Via BoingBoing, conveyor of many delights.

Read the book online at the Winterlake Press website.

Alice (object-oriented programming, creating animations, video games)

Lynda (wide range of tutorials)

Snake Wrangling for Kids (learning to program in Python)

Scratch (via MIT—several friends recommended this)

A few more links in this post at Family Online

Your suggestions are welcome too!

Things I did this week:

• Spring cleaning. I know, I know, I’m six months late. Or six months early: maybe that’s a better way to look at it. Besides, I once heard a chaparral expert mention that Southern California’s true spring is in November (going by plant dormancy cycles, I think, or maybe it had to do with the timing of our rainy season). At any rate, I spent the entire week attacking closets and cupboards, purging bags and bags of stuff, and it feels marvelous. Oh my. I keep opening the hall closet just to admire it and then I’ll realize I have a big dopey grin on my face.

• Had a fabulous discussion of dramatic irony in the Scottish Play with my Shakespeare Club.

• Cuddled a feverish baby. Poor glassy-eyed boy.

Jane’s turn for a babysqueeze.

Things I did not do this week:

• Sleep much. See aforementioned feverish baby.

• Spend much time online. Sorry, poor neglected blog. Even sorrier, dozens of nice people to whom I owe email.

• Finish the book I have been reading foreeeeeever. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I tore through the first two thirds, completely captivated, making mental notes (now all forgotten) of the zillion quotes and thoughts I wanted to share here. And then…what happened? The plot took a turn that dampened my enthusiasm a bit. That was part of it, but I’m still dying to know how things turn out. I guess mainly it was just that my attention turned elsewhere. Such as: I spent all last week (pre-cleaning frenzy, but undoubtedly related) reading my way through NieNie’s archives. Like Kristen and Sarah and Ellie and Lesley and Jenn and Alice (when Alice was blogging regularly, sob), NieNie writes posts that make me want to spruce up my home with color and fabric and blossom, and also to squeeze my children a lot.

A most squeezable miss.

NieNie’s posts even make me want to cook—almost. But I let Costco do most of my cooking this week. Too busy cramming miscellany into garbage bags. And (since Wednesday night) wiping noses and patting backs and dispensing cough medicine to two pitiful little boys. Because it isn’t just the baby who’s sick; Wonderboy got zapped with this thing too. Sorry, crowd of Shakespeare enthusiasts who spent the afternoon in Germ Central before we knew anyone was sick. And sorry, grandparents who are coming for a visit tomorrow…

Speaking of which,

Things I plan to do this weekend:

Briefly abandon my parents with germ-riddled children and sneak away for a meal with my husband, who has had to work some long hours this week. But not for too long, because I’ve got children to squeeze.

Still Jane’s turn. Now give him back!

HT to my hubby, as usual. He always finds the best stuff.

Me: I want a cupcake.

Him: What? Where’d that come from?

Me: This post I’m reading. See?

I point at the word. CUPCAKE. It looks somehow magical, evocative, as if it were spelled out in actual cupcakes instead of plain old letters of the alphabet.

Me: I think cupcake is one of my ten favorite words.

Him: Hmm. You know, I don’t really like cupcakes.

Pause.

Me: That’s all right, I’ll have yours.

Me: Oh, are your batteries dead?

Wonderboy: Huh?

Me: Do you need new batteries?

Wonderboy: What?

Me: Come here, let me check your hearing aids.

Wonderboy: I think my batteries got dead.

(And yes, we can communicate in sign language as well, but during this conversation I was holding a plate in one hand and a giant slice of pizza in the other. Priorities.)

Then he went out one night and got lit up.

Now, sad to say, that once sprightly youth has aged before his time. He spends his days on the porch, cantankerously frowning at passersby.

Let this be a lesson to you, children.

—from The Rescuers by Margery Sharp

The esteemed and sleek-whiskered Mouse Chairwoman is quoting from “Ballad Upon a Wedding” by Sir John Suckling, one of the English “Cavalier poets,” those  dashing, witty, and sensitive 17th-century Carpe Diem fellows who came out in support of King Charles I against Parliament and the Puritans. Suckling wrote a number of plays which I have not read (”The Goblins” sounds interesting) and a good deal of poetry, which his contemporaries seemed to enjoy quite a lot.

