What unschooling looked like last night

MJ spent yesterday afternoon shopping with Grandma and GG. After, they went to Madison's school's holiday concert with Maddie's family. And then MJ went to spend the night with cousin Chelsea, taking advantage of the school district's already announced delayed start due to ice all over the freaking place.

Chloe, meanwhile, was engaged in her own pursuits. I had come home early to avoid an icy commute, so she kept me company while I did some mostly mindless work, eating (and annihilating) a couple of Cutie oranges while chatting about Chloe things. When I needed to concentrate, she got cozy on the couch with a couple of books. She spent some time with "Historic Haunted America" and then switched to "Anguished English: An Anthology of Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language." Every so often she would share one of the more amusing assaults, such as the headline "Juvenile Court Tries Shooting Suspects." I think my favorite was the sign from a Paris hotel elevator: "Please leave your values at the front desk."

We talked about the forecasted low of 11 degrees (I don't think it really went that low) and the measures Frank and I were taking to avoid frozen pipes.

Grandma came to visit for a while and we drank tea and tried to sell her on Firefly. We talked about poetry, and Chloe revealed that, while she had read my copy of "Rose" by Li-Young Lee, with its poetic narration of his sad experiences as a Chinese immigrant, she prefers poetry that rhymes. Grandma and I reminisced a bit about "Tapestry," the volume of poetry produced by the English department at my high school, and Chloe remembered reading some of my poems long ago.

I fished out Chloe's 12 Days of Christmas gift for the day, the latest issue of Shojo Beat (a manga magazine). She was thrilled! And then she was gone, happily reading away with only the occasional excited outburst. "Movies, Mom! Of some of the manga I read!"

Later, she dove back into "Anguished English" while I blogged about my lack of Christmas spirit. I think she finished it. We came together again over the horoscopes in Shojo Beat, which were better written than many I've seen, and I admired their clever use of their pimped-for-each-sun-sign mascot. I continued leafing through the magazine, much to her delight. We talked idly about the Year of the Ox and some Japanese home remedies for the common cold, and then we stumbled across a little blurb about a Shinto shrine right here in Washington. This inspired an excited trip to the Internet to read all about the Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America, Shinto traditions, and so on. You could practically hear the pinging as she made connections to things learned previously from reading manga and watching anime.

After that, it was getting late, so I headed up to bed and she returned to "Haunted America." I just opened it at a random page to find out what sort of thing she might have read about. The story I landed on was about William Harrison and Tecumseh and touched on "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." Imagine that.