"What does blunder mean?"
I was standing by the table one afternoon working on something while my 6 year old son was coloring. He interrupted the quiet with this question. Not thinking much about it I replied, somewhat absentmindedly,
"It's a mistake." The quiet resumed but apparently his mind didn't stop. A few minutes later he said, "Oh. So the soldier made a mistake sending them into the mouth of hell." At this I started to pay more attention to what he was saying (this particular child is known for talking non-stop and it's possible I have a bad habit of only half listening to him). "Mouth of hell?" What was he talking about?
"So the soldiers shouldn't have had to go to the mouth of hell?" As he continued his line of questions it dawned on me that now, hours after the fact, he was thinking about the poem we'd be reading every morning. The Charge of the Light Brigade paints a vivid picture of honor and duty as well as the consequences of a "mistake" and Zane was still pondering what it all meant even after we'd done ten thousand other things and even wrapped school up for the day. These connections and conversations are stuff dreams are made up of for us home-schooling mamas. To see even my youngest child grasping the feast set before him and forming a relationship with it almost feels like a whisper of encouragement to keep on keeping on from Heaven itself. Sometimes the relationship is just a 6 year old understanding what happened in an historical poem, sometimes it is something like my 11 year old mentioning that the valley that made pilgrim's sleepy, that was part of the Evil Prince's realm, in Pilgrim's Progress, reminded her of the field of poppies in The Wizard of Oz that she has recently finished reading, and sometimes it's seeing a mossy snapping turtle at a nature center and my 9 year old saying, "Hey! That's exactly what Minn looks like!" However they're made I'm trying to store them up, write them down, remember them, and thank God for allowing me to take them on this journal of education which, as Charlotte Mason says, is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.