Here he is in a portrait by Van Dyck.

Suddenly I see where Johnny Depp found his inspiration for facial hair.

You could rock those long curly locks as well, Johnny. The off-the-shoulder cape, not so much.

“Ballad upon a Wedding” is light and a little snarky and a little bawdy, and reads a bit like a blog entry if blogs were written in meter and rhyme. Here’s the bit Madam Chairwoman liked, part of a description of a young bride:

Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out,
As if they feared the light:
But oh! she dances such a way
No sun upon an Easter-day
Is half so fine a sight.

And I think this is rather sweet:

O’ th’ sudden up they rise and dance;
Then sit again and sigh, and glance;
Then dance again and kiss:
Thus several ways the time did pass,
Whilst every woman wished her place,
And every man wished his.

But being sweet isn’t really Suckling’s aim in this poem; he’s much more focused on the wedding-night feeling in the air, winkwinknudgenudge, and is also mightily enjoying poking fun at the folks he’s describing—calling out the bee-sting on the bride’s chin is kind of a cheap shot.

As mouse-appreciating poems go, this one doesn’t hold a candle to the work of auld Robbie Burns. And then there’s our favorite book about a poet with a proper appreciation of mice: The Mouse of Amherst by Elizabeth Spires.

(That’s a four-year-old post and contains links to my Amazon Affiliate account, which means if you click through and purchase something I get a small referral fee. I don’t do affiliate links anymore, but I’m not going back through old posts to remove them, so here’s your disclosure notice.)

This week’s Poetry Friday roundup can be found at Wild Rose Reader.

Then along came young Sir Destructalot.

Having wreaked maximum havoc, he paused, well pleased with his efforts…

…and looked around for new frontiers.

Enticing prospects beckoned at the far corners of his world, but first he would have to figure out how to bridge a perilous gap.

Triumph! And now bravely through the tunnel he strode, scoffing at those who would take the more conventional route around the table.

Eagerly he made for the row of tempting treasures on the shelf, their bright colors practically begging him to pull them free of their wooden prison.

But just as his massive fist reached the first jewel-toned, delectably gummable beauty, the Voice of Doom sounded from above.

He would have to seek other bounty.

Undaunted, he set forth in a new direction. No Voice of Doom could quell his spirits. There was a great wide world out there for the grabbing,

and he had just the fists for the job.

What I should probably try to chronicle tonight is how Jane, Beanie, and I came to the conclusion this morning that Plutarch is garlic. (That’s a compliment.)

But it’s late, and I only have a few minutes here, and the pieces of today that might disappear if I don’t write them down are small moments, not big conversations.

Teenagers playing Rock Band in my living room with abandon and zest; I loved that.

Rilla screaming, squealing, shrieking, scurrying the loop of kitchen and living room, daring (begging) one of our visitors—a tender-hearted eleven-year-old who is wise in the ways of big-brotherhood—to chase and chase her but never catch her.

Wonderboy “reading” to Rose and me, ten minutes on a bare title page, a long story rattled so quickly we couldn’t comprehend more than a word here and there: “letters,” “fence,” “tomorrow.” Then suddenly, mid-sentence, the book is flung aside and his arms go around me, straw head pressing my cheek. “Mmmm, I wub you!” Oh, oh, oh, catch this moment and hold it forever.

And this one too.

Drove to children’s hospital for Wonderboy’s appointment with our favorite specialist, the esteemed yet down-to-earth doctor of genetics. Only one of my boy’s many many physical anomalies seems to be genetic—the albinism—but Dr. J is also a dysmorphologist, which means she takes an interest any kind of birth defect or abnormality, whether its origins are chromosomal or developmental-in-utero. She’s the doctor who laughed at my possibly insulting analogy two years ago, when I said that dealing with specialists in so many different departments of the hospital was like trying to walk a bunch of dogs all pulling on their leashes in different directions.

