Idioms

2yo: [trying to get out of his booster seat after dinner] "Can somebody buckle me up?"
7yo: [looking over to help out] "You're already buckled up!"
2yo: "Well, then can somebody buckle me DOWN?"

I just love the confusing nuances of language! My university students do similar funny things with Russian.

As we come to the end of Paschaltide . . .

Here are a few last minute Paschal wishes to you all for this year. 2yo is in LOVE with the Paschal greeting this year, and often spontaneously walks up to me and yells "Christ is Risen!" He also insists that HE has to be the one to start the tropar before every meal. You can see below that he is partial to the Greek, but gives Arabic a valiant try.

And here's the duet version. For kids whose mother is getting a PhD in Slavic Linguistics, these boys sure do avoid the Church Slavonic. They are like the cobbler's kids who have no shoes.

Oh, and for those who ask how I manage to homeschool and be a grad student, the disastrous mess in the background is the answer to your question. See the laundry, toys and books everywhere? That's just regular old life around here.

Birth, Pregnancy and the Incarnation

This is a repost from another blog from September 2007.

Here is my 6yo's explanation of the above topics to his 2yo brother over lunch today. His dad and I were listening in and trying not to interject too much.

6yo: Now listen. Only girls can have babies in their tummies. If you want to have a baby, you have to be a girl, and you have to be married. Well, except . . . [here my heart sank, wondering what was coming next and what he knew that I didn't know he knew] . . . except if you're Mary.

[I smiled in relief and agreement.]

[He stopped to think for a minute.]

6yo: But, actually she was married, too.

Me: Who was she married to?

[6yo takes his finger and just points upward.]

[Now I've got all of these theological themes running through my head as I try to figure out if I should just agree with his comment, or make any correction. I'm thinking, Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but never married, Christ is the Bridegroom and the Church is the Bride, Holy Virgins are married to Christ . . . My mind continues to race, and just as I decide just to let this one be and be impressed with his assessment, he pipes up again, talking to his little brother.]

6yo: But, the same one she was married to, she also gave birth to!!!

I think he's getting the paradoxes of our faith. He saw the look of happy surprise in my eyes and said, "Mom, I know all about this stuff!"

Summer Math Practice

My 7yo son loves video games. He really is a child of the 21st century with excellent computer skills. Oh well. Somehow, someway these things might serve him well. The thing is, we don't have any kind of video game equipment at all. No Gameboy. No X-Box. No Wii. No nothing. I have no plans to change that situation any time in the near future. We do have two laptops - one for mom and dad, one for homeschool (which we actually all use). So he likes to play various online games on lego.com , pbskids.org and playmobil.com. I usually allow him a little time to play some online games each day, after school and chores are done for the day. So, here's the deal we've made for the summer months. If he wants computer time, he has to start it with math practice. We're using Arcademic Skill Builders this summer. It is marked as a favorite on his school laptop. When he wants computer time, he starts by going to this site. I set the oven timer and he has to play math games on this site for 15 minutes. He really likes the games on this site and it gives him some good arithmetic practice. He seems to grasp abstract math concepts really well, but still needs a lot of work on the pure memorization of facts. This is really giving him the daily practice he needs and he never argues about it. He actually begs to play. After he has his 15 minutes of math, he gets 20 minutes to play something else. It's working so far, and I'm hoping to see lots of good improvement in his arithmetic skills by August!

Learning to love opera, one step at a time, through the ears of a child

I'll confess that I've never really been a lover of opera. And I'll confess also that no one ever took the time to teach me to love it. I remember really loving the occasional "operas" on Mister Rogers Neighborhood when I was a child. But my love ended there. When I was 13, I performed three major performances with a large opera company. But I was a dancer, not a singer. I danced as an angel in Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel. Though I was in awe of the elaborate costumes and sets, the music did nothing for me. It wasn't an art form I was going to understand or enjoy.

As a dancer I was in love with the ballet, and enjoyed soaking in the choreography of Petipa, Balanchine, Fokine, Njinsky and others. And I learned to love the music of many wonderful composers through my love of the ballet. So I learned to appreciate and know many works of Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Mozart and many other composers. But still, opera had no appeal. During high school, my best friend's father loved opera. Whenever we rode in the car with him, he would be listening to opera. I wondered how it could possibly hold his attention. Really, I wondered how he could even endure it.

