From the archives: Making it do, when it's not what you ordered

First posted January 2007. Slightly edited, and the links have been removed...eleven years is a long time!

Make It Do has always been one of my favourite topics. Except that the phrase Make It Do sounds a bit grim, like Grin and Bear It. I prefer the Common Room's question, "What Do You Have In Your Hand?" Or in your cupboard...or on your bookshelf. What DO we have in this camp kitchen to feed the two vegetarians? (I talked the cook into putting some of the soup into another pot before he added meat.) What can we do with all this coloured telephone wire in the craft room? (Braided bracelets for eighty campers.) 

What's In Your Hand is Ma Ingalls and blackbird pies. It's popsicle sticks and Cheerios for math, and teaching phonics with a pile of old Highlights magazines. It's all those recipes invented to use up things like rhubarb that really don't taste so good on their own. (OK, I know there are people who chew on raw rhubarb...) It's how we once taught Sunday School in a un-child-friendly college classroom: we stuck pictures up with Stick-tack and took them down again every week, brought old couch cushions to sit on and our own toys to play with, and let the kids colour at the adult-sized tables. And they did manage fine without mini-sized chairs.

Use Your Creativity is about surprise and discovery, instead of just "I suppose I can make do with it." It's Athena-in-a-Minivan's kids retelling stories with Playmobil. It's Ponytails' coloured-pencil drawing to go with Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave. It's Homeschool Radio Shows' Fourth Annual Make-Your-Own-Radio-Show Contest. It's Meredith's closet makeover and tree-frog-painted table. It's two balls of Dollarama yarn that got turned into one pair of slippers (for Crayons), a dolly hat and scarf, and a couple of hair scrunchies. (You couldn't buy all that even at Dollarama for the two dollars the yarn cost.)

Make It Do is combining two or more parts to make something better than a whole. Instead of waiting for the perfect thing to arrive, the perfect homeschool curriculum to be written, or our body to revert to the perfect size, we use what's there. Can we use it a little differently? Do we need to adapt, go faster/slower, make it more challenging, skip the questions or tests, include more hands-on activities? Or should we use just the best part of it?

We're using a not-perfect curriculum for math; but it doesn't matter that it doesn't cover everything, because there are lots of ways to learn the things that it doesn't include, and it's kind of interesting having a break from the same workbook all the time anyway. Combining resources for homeschool science can make a stronger overall program than trying to pick one perfect textbook or study guide. We just got an Astronomy book for next year's school--but we also have an old [Educational Insights] Sky Science experiment kit and several books about the solar system, so we'll combine what we have.

And Make It Do is finding new ways to use what you already have. Cutting holes into the bottom edges of a cereal box is one surefire way of getting kids to notice long-neglected marbles (you shoot them at the holes). You can use wooden blocks to build temporary furniture for plastic trolls. You can learn new rules for cards, checkers, or dominoes.

Not what you ordered? Not just what you hoped for? Make it do. And have fun.

From the archives: Trust and Okay (Why sing hymns?)

First posted July 2007, somewhat edited this time around.

One blog leads to another: the always-thoughtworthy Wittingshire blog posted a quote from George Wiegel, and Wittingshire was linked to by The Paragraph Farmer, which I got to by following the Deputy Headmistress's Sunday Hymn Post. This is the quote from George Wiegel, at least the bit I reallly liked: 

"A thoroughly secularized world is a world without windows, doors, or skylights: a claustrophobic, ultimately suffocating world."

Imagine never hearing the soaring words of Holy, Holy, Holy--Reginald Heber's words, or Nolene Prince's chorus from Isaiah 6:3, I don't care which--I always hear both of them flying out the windows, through the skylights, up past our small selves here. It's the poetry of the words as well as their literal meaning that opens those windows, though. Otherwise we might as well just have "What a mighty God we serve, what a mighty God we serve." Not the same at all.