“I’m sure it is,” she chuckled, earning my affection forevermore.

So I was looking forward to this appointment, even if it did cost Scott a day of vacation: he took the day off to ferry other children to other activities while I took the boys to see Wonderful Dr. J.

I arrived a tad bit early and found a good parking space in the garage down the street from the hospital. Our children’s hospital is a large complex with many buildings and it can be quite confusing to navigate, but I’d double-checked on the website this morning to make sure the Genetics Clinic was still where it had been last year.

(Ooh, foreshadowing.)

So into the clinic area we went, where the line was already beginning to snake, although it wasn’t yet 9 in the morning. And when we got to the front of the line, the nice check-in lady said, “Oh, I’m sorry, but the genetics clinic has moved.”

To a building approximately 714 blocks away. Or six, at least.

“You could walk,” she said doubtfully, “but you’ll probably want to move your car to the lot on Frost Street. It’s a pretty long walk.”

Since “moving the car” would have involved the whole lengthy process of unbuckling boy and baby from the double stroller and rebuckling them into carseats, I opted for the long walk.

Except it needed to be a long jog or else I’d be really late for the appointment.

I saw a shuttle bus and showed the driver my map, helpfully marked in green highlighter by the apologetic check-in lady, but he too was apologetic. “Sorry, we don’t go near that building.”

Which was a rather emphatic demurral, don’t you think? We don’t go near it? How far away could it be, if the shuttle bus  doesn’t go near it? Or is it perhaps radioactive? Should I don a hazmat suit before approaching the site?

At any rate, it was clear my options had dwindled to: jog. I lasted about two blocks before my jog muscle cried uncle. And here I thought I was getting into shape with all the exercise-bike-riding I’ve been doing at the gym since we joined the Y. I guess the difference is the exercise bike doesn’t involve pushing a stroller containing a scrawny five-year-old and a nine-month-old the size of a side of beef.

(You could hide pennies under those chins.)

So I walked and pushed and jogged and pushed, and there was a hill with a great deal more on the going-up side than the rolling-down side, and finally I saw a sign for the building that holds the fancy new clinic, and with much huffing and puffing, I delivered Wonderboy and his brother, the exceptionally cute side of beef, to the reception area.

The check-in lady at this clinic was embarrassed about the wrong directions on the website. I’m not the first parent to have been misdirected, it seems. “We keep calling them about it…” We—the embarrassed check-in lady and I—agreed that They (whoever they are) should have to make the walk themselves, once for every time a family arrives late and sweaty as a result of having put their trust in the website directions.

And eventually we got to have our appointment with Wonderful Dr. J. Who is, like every other doctor we’ve seen in buildings all over that sprawling medical complex and elsewhere, utterly baffled by our most pressing and persistent Wonderboy-related question, which has to do with his being the opposite of a side of beef (despite a hearty appetite). He’s been tested for everything the docs can think of, from cystic fibrosis to allergies to celiac disease to pancreatic something-or-other. But that’s a saga for another day. The topic of today’s anecdote is not My Child Is a Medical Mystery; it’s I Had to Take a Long Walk with My Two Adorable Sons in the Beautiful San Diego Weather, Poor Poor Me.

And the sequel, They Wouldn’t Validate My Parking in the New Clinic, So I Had to Go All the Way Back to the Old Clinic to Get My Ticket Stamped, O Woe.

What, you aren’t reduced to tears of overwhelming pity by this tale? Hmph. Um, um, well, I also had a dentist appointment in the afternoon. There. Now I’ve got you.

Oh, fine. It was actually quite a nice day. Okay? Are you satisfied? The girls got extra daddy time, and (for some) a trip to Jiffy Lube where there was an arcade machine containing all the best games of the 80s. The Jiffy Lube Man said kids played free and gave them a stack of quarters. And Scott bought them donuts. Two days after Halloween, with the candy still flowing freely: this was a very good day for my daughters. Jane wasn’t part of the video/donuts funstravaganza, but her science lab is moving into a chemistry unit and she came home radiant with excitement. Chemistry is Jane’s thiiiiing, to quote Little Bill’s father.