As a young student living in St. Petersburg, Russia in the 1990's, I determined to make opera my own. I could go to the Marinsky Theatre almost any day, pay about $5, and see world-class opera and ballet. What better way to spend an evening after classes were over? Even if I went alone, it was magnificent. Of course, I took the time to see many of my favorite ballets - Giselle, The Firebird, Swan Lake and others. But I really determined to try opera on for size. Maybe if I saw it in such a magnificent theatre with meticulously trained voices, I would love it. Maybe. I saw a few while I was there. Madame Butterfly. The Magic Flute. I honestly can't remember what else. German operas mainly. It didn't stick. I wasn't sold. And I concluded that maybe I'm just not the opera type. I had truly given it the old college try. Even a couple years later, when I married a man who adores the music of Pavarotti, I was not won over. He could blast those arias in our living room all he wanted, I wasn't going to enjoy it.

Then, this past fall, I watched on DVD a truly magnificent 1990 production of Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov conducted by the very talented Valery Gergiev with Robert Lloyd as Godunov. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I was in love. I couldn't get enough. I brought home a copy and made my husband watch it. Granted, the subject matter is one that I'm very comfortable with, frankly, one I love. Granted, I was watching it while assistant teaching a class in Russian Culture and thinking carefully about how to teach college students to love this opera. So I was soaking in the music, the themes, the unbelievable acting, the unusual sets, the layers of folk music with church hymnography with traditional arias, and the breath-taking ability of Robert Lloyd. And I was thinking about how to explain these themes to students who didn't know as much about Russian Culture as I do. But I had so much fun with it. I decided that week that maybe I could love opera. Just maybe.

So, I was delighted when the end of our K12 music curriculum this year was a five-lesson study of Mozart's The Magic Flute. I couldn't wait to see what K12 did with it and what I could begin to learn about Mozart's opera. If I had learned to love Russian opera, maybe it was worth revisiting German opera. We had so much fun with this study!



The K12 material was simple, but just right to pull my 7yo in to the music and story. The lessons divided the narrative of the opera into 5 sections. At the beginning of each lesson we read a chapter in the narrative. My 7yo loved hearing the tale of Tamino, Pamina, Papageno, Sarastro and the Queen of the Night. The story has so many unexpected twists and turns, so each chapter left him wanting to hear the next. At the end of each chapter, we would listen to one or two short pieces from the opera. Included in our materials was a great CD of highlights from The Magic Flute. During the five lessons, we focused on 5 pieces from this collection. As always with K12's music, the listening was focused to help him pull something relevant from his listening. My son really enjoyed listening for the kind voice of Sarastro in "O Isis and Osiris" and for the anger in the voice of the Queen of the Night in "Der Hoelle Rache kocht in meinen Herzen." (He also enjoyed trying to sing along with the VERY high soprano sections of this piece.) But I knew he was hooked when we got to the last lesson. That's when we read the last chapter when Pagageno is united with Papagena and Tamino with Pamina. The chapter did a great job describing how Papageno cannot even find words to sing when he tries to speak to Papagena. 7yo laughed and laughed that all Papageno could sing was "pa-pa-pa-pa." When the time came for the listening section, we had a few pieces to use. But he begged to hear the duet between Papageno and Papagena. So, he happily laughed aloud as he heard the two sing "Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Papageno." I never even bothered him that everything was in German. And before I knew it, he was asking to hear some other pieces from the CD. And then, when we were finished, I found him staying at the stereo, to start at the beginning and hear more of the selections! He really enjoyed it. When his dad got home for lunch, 7yo insisted on playing a few of his favorite arias for his dad. And in the midst of it, I found myself also wanting to hear more from the opera. (And wondering how I missed so much of the beauty when I saw this opera in a beautiful theatre years ago.)

I think maybe it's time to find a good video of a performance of The Magic Flute. And I'll look forward to exploring some more opera with my kids next year. Thanks to K12 for helping us learn to love it!