Three Plus Two

Beginning to keep records for high school when you're on your own

We're taking a break for Thanksgiving, and I thought that I would take the time to share some specifics about the older kids' learning this year, including some issues I've been fiddling with for high school.  High school posts tend to be sparse in the blogosphere, maybe for a few reasons.

1) To respect a teenager's privacy.

2) Because many homeschooling families turn to traditional texts, courses, or independent study schools to help them through the high school years.

3)Because teenagers do fewer cute crafts.

4) Some homeschool families choose to send their teens to brick and mortar high schools.

There are probably more reasons, but those are the ones I can come up with on the spur of the moment.  While I certainly respect all of them, it does leave those of us who are just starting high school in a bit of a state of uncertainty.  I do intend to respect my teen's privacy, but hopefully I'll be able to share a bit about our high school experiences as well.

Gareth turned 14 in October and is "officially" in "8th grade", although we don't have to report him as such to the state and I tend not to think in those terms very often myself.  To complicate matters, much of his work is on a high school level... whatever that is, as what is considered "high school level" seems to vary widely, even among packaged programs -- compare Kolbe's high school history to one of Winterpromise's senior high programs, for instance, and you'll see the dilemma facing the parent and teen who attempt to chart their own course.  In any case, having reviewed various high school textbooks to get an idea of what "high school earth science" or "high school history" (particularly on a 9th grade level) might be like, I'm pretty sure that he's doing it.

There is some debate over whether or not colleges want to see (or care about) any courses done in 8th grade.  (There is an excellent discussion of the matter on Kind Conversation.)  From what I have read the answer is: maybe not.  On the other hand, I think it is better to have too many records on hand to choose from rather than too few, and so I am keeping track of all books, projects, field trips, papers, videos... etc.   If we were the types of homeschoolers who lay out year-long courses of study and complete them every year, I would perhaps be less worried about keeping track of Gareth's history, science, and literature selections this year, but since we are not, I am going more with age than grade. From Alison McKee's book From Homeschool to College and Work: Turning Your Homeschooled Experiences into College and Job Portfolios:   :  "Since we don't believe that homeschooled children are in traditional 'grades' we prefaced many of the portfolio's dated entries with Christian's age at the time the activity took place."   Elsewhere in the book she tells how they began the documentation process with an "academic journal" when her children turned 14.  Thinking of "high school" and the documentation process in these terms fits very well with our experience.  Since we began homeschooling (when Gareth was 4), I have noticed that I tend to think of him as a grade "higher" every January, even though he may still "officially" have several months to go in the grade in which he began in July or September.  This is because his birthday is in October and every fall and winter he experiences a period of both physical and mental growth.  By the time January rolls around, he's a different kid.

In any case, since we tend to pursue interests more than timetables, I fully expect most of our home-designed courses (in history and science, say, or literature -- not math or Latin) to spill over into the "official" years of high school.  It's my plan to -- as Alison McKee says often in her book -- "sort and resort" those learning experiences into official packages after the fact, and not before.

But "after the fact" reporting has its own pecularities.  When activities, books, etc. are written down, they need to be recorded in such a way that they will be easier to "sort and resort" when the time comes.  Alison McKee recommends doing this sorting on at least a 6 month or yearly basis.  Since her book was written before all the nifty homeschool tracking software was developed, she was simply doing her sorting from a notebook that her kids kept.  Also, she did not give grades or credit or write her "narrative transcript" to bear much resemblance to the kinds of transcripts produced by traditional high schools.  When her children applied to college, colleges had not seen many homeschoolers.  Today many colleges have policies in place to deal with homeschooled applicants, and I want to cover my bases.  I am tracking hours in subjects that are not textbook based (like math or Latin).  I plan to use the Carnegie Unit of 120 hours to grant credit, after the hours have been collected, sorted, and grouped.

(I want to be clear here that my oldest is just 14.  I have absolutely no experience with applying to colleges beyond the train wreck that my own college application process was.  I am not an authority on the matter -- just sharing the results of my own research process.)

This is how I have set things up for now. 