(We quote members of Little Bill’s family quite a lot around here. Especially Alice the Great. That Alice the Great is one of the best characters on television. Wise, twinkling, mellow, kind, observant, gentle, shrewd. And comfortable in her pink sweater and sneakers. I love her. This is going to sound ridiculous, but I have actually thought more than once, Gosh, she’s getting old. I hope she doesn’t die. And then I remember she’s a cartoon.)

Later in the day there was a long stretch of singing folk songs on the couch with the four youngest children, Bonny Doon and Loch Lomond and all my Scottish favorites, and also Down in the Valley which I still remember my grandma singing in her kitchen with two skillets sizzling on the stove and a spatula in her hand, and the smell of fried chicken livers filling the room, best smell in the world, and a plate of fried okra steaming on the counter, grease soaking into a paper towel, hear the wind blow, dear, hear the wind blow.

I bet Alice the Great makes good fried okra.

Our little singalong was underscored by a fair amount of kid-squabbling, the usual “I wanna sit next to Mom” scuffles, but that’s just the percussion section of life, keeping the tempo lively. I just sing “You take the high road” a little more loudly, arching an eyebrow at the oldest child in the squabble. This is probably not nearly as amusing to the intended recipient of my wit as it is to me.

Much like this post. What can I say? Writing long, nonsensical posts for my own amusement is my thiiiing.

And because you can’t ever go wrong, can you, posting pictures of scrumptiousness like this?

Yesterday he managed to snag a bottle of barbecue sauce out of the fridge and I thought Ohhhh, baby, you don’t want to put ideas in people’s heads…I already want to eat you all up.

I hate to break it to him, but I think he’s a little too big to play Tom Thumb.

Here’s something fun: the Cloud Appreciation Society. Float on over to check out some amazing photos, learn about the different types of clouds, and marvel at the Cloud of the Month. I particularly enjoyed the Society’s manifesto:

WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry,
and the most egalitarian of her displays, since
everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.
Life would be dull if we had to look up at
cloudless monotony day after day.

“Fight blue-sky thinking.” Hee. Here’s the rest.

I wonder if the Society knows about the Snoopy “Clouds” song?

The pyramids of Khufu!
You too?
Seven wonders of the world…

“It was built about 2,500 years ago and stands on a white marble hill in Greece. Because it too is made of white marble, it seems to grow out of that hill as though it were a group of great trees standing in a small forest.”

—from Round Buildings, Square Buildings, Buildings that Wiggle Like a Fish by Philip M. Isaacson, a book I wrote about in this post long ago

The Acropolis. Photo by Adam Carr, released to the public domain at Wikimedia Commons.

We’re still reading Plutarch’s Life of Pericles.

That which gave most pleasure and ornament to the city of Athens, and the greatest admiration and even astonishment to all strangers, and that which now is Greece’s only evidence that the power she boasts of and her ancient wealth are no romance or idle story, was [Pericles's] construction of the public and sacred buildings.

The materials were stone, brass, ivory, gold, ebony, and cypress-wood; the artisans that wrought and fashioned them were smiths and carpenters, moulders, founders and braziers, stone-cutters, dyers, goldsmiths, ivory-workers, painters, embroiderers, turners; those again that conveyed them to the town for use, merchants and mariners and ship-masters by sea; and by land, cartwrights, cattle-breeders, wagoners, rope-makers, flax-workers, shoe-makers and leather-dressers, road-makers, miners. And every trade in the same nature, as a captain in an army has his particular company of soldiers under him, had its own hired company of journeymen and laborers belonging to it banded together as in array, to be as it were the instrument and body for the performance of the service of these public works distributed plenty through every age and condition.

“I’m confused,” said Rose, upon hearing (in an earlier passage) how Pericles manipulated to his own advantage a situation involving a political rival and some invading Spartans. “Is he a good guy or not?” This is a question we might ask about many, many leaders of nations throughout history, and one reason I think Plutarch is worth our time is because of the complex and relevant issues he takes on. Understanding Pericles helps us scrutinize our own leaders with sharper eyes.

