoo Land (Doerr)

After Doubt (Swoboda)

The Great Pearl Heist (Crosby)

Aeneid Book 7 (Virgil) in Latin

Sex on the Moon (Mezrich)

The Screwtape Letters (Lewis)

Don't Sleep, There are Snakes (Everett)

The Tempest (Shakespeare)

Nefertiti (Wells)

Beating Vegas (Mezrich)

Woolly (Mezrich)

Deep Work (Newport)

The Second Death of George Mallory (Messner)

October

Laughter in Ancient Rome (Beard)

To Save Everything, Click Here (Morozov)

Slouching Toward Bethlehem (Didion)

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (Ballmer)

The Good Nurse (Graeber)

Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger (Murphy)

I, Claudius (Graves)

Odyssey Book 22 (Homer) in Greek

Ex Libris (Fadiman)

Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut)

Jayber Crow (Berry)

Endurance (Lansing)

Poirot Investigates (Christie)

All in a Don's Day (Beard)

November

The Escape Artist (Freedland)

After the Ivory Tower Falls (Bunch)

Odyssey Book 23 (Homer) in Greek

Book of Mythicality (Neal/McLaughlin)

How Should a Person Be? (Heti)

Sharpe's Tiger (Cornwell)

Sharpe's Triumph (Cornwell)

The Nine Tailors (Sayers)

Arms and the Man (Shaw)

The Corsican Caper (Mayle)

Candida (Shaw)

The Man of Destiny (Shaw)

Dinner with Edward (Vincent)

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Christie)

A Good Year (Mayle)

How to Inhabit Time (Smith)

Sharpe's Fortress (Cornwell)

December

Odyssey Book 24 (Homer) in Greek

The Sacred Journey (Buechner)

Serendipities (Eco)

Gaudy Night (Sayers)

The Winners (Backman)

Aeneid Book 8 (Virgil) in Latin

Lord Peter Views the Body (Sayers)

Heart of Darkness (Conrad)

Sharpe's Trafalgar (Cornwell)

The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)

Busman's Honeymoon (Sayers)

The Scapegoat (du Maurier)

Lament for a Son (Wolterstorff)

Sharpe's Prey (Cornwell)

A Year in Provence (Mayle)

Shakespeare's The Phantom of Menace (Doescher)

Sideways Stories from Wayside Homeschool--James

 James was the tallest child at Wayside Homeschool. He had always been the tallest, because he had always been the oldest. He would have been glad to let Owen or Felix take a turn at being the tallest or the oldest, but every time that they got a little taller or a little older, James had become even taller and older still. He felt that it was an unfair advantage.

James was learning Logic in school this year, which is the art of critical thinking. His Father read him the Logic assignment. 

"My dog doesn't like cats, and no mouse likes cats. So my dog is a mouse. Represent this argument in logical notation."

James scratched his head. 

Father explained it to him. James scratched his head again.

Father tried to have James put the argument into a system of letters where each letter represented a proposition. A proposition was a single statement. Then Father would have him falsify each statement by writing a squiggle in front of it. Then Father would have him convert the statement by switching the orders of terms, and invert the statement switching the quality of the terms, and then find the contrapositive by converting and inverting at the same time.

James scratched his head.

"Come on, James," said Father "if you don't learn how to use logic then you'll never be able to communicate clearly."

James thought that maybe if he wanted to communicate ideas clearly that he should probably steer clear of logic. That was a conversion of Father's proposition.

"Let's review necessary and sufficient conditions," said Father, "and we'll see how much you remember. Is rain a necessary or a sufficient condition for clouds?"

"Well," explained James, "you have to have clouds in order to have rain. But you don't need to have rain if you have clouds."

"Right," said Father, "so what kind of condition is rain for clouds?"

James thought for a minute.

"Sounds like wet conditions to me."

Father scratched his head.

"In any 'if-then' statement where if you have P, then Q follows, what sort of a condition is P for Q?"

James scratched his head.

"A conditional condition?"

"Not a conditional condition."

James wrote down a squiggle in front of the proposition, "if p then q," and put brackets around it.

"I didn't mean that you should invert that proposition. What kind of a condition is P for Q in the proposition?"

James said it that P was an invalid condition for Q, since the proposition (which he had bracketed) was negated by the squiggly sign.

"No, no, no!" said Father.

James counted each "no" and wrote three more squiggly signs in front of the proposition. He looked at it for a moment.

"So it is not true that it's false that it's incorrect that the proposition that if it rains then there are clouds is untrue?"

Father rolled his eyes rudely, and Mother, who happened to be walking by, told him to mind his ps and qs. 

"Let's practice spotting a fallacy. If I tell you that you can have ice cream only if you do all of your logic homework perfectly, and you do your logic homework perfectly, but then I don't give you ice cream after it's completed, did I lie to you?"

James asked what kind of ice cream was being offered.

"I would not have lied to you," said Father, "because you would have substituted the conversion of the original proposition for the proposition I made."

James said he wouldn't have lied because he didn't want to do his logic homework anyway. 

Father didn't want to teach the logic homework either.

They had some ice cream.

Sideways Stories from Wayside Homeschool--Felix

 Felix was in Kindergarten. He had the biggest head out of anyone in his house, including his parents. This was important, because in addition to being in Kindergarten Felix was the Grownup Teacher. It was Mother and Father's job to teach Felix about the letters and numbers, and how to read them. It was Felix's job to teach the grownups about all of the things that they didn't know.

