I was thrilled when I stumbled upon The Little Travelers, a series of DVDs by a southern California woman talented in video production who homeschools her two little girls and travels extensively with them.

I am not generally a big fan of animated movies, but Disney’s new movie “Princess and the Frog,” in which they return to their traditional, classic style of animating, was surprisingly enjoyable.

In which we get chickens, and start gathering eggs.

I am a reader. According to my grandmother, when I was young I would set my alarm clock for 30 minutes earlier than I needed to get up for school, just so I could read. I don’t remember that, and as I am also a sleeper I can hardly believe it (though I do).
I do remember that I would stand on my bed at night and rest my book on the windowsill, where I could read by the light of the moon.
Recently, through Facebook, I heard from a person I …

I sometimes do what people call “spring cleaning” at the end of a year, when I get a hankering to straighten up the place — to get rid of some of the clutter that inevitably creeps into our house over the months, clean, and make room for a fresh, clean new year and its possibilities.
It was in the middle of my current purging of no-longer-needed papers from file cabinets and taking no-longer-worn clothes to Goodwill that I stumbled across a project by the photographer Michael Wolf.
Wolf is a German photographer who …