Plant Project, Dragons, WW2 Nazi Movies, and More

I'm moving very slowly through Jeremiah with the boys...or should I say William, since Trusten just can't sit still through it all, and I don't usually make him. I've mostly been reading just one chapter a day, but sometimes two. I imagine some of the prophetic material is a bit on the boring side for children. I do briefly explain what I can to Will, though. I want him to be prepared...

Yesterday was Plant Project day (Thursday). Will cut out two leaves that we had scanned, and he pasted five more index cards to five sheets of card stock, and he pasted the two leaves. I have to catch up on gathering info for what we have. I am hoping to do some of that today.

Oh, I'm still suffering through TSAP. I really would like to have something with spaghetti sauce. I wonder...am I addicted to tomatine, or do I just really like tomato sauce and am having a hard time finding much to eat that doesn't have tomato, potato, or some sort of pepper that is in the plant family of Solanaceae? I haven't had any physical withdrawals of which I'm aware. It's the hardest when I go to the grocery store. It's a bit frustrating. And then Nathan said he's sick of having chicken and dressing for our sabbath meal (I'm read to change, too, although it sure is good), and I'd like to fix lasagna (I make really good lasagna, too!), but I can't. I think I'm going to make chicken spaghetti for this evening's sabbath meal.

Yeah, notice how I said, "I think." Isn't that bad...I'm not sure what I'm going to fix! Oh, and I'd mentioned having a brisket for the Feast of Trumpets (what we usually eat for that day), and Nathan said he'd rather buy a tenderloin and cut up some filet mignon. This is probably a good idea, because it dawned on me that we always use barbecue sauce with the brisket, and it has tomato and cayenne in it. I let Will get a small bag of sea salt and vinegar potato chips from the deli when we go grocery shopping, and it's so hard to bear him and Trusten chomping away on them when I don't get any. I have just a little more than a month to go, not quite halfway through this torturous experiment.

Anyway, for quite a many months I've had the subject of dragons and seraphim in my mind a lot. Well, I verbally spoke to Nathan a couple of weeks ago that I still really wanted to know more about dragons and whether there were/are good and bad dragons and whether the seraphim order of angels are dragons (etymological and other biblical evidence suggests that they may be). Well, it just so happened a few days later (this often happens for me) that I got an email from the History Channel website telling me about a sale, so I went to see what they had on sale, and there was a video on dragon history, which is just what I was wanting. Well, I found it even cheaper on Amazon. I got it for around 10 bucks after shipping costs. So, we watched that about a week ago. The boys watched it with us (sort of, anyway). It was interesting. It was only 50 minutes worth, though. I still have more study to do on the topic. (It did mention Satan being referred to as a dragon and about leviathan in the sea, but it didn't talk about angels beyond that.)

Wednesday night we watched the movie Valkyrie. It is based on a true story set in the time of WWII, about a group trying to assassinate the wicked Hitler. It was a sad story. They failed, and I believe it said at the end that Operation Valkyrie was the 15th failed attempt by different persons/groups to assassinate the evil German ruler. They were so close, and then a change in plans--a change of a building in which Hitler was having a briefing--was enough to foil the whole thing. (You'll have to watch the movie yourself to see why. ;-) It hit me right then that it was the evil spirits working behind the scenes. That is my feeling on the matter. It didn't say why they moved the briefing over to the other building.

Anyway, Thursday night (last night) we watched Defiance. I haven't cried that much during a movie in a long time. And I have to write about it. I really need to watch the movie again today (we have it rented from Amazon for a 24-hour period) and take notes with my Smartpen. But, I just don't see how I have time, so I will either have to make the time to just write something the best I can with the memory of watching it once, or I'll just have to rent it again. The latter is probably what will happen. I don't want to leave anything important out that I want to talk about. Defiance is also based on a true story set in the time of WW2 and the Holocaust. It's about some Jews in Eastern Europe who flee from the German Nazis to the Belarusian forests to survive. They have all sorts of trouble go their way.

Their time of escape happened to be before winter, so they had time to build shelter ahead of time, but then right as winter was about to set in, they had to leave their camp and go establish a new one. This and so many other terrible events occurred. There was some military fighting, though they ended up for the most part just trying to survive and keep each other alive. They didn't trust God enough, though. There was a terrible lack of faith. I wonder how much better they would have fared if their attitudes had been different. There was one part where I cried with joy, and that was during a wedding feast. But, I cried so much more over all the death, fighting, division, heartlessness, sickness. Last night ended up being one of those nights where I just wept heavily because of the sins of humanity, beings made in the image of God Almighty and being treated like some sort of garbage by fellow humans also made in the image of God.

It was one of those times where my heart just melted in love and compassion for my fellow humans and yet at the same time burn with hatred toward evil hearts who bear the image of God unworthily and wonder how they could possibly hate and mistreat fellow human beings in such a horrible manner.

There was certainly much to learn from the movie. I caught a lot of things during both movies, but I especially did from the second one. I saw so many biblical parallels of past and future events. Will watched the movie, too, although I was reluctant in letting him (but Nathan said it was reality and so wasn't too concerned). It's rated R, and there is definitely plenty of violence. I was able to explain some things to Will, though.

