Just when you think it’s safe to put away the snowpants.

This is the view from the window of my home office this morning. It looks more like the upcoming holiday should be Christmas instead of Easter.

Speaking of which, today is Maundy Thursday, as we used to call it. The day of the last supper, the garden of Gethsemane and other preliminaries to Mel Gibson’s favorite part of the season.

I was thinking about introducing David to the Christian meanings behind the holidays this year, but I just don’t know how to deal with Easter.

“Do you remember the little baby that we talked about whose birthday was celebrated on Christmas? This is when they killed him.”

I think not.

So… I’m pulling out the plastic eggs and the Peanuts Easter special, and leave it at that for another year.

I’d never heard of Mookie or Swingballs before I stumbed upon this set at the toy store. I picked it up because our yard is a little too tiny to kick a regular soccer ball around, and David will likely want to do a lot of kicking as he’s joining a soccer team this year.

So, when I saw this thing at the toy store, I thought it might fit the bill.

And boy, is it fun! David and I played cooperative and competitive games for about an hour, and he and his dad played for another half hour after that. And after he’d exhausted all the adults, he played by himself for another hour.

The object of the ‘game’ is to get the string attached to the ball all the way up or all the way down the spiral. When we played cooperatively, we tried to get it from the bottom to the top with as few kicks as possible. When we were in competition, we started the string in the middle and the one who made it to their ‘end’ won.

Another advantage is that it all compacts to store inside the base, so at the end of summer I can pack it up and put it in the basement. The ability to store in a small box has become a purchasing condition for outdoor toys, since I’ve noticed that those outdoor toys fill up the porch pretty quickly if they are kept around past their season.

This weekend spring finally sprung with a vengeance. David spent hours polishing, oiling and pumping tires on his bike, all the snow in the front yard melted, and the temperatures jumped well into the ‘no coats required’ zone.

So we’ve been in spring mode the last few days. Going bike riding every day, counting how many of the samaras from the maple tree in the front yard we can find with little seedlings peeking out of them, cleaning the winter clothes and toys out of the porch to make room for their warm-weather replacements, catching bugs and trying to identify them with our bug books… it’s a great time of year!

This has been a difficult area for me. I went to a Christian school for most of my formative years ,which left me with a skewed view of religious training, if not an outright phobia.

While the Christian education was not exactly faith-affirming for me (I think the turning point for me was praying in biology class: “Bless this frog which we are about to dissect. May its body edify our minds.”), I do appreciate the high level of biblical literacy I gained from that education.

In fact, I believe that it’s impossible to completely understand the culture and history of the Western world without knowing the stories of the Bible.

But, for me, all those stories are so wrapped up in my “Christian” education, I find it much harder to teach them than to teach the stories of the Greek or Norse pantheons, for example. While David has been getting steady diet of stories about Zeus and Odin, he’s had very little exposure to the stories of the Bible.

A short-cut, I thought, would be to take him to a local church Sunday School, but apparently Sunday School isn’t what it used to be, and the bible stories weren’t taught at all. Not in the main sanctuary either, now that I think about it.

And searching through Amazon, the only secular books of Bible stories I could find were graphic, sarcastic, and definitely meant for adults.

So, I’m left to my own resources, I guess. So this weekend I spent some time re-writing some stories from the Bible. Some are definitely easier than others. Noah’s ark, for example, is easy to write with no mention of a deity at all. Others, like Moses and Pharoah, are a little more difficult. I’ve found, though, that referring to the Christian God as “Yaweh” rather than “God” gives him a name rather than a title, and makes it easier to see where I’m going with this project.

I’ve also purchased a book called, “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–And Doesn’t” by Stephen Prothro that I found mentioned on this blog ( I bought from his affiliate link. I hope he’s not too mortified) in hopes that it might point me to some places to prioritize.

Incidentally, I ran myself through the test on this page on religious literacy from USA Today, and only missed two: I only got two of Buddhism’s four noble truths, and I missed out on holy orders as a Catholic sacrament. I did, however, remember all ten of the Commandments. Eleven, actually, if you can get points for listing the Catholic and Protestant versions. Yay for me!

Continuing my research on various educational resources for homeschooling in the coming years, I found a site called LinkOnLearning.com.

Since the site said that the lessons were designed around the Ontario Ministry of Education curriculum, I was intrigued and signed up as a parent to see what I could discover about the program. Once I had finished the registration process, though, I was faced with the following sentence:

Since you has been refered by Default-Referral Do Not Delete, you can get 10% discount for all plan you seleced.

Now, this is right before you’re encouraged to enroll a child and throw, at the very least, $34.95 at the company. I probably would have signed up for a month just to peek around and evaluate what was available, but that particular sentence threw me for a loop and I clicked away.

Even though I realize that the error is probably due to some outsourced programming that wasn’t tested, I just couldn’t get past it.

I mentioned a few days ago that David brought a dinosaur kit from the bookstore.

Well, as of today, he’s done all the activities. Included in the box was

• 1 glow in the dark snap-together dinosaur skeleton
• 1 pink grow-and-shrink triceratops
• 1 block of clay with a hidden dinosaur with a pick/scraper and brush to “excavate” it and goggles for eye protection

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like the bookstore (in this case, Chapters) is now as much of a toy store as a book store.

In any case, since David still had some gift cards left from Christmas, he and his Dad went to Chapters to find some books (and toys).

He chose a pirate ‘book’ that also included a bit of a costume — earrings, an eye patch and a bandana — and boy does he make a cute pirate; an easter activity book with stickers and math puzzles and coloring pages; and a science toy called “My First Dino Kit” which lets you “dig out a dinosaur skeleton” which I’ll likely review in a later post.

This post mostly exists because I wanted to show off my little pirate.

It’s strange that, no matter how busy or lazy the day, we still manage to fill it up with activities.

Some days, at the close of the day as I wind down before going to bed, I think about all the things we did during the day, and wonder whether some of those moments could have been put to better use. Or if I should have read two stories instead of one. Whether we should have driven to the store instead of walked. Whether I should have David do two pages of math problems instead of one.

It’s almost distressing to know that those hours and decisions are gone. Yet there’s joy in what we did do. Read the rest of this entry »