Saturday, August 9

A much-needed day of relaxing summer. Mom and Dad came over in the morning, and while Lucia, Greta, and Andrew were at XC, we went to our favorite booksale. It's at a church nearby and we've been going for the past few years. The selections are always amazing, with a lot of surprising choices no one has ever heard of. Andrew and the kids met us there when practice was over. We all came away with big bags of books. (Not only is it the best booksale, it's the best kind of booksale--fill a bag for $15.)

Andrew and the kids stopped for donuts on the way home, and Mom and I chopped up some tomatoes for bruschetta, and some plums. We ate lunch on the deck and then went into the Long Room to show one another all the books we found. My favorite find of the day: a small hardcover book called Drinking with Dickens, a memoir about, yes, drinking with Charles Dickens written by his great-grandson, Cedric. At home, Andrew discovered a long handwritten inscription inside, by Cedric. I think I need to select a Dickens to read this fall now that we have this thin thread linking us, however distantly.

Andrew, the kids, and I went to the pool for a while in the afternoon. Then Andrew went to a baseball game and the kids and I ordered Mad Mex and watched two episodes of This Is Us. We're into season three now, and we watched the Vietnam episode, where we learn an important piece of Jack's back story. I had to explain a few details as we watched (the birthday / draft number assignment shown on TV, why Jack took Nicky to the Canadian border, etc etc) and was reminded of how much I learned during one of my very favorite undergraduate English classes, a class dedicated solely to literature about the Vietnam War. I read The Things They Carried for the first time in that class. It's times like this that I wish I'd opted to homeschool my kids so I could just dedicate the next week to talking about Jack and Nicky in an actual historical context, with hand-selected readings and journaling assignments.

I don't actually wish this. Not really. Except for a tiny part of me that does. But with Lucia starting precalc and chemistry this fall, I think I have officially missed the window to make this call, unless colleges will accept that the extent of my kids' high school education would be described as "Life-Changing Books We Read and Talked About with Our Parents." Not the worst education, to be honest. Pretty sure the kids wouldn't be on board, but I can dream.