I'm using Homeschool Tracker Plus.  I don't enter assignments ahead of time.  Instead, I record as "assignments" activities already done.  I try to enter "topics" and "time spent".  Entering topics will give me a scope and sequence later on and will help me sort out the resources.  The software tabulates hours for me (and grades if anything is graded), and I can tabulate hours over more time than just a school year.  It will also generate lists of resources used.  When I assign courses I try to either be very broad or else -- in the case of science -- fairly specific. For instance, I have a course titled "High School History" right now to kind of separate what I tend to think as "junior high" stuff from the books I think probably ought to appear on a high school reading list; I'll sort this work into courses like "European History" or "Medieval History" later, when I see what we've got.  But I have broken down "science" into courses by discipline -- geology, paleontology, astronomy, evolutionary biology, etc.  This is because, depending on the number of hours accumulated, Gareth could end up with a course called "Earth Science" incorporating the fields of geology/paleontology, astronomy, oceanography, and meteorology... or he might end up with courses called simply "Geology" or "Astronomy".  At the time of application (assuming he does decide to apply to college, which I think likely), I would sort out and discard any dead ends or topics that just didn't add up or combine with anything else.  But until that time I'll keep recording anything I think might be useful.

 

Create your own continent

If you have followed this blog for any length of time, you've probably noticed that my kids like earth science.  This year Gareth has decided to make high school level earth science his focus, and as is often the case when one child becomes interested in a thing, the interest spills over into the rest of the family.  A couple of weeks ago, his reading about plate tectonics (the theory of continental drift) sort of collided with the boys' love of shovels and their collective invented universe (I'm sure I have pictures on the blog of the "cities" they built in New York, but I can't find it now) and Minn of the Mississippi, and this is what happened:

 

The kids found a good place to dig in the backyard and dug a river system.  Then they added mountains, mesas, and plateaus.  They discussed and defined all the terms.  Gareth explained continental uplift to the 7 and 5 year olds.  The 3 year old was identified as the primary cause of erosion; one of the twins earned the nickname "Earthquake".   Of course, forts were constructed, too, for empires that rose and fell.

In the midst of all the digging, Katydid decided to also dig a model Mississippi, using the maps in Minn of the Mississippi  as a guide.  It's still under construction.

My role in all of this?

I let Gareth read a book he wanted to read instead of one I planned for him to read.

I chose Minn of the Mississippi as a school book for the little boys and I read it to anyone who would listen.

I provided access to shovels and dirt.

But most importantly, I let them dig.

 

 

Seven Quick Takes Saturday

 

One

So... Rocky Road is really nutty, isn't it, not nitty?  Would you believe that every time I woke up last night I was thinking about that?  Sheesh.

Two

I must get some cheesecloth.  I have a couple of dairy cookbooks, but how did I miss that ricotta was this easy ?  I think I am still hung up on the idea of making yogurt so I haven't yet graduated to thinking about cheese.  (I haven't yet attempted yogurt, by the way.  It's the incubation that requires too much planning for my disorganized brain.  Well, that and the fact that we are always about to run out of milk.)

Three

Over the past several months I have become addicted to grocery blogs, the kind where the blogger takes a picture of her insanely cheap grocery haul and posts all about how many coupons she used and what everything cost.  I notice that most of these women do not have large families, which is probably why they can get away with buying in quantities like, "3 apples."  I thought about this quite a lot a couple of weeks ago when I found ripe bananas marked down to $.39/lb.  I bought 14 lbs of bananas, and they were gone in 3 days.  I did not cut them up and freeze them.  I used 3 ( not lbs, bananas) to make banana bread.  The rest were gobbled up mainly by the little boys.  Adjusted for family size, time constraints, and organic/unprocessed eating (which means fewer coupons), though, I have found many of these blogs to be quite helpful, which is probably why I have become addicted to them.  (The other reason is that I am constantly in need of a challenge.  If I don't actively have a problem to work on, I start making them up.) 

Four

I actually took all the kids with me grocery shopping this past week, which is something I do NOT do frequently.  Most of my kids are little and although the little car carts are definitely an improvement over no car carts, 3 or 4 kids can NOT fit into them, no matter how hard they try. (And no, Pop, you are NOT allowed to ride on the roof!)  But Andy was in Arkansas for the day and there was a Mom's Night Out I wanted to attend later that night, so a morning grocery trip it was.  In order to combat some of the chaos, this is what I did:

• Made a super structured grocery list, including quantities and brands, based on the sales flyer and what we normally buy.  Katydid was in charge of the list.
• Gareth pushed the second cart.  The three year old got to drive the "car".  5 year old twins and 7 year old were designated as helpers to pull things off the shelves for me.  4 month old baby blessedly slept through most of the store.  That was nothing to do with me; that was divine intervention.
• Went as fast as we could, do not stop to read labels, do not wonder if you should buy the fish on sale, do not pass Go, head directly to the checkout.  We made it out of the store in 45 minutes.  I did buy a few extras (like Kozy Shack pudding) that were marked down for quick sale, but otherwise I think I actually spent less than I would have had I gone alone and been able to linger a while.

