from my common place

(In my study of Charlotte Mason's educational methods, I have found so many useful and delightful habits to use in my own life and continuing education.  Something I have started this year is keeping a commonplace journal, just as Charlotte Mason and her students once did.  The common place is simply a journal to copy meaningful quotes, poetry, scripture or other ideas you stumble upon in life and in your reading. It has been such a lovely way to keep and record these thoughts and passages that have influenced my thinking during a given season of life. I thought I'd share some of these passages every so often in hopes that they might also be inspiring to you...and of course, feel free to copy them into your own commonplace! :)

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
-C. S. Lewis

The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.
-Plato

Education is a life. That life is sustained on ideas. Ideas are of a spiritual origin, and God has made us so that we get them chiefly as we convey them for one another, whether by word of mouth, written page, scripture read, musical symphony; we must sustain a child's inner life with ideas as we sustain his body with food. 
- Charlotte Mason

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater. 
-J.R.R. Tolkien

I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those which anything splendid or wonderful happens, but must those that bring simple pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string. 
-L.M. Montgomery/Anne Shirley from "Anne of Green Gables"

By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.
-Proverbs 24:3-6

The Summer List 2016 and a little fourth of July

Even though we've been enjoying the slowly warming days for a while now, the fourth of July always feels like the official start to summer. We began celebrating on the 3rd with a Spokes and Stripes parade for kids around the town common. The next day we enjoyed the parade that our family has been going to every year for decades, a big ol' BBQ and then music and fireworks on the wharf, just steps from our front door. The fireworks this year were particularly spectacular!