Our topic for the week:

Do you have a sibling, cousin, parent, grandparent, or other family member that you look up to? Tell us about this person and why you admire him or her.

RULES: The person MUST BE a relative, but I don’t care how closely related you are. Perhaps you really admire your mother’s maternal grandmother’s third cousin four times removed. I’m good with that. Also, your essay is due on Friday!

See you then!

Where would you most like to live and why?

Ready to link to your own stories?  Have your mom type up your essay on her blog and then you can link to it here so all of us can read it.  Thanks for playing, and I’m sure looking forward to reading what you wrote!

This week’s topic:

Where would you most like to live and why?

Rules:  No rules.  It doesn’t have to be a certain length and you won’t be judged on your spelling or the proper use of commas.  Do your best, of course, but that’s not the point of this club.  We’ll put up a post of Friday where you can link to your essays.  So I guess there is one rule: your writing is due on Friday!  That way, we can spend the weekend reading each other’s work.  Have fun!

Moms: If you help your kids type up their work, please feel free to go ahead and clean up to spelling and punctuation so the rest of us can read it more easily.  If they type themselves, just give it a quick once-over for readability.  You can use any mistakes you find as teaching opportunities later.    And if you ever want to participate, too – go ahead!

]]> http://www.cooperfamilyfarm.com/fbp/index.php/2012/02/young-writers-club-week-1/feed/ 2 http://www.cooperfamilyfarm.com/fbp/index.php/2012/02/favorite-memories/ http://www.cooperfamilyfarm.com/fbp/index.php/2012/02/favorite-memories/#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:56:12 +0000 Jennie C. http://www.cooperfamilyfarm.com/fbp/?p=9057 Continue reading →]]> Brenna and Delaney turned in their essays the earliest and I was struck by the similarities in them: both from the same time in our military lives, when Davey was recruiting, both centered on those precious Sundays, the only day of the week he had off.

I think for Davey, it was probably his most challenging assignment, not so much because the job was hard, but because the hours were long, the days all the same, and the leadership abusive. For those of us old enough to remember it, though, those three years were some of the happiest in our family life. Strange, isn’t it? It’s like the less we saw of him, the better the together times were.

I used to get up early enough each morning to make him a hot breakfast and pack his lunch, and if it was winter, I’d shovel the snow off the walk and from around his car so that he wouldn’t get snow down his “recruiter shoes”. We only had one assigned parking spot there and I’d always park somewhere else so he could have our spot. By the time he got home at 10pm, there wouldn’t be any FREE spaces open anywhere near our house.

Every afternoon, just after lunch, I’d give him a call just to chat and remind him that I loved him and that I was thinking of him. On the rare occasions I was unable to make that call, he missed it. In the evening, I’d save him a plate from dinner. When he got off around 9, he’d call on his cell phone and we’d chat for the 45 minutes it took him to get home and I’d heat his meal. We often got another hour together at the table when he arrived, while he ate and decompressed.

It was good.

Meggie was little then, though, and she doesn’t remember good times. That hurt me more than a little bit, to read her memory. She only remembers the deployment years, pain, anger, loss. I hope they can make some happier memories together.

Well, here they are. I put them up on an old blog of mine for linkability and so that this post wouldn’t get too long.

Brenna
Delaney
Megan
Jonathan
Rosie

Preliminary results show there might be a little interest in a young writers linky! I’ll post a topic/prompt on Monday and entries will be due on Friday, which will give us a whole weekend to read our little ones’ submissions. I’m going to leave it up to moms whether or not to correct inventive spelling and bad punctuation, but my personal preference is to correct it for readability. (I have a comma challenged child.) You can use their mistakes as teaching opportunities the following week. If children are really small, they might want to narrate their stories to their typists. That’s fine, too. I don’t want this to be another schoolish assignment. I really just want this to be a fun thing for the children, to get them thinking about writing as a way of expressing themselves, and just to get them into the habit. My children are excited about this; they say I think up the best writing prompts.

Sound good?