Again from one blog to another: Lawrence Henry wrote this in The American Spectator, the JunkYard Blog commented on it, and the Deputy Headmistress picked it up as well:

"IT IS AN INTERESTING PARADOX. Churches devoted to rigorous, difficult theology -- real Christianity, in short -- have largely adopted praise music, mainly to get people in the doors. In doing so, they have denied their parishioners an intimate connection with the art, the music, the poetry, and the history of the faith of our fathers, embodied in hymns.

"Mainstream churches, which have left Christianity behind for liberation theology, "peace and justice" theory, deconstruction, and modernism, still cling to the hymnbook, to the hard work of teaching choirs to sing in harmony, and to the expense of maintaining pipe organs.

"If only they took as good care of the faith."

The congregation we've been part of for the last while was  formed partly out of this same question of worship style and content: those who rebelled against "My All in All"/overheads/praise bands, among other things. Since we meet in a rented assembly room, singing is accompanied by a piano and led by a song leader (there isn't usually a choir). Ironically, "My All in All" is included in the hymnal they chose; I think we sang it a couple of weeks ago. That hymnal is full of other little surprises, too: every so often I get hit with a chorus I haven't sung since the '80's and never really wanted to hear again. But generally we're on the same track: the hymns we sing at home often get sung at church as well.

But I have one more thing to throw in here about hymns, in case you think I've gone too far off the original point.  I would like hymns--real hymns--at my funeral, whenever I eventually get to shed this mortal coil. I don't care if every person there has to stumble through the words and doesn't know the music, I want some songs with meat on them. How can you get through any kind of a crisis without knowing that "on Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand?" This is something we've lost as a culture, especially during the worst times: being able to cling not only to the words of Scripture we know, but the poetry of the Psalms and hymns that has been written over and over on our hearts. How many families are there who hang up the phone after good or bad news and reach for the hymn book? Crayons once goofted on the name of the hymn "Trust and Obey." She called it "Trust and Okay," but I think that's closer to the truth of what I'm saying.

When I sing, "With ever joyful hearts, and blessed peace to cheer us," I think of the pastor who wrote those words during a plague. When I hear about "sorrow and love flow mingled down," I know something of Christ's love for us during our worst times. When I hear some of the "get people in the doors" stuff--I don't hear anything. It's not that older hymns are just macaroni and cheese to me, a matter of emotion and familiarity and comfort; it's not just style and taste. It's what they are filled with that goes flying away from me myself, past what I know, to something bigger than I am.

God is here within us,

Soul, in silence fear Him,

Humbly, fervently draw near Him.

Now His own

Who have known

God, in worship lowly,

Yield their spirits wholly.

--Gerhard Tersteegen, 1729

From the archives : A woeful feeling

First posted June 2007.

"I have a woeful feeling, as if the double O of doom were sticking in my throat." ~~ James Thurber

From [an] ongoing discussion about Big Words (of course some people would call it just blog chatter, since we're all supposed to be non-professionals not entitled to consider these things):

The Deputy Headmistress weighs in again on all of this, and mentions a high-ranking clergyman who says (in big words) that he would like to simplify church language for the rest of us.

"Why is he allowed words the rest of us aren't? Is it because they taste yucky, so we won't like them anyway?"

Ah! I love it, it makes so much sense. Not that any of us believe in a conspiracy to limit our language or turn us all into Alphas, Betas...Epsilons...
The DHM's reference to "yucky" refers to a motherly deception she once tried to keep one of her offspring from asking for the pop she was drinking. (She is very, very sorry now and will never do it again.) It reminds me of some friends of ours who used to give their toddler plain yogurt while they were eating ice cream. It worked--until he got old enough to notice that there was a difference! (And it NEVER worked when the younger ones came along.)

And goodness knows I do like yogurt myself--I have some yogging on the heating pad as we speak. But speaking strictly in terms of "something somebody else has that's better than what you've been given"--is it possible that we've been gradually slipped more and more yogurt in place of the Vanilla Chocolate Chip that might give us ideas about Mocha Almond Fudge or even White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle?