Before Felix had been born, it had James and Owen's job to teach Mother and Father about how a child's house ought to be run, but Felix thought they hadn't done a very good job. They had been too easy on Mother and Father, and he was constantly having to correct some of the bad habits that they had slipped into. 

For example, Mother and Father were very confused about what constituted edible food. Sometimes they would get all muddled up and try to feed the children things that were barely even food--things like fungus, or squash, or eggplant. It wasn't their fault. Mother and Father were both very tired all the time, and Felix knew that they probably had just forgotten about good and wholesome foods like waffles, nutella, and ice cream cones. Felix reminded them.

Mother and Father were also always getting confused about how they were supposed to help the children in school. Father would tell the children to read books for 20 minutes, but it wouldn't even be five minutes later that he would come into the library and get all upset because he found Owen and Felix reading Spiderman comic books. He didn't even seem to realize that he'd asked them to read, but would ramble on about nonsense like "homework" and "essays." Felix sometimes worried that Father was being too silly, especially when he used nonsense words like "adverb."

Felix also had to teach Mother and Father a great deal about chores. Sometimes Mother and Father would get confused about who was supposed to clean up the dinner table or put laundry away. They didn't remember that they were the only tall people in the family, so they were supposed to do these things. Instead, they would ask James or Owen or Felix to do them. Felix was polite and didn't criticize Father's bad memory in front of the other students, but just waited until Father forgot all about "chores and responsibilities" and just cleaned up the dinner table himself.

Felix also had to remind Father about bedtime every night. Father would often say, in the very middle of the day when no one was tired, that it was time for bed. It never actually WAS bedtime...it was always actually the middle of a football game or of a matchbox car race or of drumming time, but Father mixed up easily.

Once James read a book about people who got confused while climbing high mountains because there wasn't enough oxygen way high up in the skies. Felix thought that Father and Mother probably got confused from oxygen deprivation because they were too tall. But, on the other hand, no one else was tall enough to drive a car yet, so it was good that Father and Mother were still around. Still, neither of them drove the car very well. They were both so slow that they got passed by other cars all the time. If Felix was tall enough to drive the car, he would win every race to the grocery store.

Felix was a good teacher, and he often lay awake at night thinking of what he might teach Mother and Father the next day. Oftentimes he would call to Mother or Father in the middle of the night over and over again until one of them came into his room. He wanted to make sure that his students were both okay and not too scared, and it was good to check in on them.

Sometimes teaching Mother and Father was frustrating. They never seemed to remember that each of their boys would like a drink on the table (and they kept the cups too high up to reach), and they had a very hard time recognizing what the perfect football field looked like. (For example, both the library and kitchen table would make excellent football playing surfaces.) They got cranky when they went too many days in a row without a nap, and sometimes they would spend hours on silly nonsense games like "work" and "income tax."

Still, Felix kept patiently at his job. He made sure that he corrected bad habits. After all, you only get one chance to raise a parent.

Sideways Stories from Wayside Homeschool--Owen

 Owen had blonde hair, freckles, and a big smile. He could make anyone laugh. He had started learning Latin this year. Father told him the Saying of the Day in Latin: "Mea culpa."

"My fault," explained Father.

"It's okay," said Owen, "I forgive you."

Father looked puzzled. Today they were learning the new vocabulary words for Lesson 6. Father explained how each word was pronounced and then had Owen decline or conjugate it. In Latin, nouns are sorted by declensions and verbs are sorted into conjugations. The lesson had more nouns than verbs, so Owen mostly declined to learn his vocabulary.

Father said that the first word of the day was culpa, culpae. Owen asked why Father said it twice. Father explained that each noun has different case endings according to its declension. He said that culpae was the form of culpa in the genitive case. Owen asked if culp-eye meant a fault in your eye, but Father said that wasn't the case.

The next vocabulary word was Maria, which meant Mary. Father had Owen list all of the case endings of Maria, but Owen stopped on the fourth one, accusatively.

Next Father tried to explain what fuga meant, but Owen ran out of the room. 

When Owen was sitting down again Father taught him the next word, which was luna. Owen declined Father's help. He already knew what luna meant from his mythology podcast, so he didn't need a teacher to moon about all of the possible derivatives he might know. Father apologized and said, "mea culpa."

Next Owen learned that unda meant wave. He asked if "undas" meant "you wave," and "undat" meant "she waves." Father explained that Owen was using personal endings, and that unda was really a noun. Owen tried not to take the disappointment personally. He felt a little underwhelmed, and waved his hand to ask for the next word.

The next word was Hispania. Hispania was 1st declension feminine noun. Owen though that if it was a feminine noun, it ought to be Herspania, but that wasn't the case either. 

By the time they reached the noun silva, Owen felt like he was lost in the woods. Learning so many new vocabulary words in a single day could make him feel cranky and sleepy.

He fought to concentrate as father taught him what pugno meant. He judged that they must be near the end when he learned judico, considering how many new words they had learned. Distraction kept seizing him as he tried to learn occupo.

Finally they were on the last word, scribo. Scribo means "I write." Father wanted to quiz Owen on conjugating personal endings before he let Owen go.

"How would you say that we, as a family, write?" 

"Scribimus!" shouted Owen

"And how would a group of very literary pelicans write?"

"Scribunt!"

"And how would a single frog write?" asked Father excitedly.

"Scribit! Scribit! Scribit!" shouted Owen.

Father wanted Owen to work on noun forms some more, but Owen declined.