You Know That Feeling?

When you’ve decided to ride the roller coaster and you’re all strapped in and the train has pulled away from the loading area and you are waiting for the first big hill . . . .

And you have that frantic urge to wave your arms and scream for them to let you out because you changed your mind?

That’s kind of how I’ve been feeling all day.

Did I mention that tomorrow is our first day of school?

And, yes, I know it will be fine, probably good and possibly even great. I know that we will accomplish a lot and have a good time and look back on the year with pride and joy at all the things the kids learned and all the great experiences we had. But right now, I’m sitting in that roller coaster vehicle feeling it crank up to the top of that incline and wondering how on earth I let myself be talked into this.

And so, in order to distract myself, I’ve decided to chat in this note about somewhat lighter fare: the arts.

We’re big-time arts lovers around here, with the kids having certain areas of shared interest and each having their specialties, too.

In terms of formal studies at home, my daughter will be focusing on art history of the medieval and Renaissance era. She’ll be more or less following the suggested approach of The Well-Trained Mind, using a portion of The Annotated Mona Lisa as a base and then building out from there. We have a huge book I found on a bargain table a few years ago called A History of Art that we use for picture study and to supplement the Mona Lisa readings. I’ve made a list of a few possible museum field trips and stocked the Netflix queue with videos and DVDs about the art and artists of the time that we’ll sprinkle throughout the year. And, just for fun, I have a paint-your-own Renaissance masterpiece kit, with postcard-sized reproductions of several famous works.

My son will participate in as much of this as strikes his fancy, mostly the videos and the hands-on projects.

Both kids also decided that this was the year they wanted to learn to draw. (Well, to be more precise, my daughter decided it was her year, and my son decided she wasn’t going to get to do anything he wasn’t allow to do, too.) My daughter chose Drawing: A Complete Course from Walch, and my son decided on Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad. We stocked up on all the supplies we’ll need for the whole year in a single expedition to Michaels, just so that we’ll never have to skip a lesson because we don’t have things on hand. At this point, the plan is to do drawing together (using their separate books but sitting across from each other at the table) on Mondays after our science lab. I’m afraid that letting it wait until later in the week will allow it to get shoved out of the way by other things that might seem more pressing.

And then there are the outside classes and activities.

We all love theater, and we’ve been taking the kids to live performances even when they had to sit in strollers. For the last few years, we’ve started with season tickets for the Shakespeare Festival as our baseline and then just added in as much as we could manage to fit into our schedule and budget. Both kids have participated in community theater, although my daughter is more involved than her little brother just yet.

My daughter is starting her third year of singing with a choir affiliated with the Royal School of Church Music. My son is returning for another year of ballet, with a total of four classes a week this year.

Both of them started piano lessons last year, and each is adding a second instrument, My daughter had her first classical guitar lesson last week – and positively glowed for hours afterward. My son is starting lessons tomorrow with a local bagpipe and drum corp, learning to play the Scottish snare drum.

It makes for a very full calendar, but keeps them both happy. Like foreign language, this is an area in which I am sometimes a little stunned at just how much each of them learns and does.

Creak, creak, creak, creak, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk . . . Do you hear it? We’re almost at the top of the hill. Guess I’d better hang on, ‘cause here we go!