Like our toddler friend (who's now an almost Goliath-sized teenager), demand your semantic rights as loudly as you can, and be a voice for the vocabulary-impaired.

"Black showed his teeth and made a restless gesture. 'Taking a single letter from the alphabet,' he said, 'should make life simpler.'

"'I don't see why. Take the F from life and you have lie. It's adding a letter to simple that makes it simpler. Taking a letter from hoarder makes it harder.'"--James Thurber, The Wonderful O

From the archives: Exploding with creative energy

First posted April 2005

The Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room has been troubled by something on another blog that wonders how those who support conservative politics can also happily mingle with poetry (and, to extend the thought, with intelligence).

At the risk of boring with yet another quote from Northrop Frye, I'd like to offer this, from the very same page of The Bush Garden where I found the quote about weasel words.

"[Poet Irving Layton] speaks of 'the holy trinity Of sex revolution and poetry', and each of these is conceived as an explosion of creative energy against the inhibitions of prudery, exploitation, and philistinism respectively; a trinity more or less incarnate in Freud, Marx, and Whitman." ("Letters in Canada," 1953)

(Again on Layton, 1954)"....the ironic eye does not have free play; it is oppressed by a conscience-driven and resentful mind which sees modern society as a rock pile and the poet as under sentence of hard labour."

It might help to remember what was going on with a lot of poetry during the 1950's when Frye wrote these reviews of Layton: there were a lot of Angry Young People doing the coffeehouse thing, Ginsberg and Kerouac and all that. But I think the basic thought hasn't changed so much in 50 years. Some people still think that to be into the third part of the "trinity," you have to be into the first two as well. I think that's why some of the people in Mama Squirrel's creative writing classes were so weird, or really wanted everyone to know they were weird, or just pretended they were weird, because it kind of went with the turf. Anger poetry was good, exploding against things was good (even if it wasn't good poetry, it was Saying Something, right?). So do poets, or those who read poetry, have to have a rock pile to pound at? Was Whitman as revolutionary as Freud and Marx? Is that why Mama Squirrel doesn't like Whitman much?

And can Christians still manage to have an intelligent discussion about something like this without being called pseudo-intellectuals? Francis Schaeffer thought so, and so did C.S. Lewis.

Do you live in Canada? You are so lucky...

You get to access Project Gutenberg Canada.

The DHM at The Common Room blog reminded me about this, when she posted yesterday about being able to access Project Gutenberg Australia in the Philippines.

The short version of all this is that since public-domain copyright laws vary in different countries and for different authors, there are certain free books that you can access only if you live outside of the U.S. Access, as in download to an e-reader, or at least read online (depending on the book). (I have OverDrive on my tablet so that I can get free library books, and I was able to use that to download several books from this site).

Isn't it nice to be the "special" ones, for once?

And it's not all Stephen Leacock and E.J. Pratt. How about downloading the entire Narnia series, plus the Space Trilogy, plus some of C.S. Lewis's non-fiction titles? Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, the real deal? How about some classic Eleanor Farjeon? Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats? Charles Williams? Max Beerbohm? Jim Kjelgaard? Greek dramatists? (Yes, I know you can find Greek dramatists on the U.S. site).

We don't have all the authors that made the DHM smile, but we do have Josephine Tey and some other mystery writers, including five Father Brown books. Have you ever read anything by Anna Buchan, sister of John Buchan? I hadn't.(You can get a few of her books on the U.S. site too, under her pen-name O. Douglas.)

That should be enough to keep just about anyone going on books.

From the archives: The cost of homeschooling?

First posted February 2012 

Of all the reasons for or against homeschooling, the supposed "real costs" or "missed-opportunity costs"  argument has to be about the second-oldest after the socialization question, and it's just as misleading.