Five

A few of the grocery-related blogs I've been browsing lately (and note that these are all American):

Mama Says Food Stamp Challenge -- Big, Catholic family, very low budget.  This year  she's written a real food manifesto and changed the way her family eats somewhat.  Her manifesto is a useful guide to the compromises many of us must make in order to eat real food on a real budget.

Money Saving Mom -- not just about groceries, but she posts natural and organic deals and has a helpful series about lowering your grocery budget.  She hosts a Super Savings Saturday where people can link all the gory details of their latest shopping trips.  I think it says something about me that I enjoy looking at pictures of groceries, but I'm not sure what.  I thought about taking a picture of our groceries when we came home, but everything got put away too quickly, and anyway, it wasn't that amazing.

100 Days of Real Food on a Budget -- just found this one.  She's trying to feed a family of 4 "real food" on a budget of $125 a week.  Apparently this is less than what she would get with food stamps (and interestingly enough according to the data she links to, a family of 9 would be eligible for as much as $1350 a month.  We've been trying to keep ours around $1000 a month, including paper products, diapers, etc, and while I don't think we've come in at exactly $1000 yet, we're still way below $1350!)

Grocery Cart Challenge -- when I was sitting on the couch this summer trying to get my C-section incision to heal, I spent a while reading through her archives on my iTouch.  After we moved, I tried her system of just buying what we needed every week without trying to stock up on anything, but I found that our lives are just too unpredictable and I was far more likely to go out when there was only a meager amount of "emergency food" around.   So our budgets have been a little higher from time to time as I try to build up our freezer and pantry after moving. 

Healthy Life Deals -- She posts coupon match-ups to Whole Foods.

Six

When I was in the middle of writing Quick Take #4, I received a call from a new friend of mine.  They were going to be in our area for most of the day but they had a gap of a few hours before they had to drop off a couple of their boys for Scouts.  (My Boy Scout did not need dropped off because he decided he would rather go to a Civil War re-enactment than hike in the rain.  If you knew him, you would have been able to see that coming.)  The night before my husband mentioned that they ought to hang out at our house.  Could they hang out at our house?  Of course!  The kids and I spent the morning trying to make the house presentable and baking pumpkin bread, and we spent the afternoon talking and playing with our new friends.  One of the boys, about Farmerboy's age, likes rocks.  Once they discovered that (and our rock hammers), it was a match made in heaven.

So that is why I am now finishing up Seven Quick Takes Saturday.

Seven

Because I fell into bed quite early Friday night (after all the scurrying, talking, etc.), I woke up before 6 this morning.  It's amazing what you can see in the quiet morning if you're willing to be quiet, too.  The daddy longlegs have been invading my house recently.  This morning I saw one inside a jar of tempera paint I had mixed and left on the window sill.  I mixed it from powder, and the powder had all settled on the bottom, leaving a skim of water at the top.  The daddy longlegs clung to the rim of the jar with two of its long legs and lowered itself slowly to the surface of the water where it stuck out its mandibles to drink.  Once, twice, three times it drank, and then slowly, carefully, testing every step before it took one, it backed up and out of the jar.  The whole process took longer than it took me to write it, and certainly longer than it takes to read about it.  In order to watch, I had to slow down, too.

Then I came into the computer room and sat down at the computer.  I looked up "Costco shopping trip" because my new friend and I had been talking about Costco, and since I just spent 5 years in the frozen wilds of upstate New York, far away from any Costco's, I had to restrain myself from asking her too many questions.  Then I looked up from the computer screen and saw that the whole outside was pink.  Not just "tinged a rosy pink with dawn", but actually, really pink.  I got up to take a better look.  The eastern sky was clear and the sun was up.  But from the west, a front had set up a wall of gray and white cloud.  The sun reflected pink off the clouds, caught the glow from the yellow and crimson autumn trees, and colored the whole world.

Now it is almost 7 AM and I can hear the boys talking in their room.  The clouds have come in and the world has settled down to gray sky and the sound of the bathroom door slamming.  But I'll carry the early morning slowness, the pinkness, into my day.