Davey was home and it was a big party week. Why? Well, because we’re retiring from the Army after 20 years of service, that’s why.

See? I got this:

I thought about blocking out my name, but that would be silly, don't you think?

I would show you his, but all he got was a Meritorious Service Medal, which is awesome, of course, but it says nothing at all about retiring. Mine says we’re retired.

So there was the day of the ceremony and we had a party the next day which – thank goodness – was pretty well attended. A good time was had by all, and one older gentleman even said, “I’ve been to a lot of these here things, and this is the best retirement party I’ve ever attended.” Welcome praise, because while I am quite good at making people feel welcome in our home, organized parties are not my forte. Or at least, I don’t think they are. It’s entirely possible that our guests think I’m doing a-okay.

Anyway, following hot on the heels of the retirement party was Tommy’s third birthday. Ack! My baby is three! THREE! To celebrate the occasion, I gave him a haircut. It’s been a whole half a week now and I’m still regretting it.

See? I mean, these two pictures were taken a mere two weeks apart. But the baby is all gone. He’s a cutie pie, though, isn’t he? And he was asking me almost every night to cut his hair. Sigh. I guess it was time.

But I’m still sad.

It was a good week, I guess. We ate too much cake, but there were balloons and miles of festive red, white and blue crepe paper, and modest gifts in line with the upcoming budget limitations, and pleasant company. One day soon, I’ll get over the habit of sleeping alone, and I’ll remember to check with him before going about my business, and I’ll stop chafing at his “interruptions”. I need a lot of retraining, too.

Later, I’ll tell you about the time they left me alone for four whole hours. I hope I never have to go through that again.

Tomorrow, I’m going to post some essays the children wrote. I’m trying to get them into the writing habit, so I’ve been assigning a topic each Monday, with the essay due on Friday. This week, they wrote about a favorite memory of their daddy, and they are sweet and touching and even a little heart-breaking, but I have permission to post them, so we’ll run with that. If you are interested, I’ll post a topic on Monday and your children can write along, too, and maybe we can have a Friday link-up. What do you think?

Jonny is collecting dust-like samples off the windowsill for examination.

They’re full of microscopic bugs.

And only some of them are dead.

I met a couple of local archaeologists at the Louisville Science Center a couple of weeks ago.  They offer a program for school children in which they learn about the site and get to participate in the dig.  It’s not worth their while to run the program for just a few children, so I offered to plan the trip for our local Catholic homeschool group.  We’ve got about 35 kids planning to attend, but if you happen to be a local reader and think you’d like to do this with your children, just let me know!  You can email me at armyofseven(at)yahoo(dot)com.

The site is called Riverside, Farnsley-Moremen Landing.  And I don’t mind if you’re not Catholic.  I may wonder why not, but I won’t mind. 

“Where do you go to school?” she asked Delaney.  “I don’t remember seeing  you before.”

“I’m homeschooled,” Delaney replied.

“Homeschooled!  I suppose you never get out, then.”

Delaney didn’t know what to say.  Did she perhaps think we lived in this gymnasium at a closed-down Catholic school?   How did she suppose we’d developed the relationship which had gotten us the invitation to this most important of family events?  As she really liked this lady and couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t be offensive, Delaney chose to be silent.

When I heard the tale at home later, I told her, “Next time, just look at her sympathetically and say, ‘You were public schooled, weren’t you.’”

“No, I only have seven,” I grinned.

She laughed. “How many places can you get away with saying only seven?”

She only has six. Such a slacker.

That said, the author clearly loves Texas and everything about Texas, including the Texas Rangers, and he covers a rather broad swath of Texas history.  Evil deeds are never romanticized, no matter how beloved the evil-doer, and the Rangers’ own deeds in administering justice are played down.  It was a fact of the Old West that sometimes justice could only be served by killing, but in the case of the Rangers, it’s told as a sad fact of their jobs, and our Rangers never brag about such things, but are only glad to have been able to help their fellow Texans.

Well done, and an interesting read, which has made me want to follow up with Sam Houston.  Stay tuned…