The Deputy Headmistress of The Common Room has posted her current thoughts on this, here and here.  It's also worthwhile to go back to her 2005 post here, because the comments are so interesting.  I originally posted a response to that one here.  (The DHM and I have been friends a long time.)

All I can add, to all that, is this:  first, you may save money by homeschooling.  It depends on your lifestyle, your curriculum, how many kids you have, how much money you were making or spending before, and so on.  As the DHM and others have pointed out, you won't be spending money on extra shoes, band trips, and pizza days either, and you may be saving money related to daycare or other parental work expenses. But most people don't begin to homeschool solely with the intention of saving money.  As in, we can't afford to send you to public school any more, so you'll just have to stay home.  There are usually other reasons involved in the decision--academic, religious, health reasons, bullying, bad teachers, whatever.  So from my admittedly limited economic understanding, this is not something you can approach with a simple comparison of costs.

Second, as far as the actual cost of the actual homeschooling goes--that is, minus the arguments over whether or not the kids' shoes wear out faster, or whether you have lower medical expenses because they're not being coughed and sneezed on by thirty other kids, or how much money you won't have to spend on peanut-free granola bars and juice boxes--the only point that all homeschoolers* can agree with on this, is that we're in control of that cost.  If we have money to burn and count a whole lot of things as "school", we can homeschool very expensively.  If we're broke, we can scrounge and use freebies.  In most cases (see the note below), we are free to decide that this year we will or won't teach a certain subject, will or won't have swimming lessons, will or won't buy a new printer.

Yes, you could put together some kind of an "average" family picture, and say that "most" homeschoolers pay a certain amount for math materials, reading books, computer stuff; or that people who spend a certain amount are more successful at homeschooling than others.  But what's the point?  A glance through any general homeschooling magazine, or through a week's Carnival of Homeschooling, will show such a diversity of approaches and lifestyles that such comparisons would be meaningless.  Even within our own family, every year's expenses are a little different: some years we've just re-used what we had, other years we've needed to buy new materials.

Conclusion?  There isn't one, except that, like the socialization question, the "costs" question is just as red a herring.

*"All homeschoolers" meaning all who live where they are free to plan their own work and/or choose their own curriculum provider, rather than being required to teach a set curriculum, buy required books, etc.

RELATED POST:  Frugal Homeschooling: Let Me Count the Ways

To read today: The Common Room on the vocabulary of good books

The Deputy Headmistress has a few well-chosen words about allowing children to climb the library shelves, so to speak.

Some good blog stuff to pass on

A couple of blog posts you really shouldn't miss this week:

The Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room has started a series about the Charlotte Mason approach to composition. This is not just theory; the DHM has a whole lot of years of experience with this, both ups and downs.

The latest Seven Quick Takes post on Afterthoughts has a couple of good links to challenging articles. Plus a cute baby goat.

That's all for now! (Really, there's enough in there to keep anybody busy for awhile.)

Tammy Glaser (and the DHM) on teaching the whole child (L'Harmas posts)

One of the keynote speakers at this year's L'Harmas weekend was Tammy Glaser.  Most Treehouse readers know who Tammy is. (She also brought her daughter Pamela with her, and we got to see Pamela's artwork.) Many of you will also know that she has been involved with a small school, so she has been getting the chance to see how CM works with even more shapes and sizes and styles of children.

Tammy talked about teaching vs. what you might call therapizing. The Deputy Headmistress posted on a similar theme, awhile back, saying, 'Intimidated by the condescending attitude of the perky expert, who spoke kindly but loftily to all of us as though we were small and more than unusually dim children, we found ourselves responding by feeling small and dim and mentally shrinking down to her expectations."

