Two Little Monkeys Sitting In A Tree

You might have to squint really hard — or double-click on the photo — to see the monkeys.

Does This Mean That The Lazy Days of Summer Are Here?

Poetry — With A Twist

Today Dominic and FDPG worked on rhyming couplets. We started with helping & linking verbs, then, as these things do, our lessons morphed into poetry.

We're using a very loose blend of First Language Lessons, English For The Thoughtful Child, and Classical Writing Aesop this year. I say blend because there are days when I find one too constraining, or the other too predictable, but they are all fairly similar in method so it's easy to jump from one to the other with too much fuss.

Anyhow, we picked this poem and decided to fool around with it, because it's so charming and light-hearted and simple to memorize. And, well, they already HAD memorized it last year, so adapting a lesson for it was easy.

The Months Sara Coleridge

January brings the snow, 
makes our feet and fingers glow. 



February brings the rain,Thaws the frozen lake again. 



March brings breezes loud and shrill, 
stirs the dancing daffodil. 



April brings the primrose sweet, 
Scatters daises at our feet. 



May brings flocks of pretty lambs, 
Skipping by their fleecy dams.



June brings tulips, lilies, roses, 
Fills the children's hand with posies. 



Hot July brings cooling showers, 
Apricots and gillyflowers. 



August brings the sheaves of corn, 
Then the harvest home is borne. 


Warm September brings the fruit, 
Sportsmen then begin to shoot. 



Fresh October brings the pheasants, 
Then to gather nuts is pleasant. 



Dull November brings the blast, 
Then the leaves are whirling fast. 



Chill December brings the sleet, 
Blazing fire, and Christmas treat.

After they wrote it out I had them make up their own rhyming couplets. "Pick two months," I said, "any month. Then make up a couplet for each month."

I went off to make lunch.

FDPG interpreted it her way, which meant that she made up more than one couplet for each month — because more is better, right? Here's her example:

Cold December brings the snow,

With it traffic cannot go.

They plough the streets with all their might,

But always snow comes back at night.

She had something started using August, her birth month, but at printing time it wasn't quite ready for publication. That's our FDPG, always not quite finished. I have suggested that she translate this into Latin as a motto but she doesn't find my suggestion quite as amusing as I do.

Here are Dominic's examples. Dominic is a man of economy. Why do two couplets when only one is required? This was perhaps the only example I have of Dominic listening carefully to my instructions, so when he corrected FDPG, in his inimitable way

"I LISTENED TO MUM, YOU DIDN'T"

we were all quite astounded.

January is cold and bright

So let's get in a snowball fight!

December is nice and loud and clear,

And let's fill the house with Christmas cheer!

Then we went in and had lunch. They were all sniggering when they came into the dining room, and Max asked me if I'd heard their other couplets. "Other?" I said. "You wrote more?"

I should have known better. I'm tempted to call some of this doggerel, but one of them is merely being observant. Nevertheless, I think this lot will stay in the Ogden Nash section of the library.

FDPG:

August is a garden time

For gin and tonic with a lime!

Dominic:

It's August, let's go to the petting zoo

Look — a cow— mooooooo.

(never mind that cows aren't commonly found in petting zoos)

In Which We Get A Lemon House

It all started with this: two lemon trees, a concrete wall, some mulch, and a cold frame.

It seemed so easy at the time. Stick them in the ground. Watch them grow. Harvest lemons - in the event that they fruited. What I didn't bank on was how much growing them - this not being your typical lemon growing climate - would obsess me.

Okay, maybe I did. I might not have recognized it at the time, but hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it?
So I planted the lemons, and left them. Then I started looking at the path to the cold frame from this angle. The cold frame is at the end on the left, that small blob of plastic. But the path was so very crooked. Bumpy. Hard to mow. Awkward when picking peas and beans from the arbour (on the right). I will flatten this path, I thought. I will lift the sod, remove some soil, then replace the sod. The path will be flat and smooth...

...and it will lead to a Lemon House.
Fast forward several months, some discussions with family members (some willing, some rather, hmmm, let's just say recalcitrant and leave it at that), and many many discarded ideas.

Here is the germ of the method we finally settled on - in the bed of that red pickup. An old glass door set into a wooden frame. The man on the left (AKA: Willing Father) built it; the man on the right (AKA: Recalcitrant Husband) assisted in getting it into this truck. He has no idea what he's in for, which is probably a good thing.
Ignorance really IS bliss in some cases.
Once we got the glass over to the back yard of our house, there was, this being a Male Building Event, much measuring and discussion.

Endless measuring and discussing, actually.

Which was when I noticed that Recalcitrant Husband was standing on my lemon tree.

Bad Recalcitrant Husband.


We have a brief break while I intervene in the Male Building Event. Recalcitrant Husband, for all his wonderful qualities, has a long and distressing history of standing on plants in the garden without any clue OR concern whatsoever. When apprised of his Plant Standing Transgressions he doesn't bat an eyelid, either. "Well, what's it doing there?" he says, sometimes rather rudely. "That's not a good place for a —" I point out that he's actually IN the garden, where plants are SUPPOSED to be, but he never quite grasps the irony of my remarks. So I must be vigilant.

Here we have Lemon trees with Protective Coatings.

They laughed when I did this. Recalcitrant Husband might even have rolled his eyes at Willing Father a little, but I remained firm: either the lemons have a cover throughout the entire Building Experience or I stand around barking out remarks like "YOUR FOOT IS ON THE LEMON TREE!" and "WATCH THAT LEMON TREE!" and "ACCKKKKKK! THE LEMON TREE IS GETTING SQUISHED!" and maybe even a little "GET YOUR FEET OFF THAT LEMON TREE."

Fortunately everyone saw the sense in keeping the covers on the lemon trees.
They then resumed their endless measuring and discussing.

Measuring.

Discussing.

Measuring some more.

Discussing some more.


Then there was this lot, who spent a lot of time goading other people into getting ice cream from the freezer and eating it. They look innocent enough, but don't be leaving them near your freezers any time soon, lemme tell you.









And then suddenly it was up. The glass was on, the posts were in place, the frame was straight, the supports were screwed in.

It all looked wonderful, from any angle.



















But it was when I was taking this picture, ostensibly of the post and concrete block, that I noticed how, well, sunken the lemon trees were.

The lemons were sprawled on the ground, too. They'd been like that all winter.

Not a good look for a lemon, if you ask me.




So today I dug them up and set them on a base of soil and compost and manure. Built a little brick box around them.

Took another picture.







Stood back.

Admired.

Gazed.

Then thought "Hmm, it needs a little something on the sides."





And there you have it: The Lemon House

Before & After

I love these poppies. I can't think why everyone doesn't grow them. They are soft and frilly and glorious on a sunny day.

Princess Victoria Louise

It's Coming...

A clever little short for all you HP fans out there:

LEGO Wednesday

Some of us like building things out of LEGO. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that some of us are slightly obsessed with building things out of LEGO. Some of us can stay in our cave of a room for hours building Things That Go. So some of us thought we'd develop a new blog feature, in which we showcase the things that some of us are building (because some of us like being part of the bloggy world and are tired of hearing about all the clever things a certain sister is doing).

So, with that in mind, here is a video of an item a certain nine year old someone built the other day. And yes, we DO know that it's not Halloween. It's just that some of us really like Halloween.