Oh, and he's so smart. Toward the beginning of the movie, the two Jewish brothers who are the main characters were hiding at the edge of the woods and watching the Germans kill and haul off Jews. When they all left, they went back to their house to get their youngest brother out from hiding under the floor (their parents were killed) and gather some food and things and then headed back toward the woods, and Will said, "They're having to go survive now." :-( I told him that yes, it was true. One of the games he plays when he's outside is Surviving. He says, "I'm going to go survive." This is before we've really started teaching him survival skills, but that is our plans.

That is a big part of the reason why I'm doing the plant project so that we can learn all we need to know about different trees, wildflowers, and other plants--food and drug usage and building usage (shelter, baskets, etc.) We will soon be starting a long curriculum called Prepare and Pray. I bought the first and second set of the curriculum. The second set is called Blessed Assurance. I'm not sure whether we're going to start it when we end our school break in mid-September or whether we'll wait until the beginning of next year (the beginning of the next Roman calendar year, in January). He'll be so busy with reading, writing, and math (I have a lot of that planned) work that we might not have any time to do anything else (except the animal science I have planned) until January, especially since I'm about to have the baby this fall and that I have a time limit to finish the book I'm writing, God's Law of Love: The Perfect Law of Liberty. But, we'll definitely be starting the curriculum soon.

Nathan will be taking Will hunting this fall, and I'm sure Nathan will carefully teach him how to clean and cut up a deer.

Trusten mostly learns from observing the rest of us and from talking with us. He asks questions. I do various activities with him when I have time. I simply don't have the time to sit down with him as I did Will at that age. Will certainly had the firstborn advantage.

I finished the book The Firstborn Advantage. What a super book. I highly recommend it, especially to firstborns. I did appreciate that the author Dr. Kevin Leman explained how there can be more than one person in sibling group that possesses firstborn qualities/personalities and that the literal firstborn doesn't always act like a firstborn.

I understood this a bit before I read the book, based mostly on my biblical knowledge and how a firstborn son can lose his firstborn rights. This book didn't discuss rights, really, but it just explained that you can have a firstborn son and a firstborn daughter, both with firstborn traits; and that whenever you have five years or more between two siblings, you can consider those subfamilies and that the firstborn of that subfamily may have firstborn traits. I truly believe that. My husband was the second born of two sons, but he's ten years younger than the firstborn. My husband has more firstborn traits, but he also does have two or three lastborn traits (such as his great sense of humor and social skills and his fantastic salesman ability). He's mixed.

I am no doubt a firstborn. The book not only confirmed things I already knew but also taught me things I didn't really know. The book pointed out the good and the bad of being a firstborn and how to use the firstborn advantage to one's benefit and also to the benefit of others (especially when people tend to easily hate firstborns). I better understand now why I tend to be so very analytical, logical, and organized. These traits are typical of firstborns. I'd like to get a copy of Kevin's The Birth Order Book now. I am very much into the study of birth order. It's amazing! I believe, as Kevin said, that there's a need for every birth order in our society, because each birth order possesses different strengths.

Wow, I'm so impressed with William's various houses and other structures he builds with blocks. He loves to build. I think it will be very exciting when he can build good things out wood and nails (he practices this already). If he's anything like his daddy is, he'll do well.

Will also loves the Reading Rainbow dvds I bought for him. I think he's watched them all, and I know he'll watch them again. I'm so pleased. I'm glad I got them. I just LOVED RR when I was a kid. Kudos to Levar Burton, the host. It's so nice to see a decent black person who loves to learn and share with others. (And he was on Star Trek: The Next Generation, too, and I LOVED that show, too!) Will has learned a lot from the videos. Trusten watches, too. My boys are SO CUTE sitting on the couch together watching a video.

Okay, well I'm just rattling on now. The main point is that we are still happily learning, even during our "break." (But, hey, we're enjoying a lot of time outside, and I'm catching up on my reading. Yay!)

Oh, yeah...one more thing. Last sabbath, while the boys went for a ride with Nathan, I was walking around the yard, and I inspected a tree at the edge of the yard. There are bumps all over the trunk of the tree. I assumed it must be some sort of fungal growth but that perhaps the bark was just that way. I'm not sure what kind of tree it is. I have not identified it, yet. But, anyway...fast forward to just two or three days ago, and the boys and I were outside. I was sitting on the front porch reading, and Trusten pointed to a beetle of some sort that was crawling on the house. He asked me what it was. Well, I've seen that type a few times before, but I don't know what it is. I stepped inside to grab our insect field guide and started flipping through it and told Trusten I would try to figure it out.

Well, that particular beetle is not in there, so I still don't know what it is, however I came across something called "scale insects." They had fake pictures of several different kind but not the exact thing that was on that tree. But, I think that must be what those bumps are. Some of them are apparently microscopic, and I guess all of them have legs very tiny (I can't see any legs). That's what I told Will later on, when I brought it up to him. He and I walked out to the tree so that I could show him the strange things. He said that they didn't look like insects, and I said that's not what I would have thought either, since I thought insects had six legs. But, I pulled back out that book to show him, and it said they have legs...you just can't see them.

That's it for now! I've already written what's becoming a book.