If we are to teach with things and thoughts, then the teacher--of any student, including one with particular limitations--needs to know what potential things and thoughts are in the lesson, what might be in the way, and how we can get around those obstacles, make the lesson meaningful...and not make anybody feel small and dim.  Sometimes, in a classroom, that just means doing what teachers have always done: seating one child away from chattering friends or other distractions, or putting another one right up front to keep an eye on them.  It might mean letting certain children "break the rules"--letting them narrate a picture talk with the picture in front of them instead of hidden.  In a one-on-one situation, there's even more room for taking things as slow or making things as concrete as they need to be for that student.

And, to take something else away from what Tammy said, that makes outdoor time even more valuable for all children.  What sorts of things happen...naturally...on nature walks, during outdoor play time, in an afternoon at the beach? What happens when you encounter a real praying mantis? How can you match that in a therapy room?

We want to give everyone access to real things, big thoughts. It might help to remember that "a person's a person no matter how small," but only in the sense, maybe, of physical size or chronological age.  Because nobody wants to feel small and dim.

Another post you might like:  Illegal Moves.

More posts about L'Harmas 2014

What books changed your life in 2012?

Mama Squirrel's responses to the Book Quiz posted on The Common Room this week

What was the best new (to you) author you discovered last year?

Probably Ellis Peters.  I started reading a couple of the Brother Cadfael books from The Apprentice's bookshelf when I was book-bored one night, and then I picked up more of them at the thrift store...

What was your favorite new (to you) series?

I read through almost the entire Brother Cadfael series. And several Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries I had never read. And several Rumpole of the Bailey books.

Book that made you cry?

I don't cry much over books, but I liked Sarah's Cottage, by D.E. Stevenson. I suspect we might be distantly related (D.E. Stevenson, I mean, not Sarah), but I'd have to ask my genealogist aunt about that.

Book that made you laugh out loud?

John Mortimer's Rumpole stories.

Book that totally changed your perspective on something?

I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What it Was, by Barbara Sher.

Best homeschool(ing) book?

The Big What Now Book of Learning Styles, by Carol Barnier.

Worst book that you managed to finish?

Castle Dor, started by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and finished by Daphne Du Maurier. But two mysteries based on Sherlock Holmes and Josephine Tey came close for don't-bother-ness.

Book with the best surprise plot twist?

A Morbid Taste for Bones (the first Brother Cadfael book).

Best book-that-was-better-than-the-movie?

Our Man in Havana.  Although I like the movie too.

Most over-hyped book of the year?

I don't know!  I don't pay a lot of attention to hype.

Best Bibliovore recommendation of the year?

I don't use Bibliovore...I'm not even sure what it is.  I do read the NYT Book Review section, but most of the books in it scare me.

Book you have recommended to the most people this year?

Don't know.  Most people I know don't ask.

Best feel-good book of the year?

Don't know.

Best childrens/young adult book of the year?

In new books, I would vote for The Prairie Thief, but I am still waiting for our library to buy a copy.

Book you’ve been meaning to read for years and finally got to?

On The Art of Writing, and On The Art of Reading, both by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

Read aloud that the family enjoyed the most?

The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger.  Or possibly The Hobbit. The Pushcart War doesn't count, because we're reading it right now.

Best cookbook/knitting/gardening/or other household how-to?

The 2012 Family Guide to Groceries under $250 a Month, by Liss Burnell.

Best non-fiction?

How to Read a Poem, and fall in love with poetry, by Edward Hirsch, but I'm not done it yet.

Best religion/theology/doctrine/philosophy?

The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy L. Sayers. Also J.B., by Archibald MacLeish, and Walking with Bilbo, by Sarah Arthur.  And Spiritual Anorexia: How Contemporary Worship is Starving the Church, by Doug Erlandson.

Best political book?

Uncle Eric Talks About Personal, Career, and Financial Security, by Richard J. Maybury.  It's sort of political.

All-around best story of the year?

Not sure.

You?