This week’s Plutarch-ing took place over homemade french bread pizzas, courtesy of Rose. Afterward (yum), we took a look at the different types of Greek columns, and the kids designed their own temples at this interactive British Museum site.

Meanwhile, Athena has outfitted some swift ships and Telemachus is ready to set off in search of Odysseus—or in search of news about him, at least. That is, we finished Book II of The Odyssey. Good stuff in book two. Snarling suitors, Penelope and her loom, and for young Telemachus, a hopeful omen from Zeus:

Then from a mountain peak
far-seeing Zeus replied by sending out two eagles,
flying high up in the sky.  For some time they soared
like gusts of wind, with their wings spread out, side by side.
But when they reached the middle of the crowded meeting,
with quick beats of their wings they wheeled around,
swooping down on everyone, destruction in their eyes.
Then with their talons they attacked each other,
clawing head and neck, and flew off on the right,
past people’s homes, across the city. They were amazed
to see these birds with their own eyes.  In their hearts
they were stirred to think how everything would end.

The Achaians’ hearts weren’t the only ones stirred. Exciting stuff, that.

Wonderboy (looking at book): “Biscuit is spelled B-I-S-C-U-I-T.”

Jane (hiding book): “That’s right! What does B-I-S-C-U-I-T spell?”

Wonderboy: “Biscuit!”

Jane (still hiding book): “That’s right! How do you spell Biscuit?”

Wonderboy: “With letters!”

Wonderboy, as many of you know, is hard of hearing. Even with his hearing aids in, he cannot pick up soft unvoiced consonant sounds such as those made by the letters C and T.

Which may explain why, this morning, we discovered that pair of shoes in the kids’ bathroom—in the tubby.

“You, child. What do you know of Greece?”

Betsy had not understood much of what had passed, but she remembered her nursery night-light burning in a little pan of grease and she said, “It is a bright light.”

Uncle Ambrose leaned back in his chair and stared at her and his jaw dropped. Then an expression of great tenderness came over his face and he said, “Child, you are right. A bright light. One of the brightest the world has known. But that you should know that, a child of your age. I am astonished. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.”

—from Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge

One of our favorites. Beanie’s reading it now for the first delicious time. This scene popped into my head a couple of weeks ago when we were about to begin reading The Odyssey—a kind of family fun I heartily encourage everyone to try. The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf,  Idylls of the King, Macbeth, Plutarch’s Lives: heavy, hard, heady college stuff, right? Not necessarily. Honestly, I’ve had better success reading some of these Great Works with my children than I’ve had with certain Newbery-winning children’s novels. (Longtime readers will recall my laments about our inability to sustain Secret of the Andes or Red Sails to Capri as read-alouds.)

I wonder if one reason the Hard Stuff works well for us is that I feel no pressure to finish the whole thing, figuring that every little morsel of Homer or Shakespeare is a boost, a blessing, a bit of nourishment for mind or soul. You know how Flylady talks about every little bit of housework, even housework done clumsily, being a blessing for the home? I guess that’s my take on reading these literary classics with young children. Our best, deepest, most affecting discussions have been sparked by small passages from big works. Some weeks I may not read more than a score of lines from The Odyssey, a single paragraph from Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, but weeks, months, years later we’re still chewing on those big ideas.

From yesterday’s Pericles passage:

“For [Pericles] was never seen to walk in any street but that which led to the market-place and the council-hall, and he avoided invitations of friends to supper, and all friendly visits and intercourse whatever; in all the time he had to do with the public, which was not a little, he was never known to have gone to any of his friends to a supper, except that once when his near kinsman Euryptolemus married, he remained present till the ceremony of the drink-offering, and then immediately rose from the table and went his way. For these friendly meetings are very quick to defeat any assumed superiority, and in intimate familiarity an exterior of gravity is hard to maintain. Real excellence, indeed, is best recognized when most openly looked into; and in really good men, nothing which meets the eyes of external observers so truly deserves their admiration, as their daily common life does that of their nearer friends.”

Food for thought there for a great many meals.