Michael & Elizabeth are in town for a few days. They recently returned from their honeymoon in Thailand and a summer in India for school. They are in town to pack up things at his mother's house and then head back to school in Boston. It was good to see them. To me Michael will always seem about 15 years-old, which isn't entirely my fault, since he didn't stop looking older than fifteen till he was 23.
Rose is back from New York and we will resume her schooling tomorrow. Mark assigned her some reading in Edith Hamilton's Mythology. She has finished it but her teacher hasn't started it. Until the time she leaves for England we're going to do an intensive study to prepare her for the visit. There's just so much I want her to read and to learn that I don't know if we'll have time before she leaves.
The reason for this preparation is two-fold. I truly believe it would be good if she knows a bit of the history of the places she is visiting. So much of the richness of these places lies in knowing (and loving a little bit) the people and the legends associated with them. The second reason is that my aunt (with whom Rose is travelling) is a retired public school teacher/principal I dreadfully want to impress. Maybe I will just settle for Rose conjugating her verbs properly. Maybe I only hope she pretends to know something about those topics that older grown-ups take for granted. On the one hand I am confident she is able to carry on intelligent and insightful conversations. But on the other hand she drops these one-liners that imperil the whole homeschooling movement and threaten to set it back twenty years.