Tips to keep your frugal food gifts from bombing

As you can see from one of last year's gift baskets, when we give food, we often give packaged treats rather than homemade: tea, coffee, apple butter, popcorn, chocolate, and things like pickled beets canned at a small vegetable market that only opens from spring through fall--so by Christmas, it's impossible to buy them. We like to be able to give an assortment of things, especially to family members who live alone and wouldn't really appreciate, say, a whole box of fudge.

But we have often given small homemade food gifts to friends, Sunday School teachers, and neighbors.  Some ideas we've tried (besides the obvious plates of cookies) are salad topper mixes (like trail mix except you sprinkle it on salads); Cider Beetles; homemade mixes for coffee and hot chocolate; peeled garlic cloves in a jar of honey; peeled and sliced ginger root in a jar of honey; herb mixes for salad dressing.  One year I made up bags of the dry ingredients for Beer Bread.  (I didn't include the beer.) We've given away jars of things we've canned ourselves: jam, apple butter, and, one year, pumpkin butter.  We have given (and received) special health-food items...those expensive natural sweeteners, organic nut butters, and other healthy-but-gourmet ingredients can make good (and still relatively frugal) gifts.  Ethnic groceries often have interesting possibilities too.

But not every food gift is a felicitous choice.  Here are a few tips, especially for giving homemade mixes, that may save time, embarrassment, and/or food waste.

1.  This should go without saying, but check carefully for allergies or other dietary requirements, especially if the gift is for someone you don't know well.  You don't want to be like Muffy's father, cheerfully bringing a ham to the (Jewish) Frenskys.

Even personal tastes and preferences can change from time to time. Several friends who used to be coffee drinkers now ask for herbal tea (one of those midlife things?), so I'm less likely to be making coffee mixes.

2.  Put best-before dates and storage instructions on mixes and baked goods.  Baking mixes that contain baking powder are said to lose quality after a certain time; brown sugar can also go lumpy and hard after awhile.  Also, please list the ingredients, if it's a mix:  see #1.  Surprises are not always welcome.

3.  Some homemade mixes come with baking or cooking directions that are too difficult for the recipients, require them to buy too many extra ingredients, or just make too much at once, like a salad dressing recipe that makes more than one person could eat in a month.  Look for instructions that give alternate amounts, or that suggest variations.  I have one soup mix recipe that calls for mixing the dry ingredients with sausage, onion, carrots, etc.; but I've made it up just with water or broth, and it's still pretty good.

4.  Some layers-in-a-jar ideas, like soup mixes, call for layering need-to-be-washed ingredients like beans, lentils, or brown rice directly with other ingredients.  If it's something that should be rinsed before cooking, then figure out an alternative, like putting the spices in a sandwich bag.

5.  Try not to give people things they already make themselves.  Somebody who makes a lot of jam may not appreciate a jar of yours--unless she gave all hers away as gifts.  So you never know.

BONUS UPDATE:  It's not Christmas yet, but I can post this here because my oldest won't see it--I'm pretty sure she's too busy studying for exams to be browsing through month-old blog posts.  So anyway...she asked me for a muffin pan to fill out some of her off-campus kitchen gear, and that was easy enough.  But I added some other things to make it a Coffee-and-a-Muffin Kit, and now it takes up the whole lid of a paper carton.  I made up four Ziploc bags full of dry ingredients for family-favourite muffins, plus cards with instructions for what else to add.  I added in a few sandwich-sized bags of chocolate chips, walnuts, cinnamon-plus-brown-sugar, and raisins.  There's also a small coffee can full of the Hillbilly Housewife's Vanilla Coffee Mix (figures, my university student is one of the few people left I can give coffee mix to), and a mug.  I'm not a fancy scrapbooker, but I managed to print out a label for the coffee, tags for the mixes, and a full-size label for the whole thing, using a photo I found online.  I tried to colour-co-ordinate the whole thing--mostly blues, blue for the tags, a blue coffee mug, and so on; and I found a big piece of clear basket wrap in our stash of recycled giftwrap.  In spite of the fact that it's sitting in the lid of a paper carton, I think it all looks pretty good.

