On Education

Lily's classical education has begun!

We are diligently escorting Lily through all of the important topics and subjects she will find most crucial for her life. We got straight to it in Lily's first hour with music education, which included some family influence, as Lily listened to her Uncle Ben's third album with Great Lakes Diamond Times. Later, Lily learned about several important compositions, including the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, the Beatles Revolver, and Gram Parsons GP. We haven't started any testing yet, but she seems to be picking it all at an alarmingly speedy rate.

We've done some work on theology and ethics through music as we sung John Prine's Your Flag Decal Won't Get you into Heaven Anymore, which has proven to be her favorite song so far. Lily also seems to enjoy Christmas must be tonight, but I seemed to lose her when I explained that Christmas follows the Christian season of Advent, and right now, we're in Lent, which leads us up to Easter, and the appropriate liturgical color for both of these seasons is purple. I'm not sure if her quizzical look stemmed from confusion or gas... but we'll keep working at it. I'm bound and determined to have her reading Barth and Wesley by her first birthday!

Grandma "Cookie" Crum will be glad to hear that the math education is progressing well too. Lily is working on shapes with the mobile above her bed, and we can only assume that her plaintive gazes mean she is differentiating clearly between the triangle, square, rectangle, trapezoid, and circle. She really is amazing!!!

We plan to get into some science a little later with the help of They Might be Giants and their album Science is Real. Sylvie wants to be sure Lily begins to learn about the big bang, evolution, and the periodic table. I'm supportive of these studies, though I'll need a bit of tutoring myself as we get into the finer points of molecular biology.

This parenting stuff is really getting my juices flowing! Gotta go now, Lily looks to be waning and I really want to read her the first chapter of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics before she fades completely!