 

Just Call Me Rocky Road

 

 I was quite surprised to learn that I've been nominated for Best Nitty Gritty Blog again this year!  Thank you!!!

I've already voted in some of the categories so I can't link to those to campaign for blogs I like.  But Erin has a good list!

K-2 and Early Learning: November 1-7

This week was a "hither and thither" sort of week... heavy on the "thithering".  Andy took off on All Saints Day so we could run moving-related errands; Katydid had her once a month choir practice for her once a month choir (which, unfortunately, she will not be able to attend because so many of us are sick); we spent Thursday visiting gyms to find a good preschool gymnastics program; and the little boys, pumped up on Halloween candy and irritated by a virus most of the week, did their share of "thithering", too.  In other words -- it was a light week academically.  

While we were driving around we listened to Hotel for Dogs, by Lois Duncan.  We haven't seen the movie, but the book is good.  I did my fair share of indentifying with Andi Walker, the 10 year old main character. 

Because I apparently have SO MUCH to talk about for a "light week" (ahem), I'm going to break my usual weekly review post into two.  This one will focus on Farmerboy and the twins, who are roughly 2nd grade and kindergartenish, respectively.

Art and Nature Study:

I forgot to mention last week that we started a family nature journal.  It's not an original idea, but I can't remember where I first heard about it.  Anyway, I thought it would be a good way to encourage the little boys in some nature drawing and possibly to encourage my 14 year old as well.  (Katydid has her own nature journal in which she draws frequently.)  Our first project was leaf rubbings:

(Sorry about the glare from the page protector.) 

We're just using a 3-ring binder.  Katydid and Farmerboy made a cover for it and then led all the little boys on a nature walk around the yard.  They drew what they found and filed the pictures in the binder. 

This week's "excursion" (hands-on science in the yard, basically) was a dig initiated by Farmerboy, who wanted to see if any rocks could be found at all.  When it was so dry, the dirt was as hard as rock, but with our rain this week, it softened enough to take a shovel.  Unfortunately, no rocks were discovered, but a long, rotting board was, and also signs that a raccoon has taken up residence in the barn.  The raccoon will have to be evicted somehow; one of our jobs this winter is to convert one of the big stalls on the outside of the barn into a chicken coop.  Raccoons are bad for chickens.

By Sunday afternoon, the trench had become an entire river system, complete with tributaries, mountains, volcanoes, bluffs, forts, and civilizations.  Chipmunk and Pop had apparently been assigned the titles of "Erosion." 

 

Pip worked hard coloring some bird notebooking pages.  He has become very meticulous about his nature coloring pages, prefering to work from actual photos in order to get the colors right.  In order to color his blue hen chicken (the state bird of Delaware), we had to round up Storey's Illustrated Guide to Poultry Breeds, which has excellent color photos of all the breeds it references.  (And, really, if you are at all interested in raising poultry, you need this book.  Read it alongside the poultry catalogs, which is what we're doing right now.)

Math

Farmerboy and the twins have also been learning to tell time for a while now.  Farmerboy started out last spring with a few pages in Seton's Math 1 for Young Catholics, but math workbooks usually give telling time and the concepts behind it short shrift.  Time (like most mathematical concepts) is a concept best dealt with in a practical, hands-on manner anyway, but the kids do like practicing their time-telling skills on paper.  This is where typical math workbooks can become frustrating, because once you've done a page or two of clockfaces, you've exhausted the workbook's fund of time-telling practice.  So this is what we do:

Montessori clock cards :  These are not the same cards I have, I don't think, because I printed mine from somewhere I can't remember back when Katydid was learning to tell time.  But Lori's materials are top-notch, and I'm fairly certain this set is more comprehensive than the one I have been using.  The twins are working on telling time to the hour; Farmerboy is struggling a little bit remembering :15 and :45, but he's getting there.

Judy Clock:  Again, the teaching clock(s) I actually own are not the same.  I bought them (I bought two of them, one for Gareth and one for Katydid, back when there were only two kids to buy for) at an amazing teacher supply/educational bookstore we used to frequent when we lived in the St. Louis area.  (The best thing about the store was that it had a large play area in the back.)  Our clocks are not as fancy, but I actually like them better because they have the corresponding minutes printed beside the big numbers to help kids learn to tell time in 5 minute intervals.  The boys use these a lot, for fun.  They sit on the couch turning the hands and say, "It's 7 o'clock!  It's 3 o'clock in the morning! It's 12 o'clock now!"

