Co-sleeping in art and literature, and How We Homeschooled Today #110

(If you’re new here, my daughter is 8 and my son is 6.)

An even later start. My son has a cold, meaning interrupted nights and very slow mornings. I had a lie-in, the children read books (Mythopedia and the Boxcar Children) and played games. At 10am we started work:

• I pointed out how ‘Thursday’ is spelled.

• Yesterday we learnt about the earth’s core, and how the metal at the centre is solid even though it’s as hot as the sun. I explained about molecules yesterday, but today I thought of another way of explaining it, with the children imagining themselves as molecules, squashed together so they can’t move.

• We talked about today’s spellings.

• Multiplication by Heart (discount codes here)

• Another lesson from the Math for Love Fraction Curriculum, about sharing foods between different numbers of people. Strangely, one child has mastered equal sharing but struggles with how to write fractions, and the other child takes longer to work out the sharing but can write fractions like a pro. I struggled hugely with fractions at school so I sympathise with both!

That took 45 minutes, and then we took a break, followed by half an hour of reading aloud:

• Lots of Things to Know About Space. Did you know that Mars has its own Planetary Protection Officer? Or that mathematicians have mapped out the best routes through space to use the least energy to get around (called the Interplanetary Transport Network)?

• Journey to the Earth’s Core: We learnt how scientists know what the core is like (which tied in with some of the things we read in the space book).

• Around the World in 80 Trees: Our first look inside this book. The children were a bit worn out but I chose a page about baobabs. It was very short and sweet and afterwards I showed them photographs online of these amazing trees. They can live for 3,000 years!

Via Unsplash

After a long lunch break the children each wrote out their spellings, and we did a little French—counting, questions and answers, and a story from One Third Stories. And then we were faced with a very long afternoon. It was raining steadily. Some of us were slightly ill, and some of us were rather tired. The children had already watched quite enough television after lunch. I tried to think of fun and delightful things I could surprise the children with. I failed.

The answer took the form of science boxes, followed by the very timely delivery of a wonderful new book. It’s too good to squeeze into this post, so you’ll have to wait until next week, but it took us all the way to 5pm, when the children felt the urge to go outside and collect snails in the dark and rain.

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Co-sleeping in art and literature

We never did co-sleeping, because on the very rare occasions when we tried, it didn’t seem to involve any sleeping. But when the children are poorly enough to spend the night—or part of it—with me, I love the feeling of having them so close. As I lay wide awake in the small hours of this morning, I thought of two favourite pieces of art and literature on this topic.

If I could choose one piece of original art to hang on my walls it might be this one, Sorolla’s Mother from 1895-1900.

Via Wikimedia Commons

And here’s Laurie Lee on sharing a bed with his mother, when he was aged 3 in 1917:

I was still young enough then to be sleeping with my Mother, which to me seemed life’s whole purpose. We slept together in the first-floor bedroom on a flock-filled mattress in a bed of brass rods and curtains. Alone, at that time, of all the family, I was her chosen dream companion, chosen from all for her extra love; my right, so it seemed to me.

So in the ample night and the thickness of her hair I consumed my fattened sleep, drowsed and nuzzling to her warmth of flesh, blessed by her bed and safety. From the width of the house and the separation of the day, we two then lay joined alone. That darkness to me was like the fruit of sloes, heavy and ripe to the touch. It was a darkness of bliss and simple languor, when all edges seemed rounded, apt and fitting; and the presence for whom one had moaned and hungered was found not to have fled after all.

My Mother, freed from her noisy day, would sleep like a happy child, humped in her nightdress, breathing innocently and making soft drinking sounds in the pillow. In her flights of dream she held me close, like a parachute to her back; or rolled and enclosed me with her great tired body so that I was snug as a mouse in a hayrick.

They were deep and jealous, those wordless nights, as we curled and muttered together, like a secret I held through the waking day which set me above all others.[…] At dawn, when she rose and stumbled back to the kitchen, even then I was not wholly deserted, but rolled into the valley her sleep had left, lay deep in its smell of lavender, deep on my face to sleep again in the nest she had made my own.

The sharing of her bed at that three-year-old time I expected to last for ever.

—Laurie Lee, Cider With Rosie (1959)

For all you readers who do manage to co-sleep, I don’t know how you do it. And I’m also a little bit jealous.

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