P.S.  After I got the whole thing put together and then wrapped in a dollar-store plastic tablecloth (the only thing I could find that was big enough), I realized that I left out the package of walnuts.  So I'm going to wrap that up separately with a tag that says "oh, nuts."

Linked from Four Moms discuss Food for Gift Giving

Mrs. DHM and the Bad Squirrels: A Fable

Mrs. DHM was a little brown squirrel who lived in the tip, tip, top of a tall Common Room House. She didn't like to cook (well, sometimes she did), but she did like to move furniture and blog and teach her children, and she liked to sing while she worked.

Every morning Mrs. DHM made herself a bowl of crockpot cereal, and as she stirred it around she sang:

"Oh, I love to cook, I love to bake,
I guess I'll make an acorn cake and send it to Mama Squirrel."

Then she dusted her wooden toys and rinsed her mason jars and put her whole house in order.

At night Mrs. DHM climbed into her bed and looked through the topmost branches at the sky. She saw a million stars. She looked at her bookshelves and saw a million books, most pre-1985. It was very peaceful.

But one day a band of red squirrels came jumping and chattering to the Common Room House. Mrs. DHM was just putting her cake in the oven, when she looked up and saw a lot of strangers in her doorway. One, two, three, she counted, and one, two three more--six red squirrels. She didn't think they were there for the singing.

Then they told her she couldn't sell her used books online anymore. They drank up her whole winter's supply of Russian Tea. They broke her broom and threw out her mason jars. Then they chased her out of her Common Room house.

Poor Mrs. DHM! She didn't know where to go. And it began to rain. She scampered up the nearest tree with her laptop. Shivering and cold, she scrambled down a chimney and out of a hole in the chimney and into the attic.

There in the dusty, quiet attic she saw a beautiful sight. The whole attic was full of vintage children's books. Bound volumes of St. Nicholas Magazine. Entire shelves of Childhood of Famous Americans. First editions of Edward Ardizzone's Little Tim books.

"My, what a lovely attic!" thought Mrs. DHM. "What a shame there is no one to share it with me. It is so big!" She catalogued two whole bookcases on Library Thing.

Then she saw a box and opened it up. Well, what do you think she saw inside? A band of toy soldiers. They had been sleeping there for years.

"Thanks for setting us free," said the captain. "Is there anything we can do for you?"

"You could march to the Common Room," said Mrs. DHM, "and talk to those red squirrels who pushed me out. But, on the other hand, we don't want to use unnecessary force. How about you stay here instead and I'll read you stories."

"As long as we don't have to narrate afterwards," said the soldier captain.

Late that night the captain woke his men and gave them their orders. There were only five of them, but they were very brave, and their hearts were full of love. After all, Mrs. DHM had introduced them to The Bears of Blue River.

They marched to the Common Room and climbed through the window. The squirrels were making so much noise about government bailouts that they did not hear the soldiers until it was too late.

"This is Mrs. DHM's house," said the captain, drawing his sword. "Will you go peaceably, or must we fight?"

The red squirrels looked at the soldiers and screamed "Lead! Contaminants!" They ran out of the house as fast as they could and down the road.

"And don't come back!" shouted the captain.

Mrs. DHM was very happy to move back into her Common Room. She thanked the soldiers and made them promise to come for potluck dinners once a week. Then the soldiers marched off through the forest, singing The Cruel War.

That night when Mrs. DHM went to bed, she was very tired. And she still missed her Sadie dog. But she looked through the branches and she could see a million stars. She looked at her bookshelves and she could see a million books. And she looked through her blog comments and realized that she had...well, not a million friends...but a lot. And Mrs. DHM was very happy once more.

With Apologies to Miriam Young and her classic picture book Miss Suzy, copyright 1964 by Parent's Magazine Press, now classified as an illegal substance.