Clock Stamps: The boys are not as keen on these as Katydid was, but they do use them occasionally.

Books:  Well, you knew there had to be books, right?  Two of our favorites: Telling Time with Big Mama Cat and Little Rabbits' First Time Book (Little Rabbit Books).   Mama Cat has been read with so much enthusiasm over the years that the hands on the clock were torn off, so it is in need of being replaced.  Little Rabbits is one of Chipmunk's favorite books at the moment.  A book I found at the library this week that shows some promise is All in One Hour.  It's illustrated with colorful cut-paper collages and digital clocks timing a chain of events set off by a cat chasing a mouse in the early morning.  (Another book of which I have fond memories is Gail Gibbons' Clocks and how they go, which I read over and over and over and OVER to Gareth when he was about 4 years old.)

Another opportunity for time-telling practice is letting me know when it's 4:00 and time for computer/Wii time. ;-)

Farmerboy is also working on adding and subtracting two digit numbers in Seton's Math 2 for Catholics.  This is work he enjoys doing, but he gets horribly frustrated if anyone talks while he's doing it.  Finding him quiet corners in which to work has been a challenge.  Also, this is another instance where kids really need some concrete, hands-on work, but our base 10 blocks were all packed up.  I finally managed to unpack them this weekend and am hoping to introduce Farmerboy to "trading up" (and hopefully the snake game, too).

And the twins spent a few hours on Sunday morning before Mass inventing their own games using Rummy Roots card decks and other board games.

Reading

Because Farmerboy was sick much of the week (including a three day headache), he didn't do too much reading, which is more difficult for him than math.  But he did read most of a picture book to me, Drat That Fat Cat!, which I found at the library.  This is a really excellent book for young readers -- SO much more intelligent and funny than most phonetic readers, and with a vocabulary mostly based on short vowel words.  I had to interject some help here and there (eg.  as with "This is an outrage!"), but Farmerboy could read a lot of it on his own.  I think that struggling readers often think they are doomed to read short, meaningless books about "nags", "cats", and "hams" for a long time, so I was happy to be able to provide Farmerboy with something different.  Glasses certainly improved his reading, but we are still going slowly.  This week has been the first I have heard him try to read words in the books HE likes to look at, or on the closed captioning on the TV.

Pip and Pop are anxious to try out their fledgeling reading skills, too, and are just at the "starting to blend" stage.  Pip in particular demands long lessons using Phonics Pathways, and this week I helped him along through his first book: a short K-4 phonetic text from Abeka I have had sitting in our container of readers (I keep sets of early phonics readers each to their own ziploc bag in a tall Rubbermaid container) for... a really long time.  Gareth and Katydid never picked them up, but they seem to be just right for the twins at this stage. 

 

 

 

 

 

Week in Review: October 25-31

It's been a long time since I've done a real week in review.  I keep meaning to do a summary of our whole term (quarter, whatever you want to call it) along with my somewhat nebulous plans for the future, but weeks pass and there is no giant review posted on my blog.  So I am just going to try to jump in with one week.  This in itself may be difficult, as at this very moment one of my five year olds and my three year old are running in and out of the house filling up containers (and a squirt gun) with water to pour on our multitude of swarming, stinging ant nests.  I cannot think that this is a good idea, but we have had the "stay away from ants" discussion ad nauseum and they have even been stung before, but they are boys.  'Nuff said.

So... what did we do this week?

Well, the weather made a bit of a statement.  We had our first trial run tornado warning on Tuesday morning.  The historic Midwestern storm arrived at our house just as I was leaving to bring the baby to the doctor for a well-child visit.

Katydid took a picture of the approaching front, about twenty minutes before the storm arrived and the sirens went off.

I'm not sure if there was ever a tornado actually spotted, but the rotation passed several miles south of us.  Andy worked from home in the morning so I wouldn't have to haul all 7 kids to the doctor's office (which turned out to be a blessing, since I waited for an hour and a half in a small, windowless waiting room much like a tornado shelter), and he and the kids dragged all of the stuff out of the wide but narrow hall closet in preparation for riding out the storm.  Katydid and Gareth remember tornado warnings from living in St. Louis, but we had a basement there.  One of the first things I did after we moved in here was to think about where we would go in case of tornado.  (I have a "thing" about tornadoes.  Really, I'm much better now.)  Due to the quirky nature of our floor plan, we have no interior rooms in this house.  We have two places to go: a long, skinny cedar closet in the hallway, and Katydid's walk-in-ish closet (which is piled high with craft stuff... etc., etc.)  So I am just praying that we have no actual tornadoes!

