The CMP Review — Week of July 14

July 14, 2025

“Most of the time of the Nursery Folk is spent out-of-doors, and rightly so. Therefore it is quite an easy thing to help them to be friends with Mother Nature.” (J. R. Smith, PR28, Nature in the Nursery)

@tessakeath

July 15, 2025

Let’s face it: homeschooling is hard. As parent-educators, we want to prepare our children spiritually, mentally, and physically for the fullness of life. On this journey we face pressures and doubts. We wonder about our pace and progress. We wonder about results. We feel inadequate and can’t help but compare ourselves to others around us. When our worries threaten to overwhelm us we seek refuge in faith.

Many veterans on this journey tell us to simply “trust the method.” Is this answer Miss Mason would give? How would she tell us to balance faith, reason, and responsibility in this great task of raising the children entrusted to our care? Hear my comprehensive answer recorded live at the 2025 Living Education Retreat. Find it here.

@artmiddlekauff

July 16, 2025

Doom scrolling, doom surfing, zombie scrolling, envy scrolling…people (especially our young people) who endlessly scroll their phones have a higher risk of anxiety, depression, and self-harm.

Handicrafts and Art in all the forms help supply our children with healthy pursuits and wholesome things to do, look upon, or listen to in their free time.

@rbaburina

Image @aolander

July 17, 2025

I have fond memories of those days years ago when we had our own newborns. Those were days of newness, excitement, uncertainty, and possibility. We were filled with energy and love; we had everything we needed except experience. We encountered so many challenges, but Barbara always figured out what to do. And everything worked out.

Now I see her with her daughter’s son. Yes, she’s a grandmother now, and it’s amazing to see. She has all the same energy and love; but now she also has experience. None of the uncertainty of our younger days. With confidence and tenderness she meets the challenge of every occasion.

Yes, most people will call her a grandmother. But I like to call her a super-mom. Lessons learned and never forgotten, energy renewed and never exhausted, and an admirer who never tires of appreciating who she is and what she’s done.

@artmiddlekauff

July 18, 2025

You probably know the Charlotte Mason quote “The flowers, it is true, are not new; but the children are; and it is the fault of their elders if every new flower they come upon is not to them a Picciola, a mystery of beauty to be watched from day to day with unspeakable awe and delight.” from page 53 of Home Education.

But do you know the story of Picciola? It is a heart-warming tale about a plant growing up through the paving stones in a yard of a prison in France, lovingly tended by an innocent man who is jailed there.

James Baldwin retold this story in the penultimate chapter of his Fifty Famous Stories published in 1896. It’s just a couple of pages long, but really quite lovely. And a famous man’s wife makes a one-line appearance in the story.

Baldwin’s retelling was based on the novel Picciola written by X. B. Saintine, a French dramatist and novelist, and it was published in France in 1836. Have any of you read that original? I’d like to try to get my hands on a copy! A quick search tells me it has been translated into many languages.

At any rate, I saw my own Picciola growing in a crack on the bridge here in town, and it reminded me of both Mason’s quote and Baldwin’s story which we read way back in our first year of homeschooling.

@antonella.f.greco

July 19, 2025

A rare sighting on the Appalachian Trail.

One of the coolest things we learned about the luna moth is that its twisting tail helps it escape bats by shifting and scattering the location of echoes!

@rbaburina

“The demands of Christ are so severe; they take your life!” wrote Watchman Nee. “He says that whoever loves his father, mother, or children more than Him is not worthy to be His disciple. Neither is any worthy of Him who will not take up his cross to follow Him. Is this not asking for your life?

“The clause concerning the bearing of the cross is especially so. The modern equivalent of the cross is to take a criminal to the execution ground with his hands and feet bound and then have him dragged through the streets for public ridicule. If you cannot be like that criminal, you are not worthy to be His disciple! Is not He demanding our life?”

More than 30 years after Watchman Nee had written these words, his grandniece came to the labor camp where Nee had suffered and died for his faith. She recalled, “Before his departure, he left a piece of paper under his pillow, which had several lines of big words written in a shaking hand. He wanted to testify to the truth which he had even until his death, with his lifelong experience. That truth is—‘Christ is the Son of God who died for the redemption of sinners and resurrected after three days. This is the greatest truth in the universe. I die because of my belief in Christ. Watchman Nee.’”

Charlotte Mason’s “Counting the cost” gives poetic expression to this path of the cross. Read or hear it here.

@artmiddlekauff

🖼️: Christ Preaching (La Petite Tombe) by Rembrandt