On the same day, we received via UPS the highlight of Farmerboy's week...

A couple of rock collections!

The Deluxe Introductory Earth Science Collection at Home Science Tools is about $25 off right now.  Their Stratigraphic Fossil Collection is about $20 off.  I don't know why we haven't collected any formal rock collections until now, considering the high levels of interest I and all the kids have had in the subject.  What pushed me over the edge this time were the discussions Gareth and I have had recently about high school earth science.  Because Gareth was more interested in history than science last spring and summer, I had planned for him to do a survey course based on A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.  I had planned for this to be roughly equivalent this year to a course in physical science.  But when we were unpacking, Gareth discovered The Eternal Frontier by Tim Flannery and started reading it.  The Eternal Frontier is a history of the North American continent beginning with the meteor strike 65 million years ago.  He left off that book around 1492 and picked up The Future Eaters, which takes the same approach to Australia and its surrounding lands.  (He's reading The Future Eaters right now.)  So we started talking about paleontology again, and upshot of that is we are now planning to cover the four traditional areas of high school earth science: Geology (including paleontology, unless we get SO much paleo by the end of high school that it can be broken out as its own course); Oceanography; Astronomy; and Atmospheric Science.  More details to follow (hopefully). 

I read the boys a Let's Read and Find Out science book, Let's Go Rock Collecting!  and we found more rock and fossil and dinosaur books when we went to the library.  Farmerboy and Katydid also set up an experiment to grow salt crystals up a string.

Halloween/Fall picture books read this week:

 

Other Picture Books:

 

School Books for K-2:

• Reading lessons from Phonics Pathways
• Narrations from Aesop's Fables (Farmerboy, grade 2)
• Read aloud from One Small Square: Backyard

Little Boys:

I bought a whole bunch of Kumon books for the boys to use independently.  The Mazes and Cutting books were big hits. Farmerboy then asked me to order a Mazes book for him, too, so I got him the Around the World mazes book.  Some of those are really hard!  

I'm actually quite happy to see them working with these mazes so much, given our past history with vision and occupational therapy.

Read-Alouds (Chapter Books):

• The Book of Saints and Heroes
  
• Mattimeo and The Bellmaker, Redwall books by Brian Jacques (Farmerboy and the twins)
• Finding the First T. Rex (ch. 1, Farmerboy)

Katydid:

• Finished Sun Faster, Sun Slower and Greek Myths
• Started A Wonderbook for Boys and Girls (Nathaniel Hawthorne) and Outlaws of Ravenhurst
• Made a walking stick and sewed a fabric bag
• Continued work on her tropical birds notebook
• Started dictation and copywork with Spelling Wisdom

Gareth:

• Read and narrated from Glory Of Christendom: History Of Christendom Vol 3 (History of Christendom Series ; Vol. III) , The Future Eaters, and The Golden Thread: A Novel About St. Ignatius Loyola 
• Started dictation and copywork with Spelling Wisdom
• About halfway through the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum

(I'm not saying anything about the dailies here: math, Latin, grammar, copywork for Farmerboy. I do hope to make some general "curriculum" posts, though.)

And, of course, there was Halloween and the All Saints Day party.

 

 

 

 

All Saints

St. Jeanne Jugan, newly canonized in October of 2009, foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor...

St. Louis, busy and blurry as usual...

St. George is a man of few words and was not sure he wanted to stand up in front of all those people.  (St. George is also very brave.)

He's supposed to be St. Isidore, the Farmer.  Apparently St. Isidore wore a "John Deere cape".  (Because it's green, see.)  Everyone at the party called him "St. John Deere."

Today, the Feast of All Saints, we spent running errands, grocery shopping, signing papers, an unscheduled library visit, and finally -- with one of the twins down with the annual All Saints Day fever -- watching the recorded Mass from the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.  

November always seem to me like a little Lent... after all the candy and celebration, a little sobriety, a little swirl of rain and leaves coming down off the trees, a little remembrance of those who have gone before, the double feasts of All Saints and All Souls.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.  Amen.

Halloween

Hope your Halloween was happy, too!