Tales of the Heartily Homeschooled: Sample Chapters

Pitter-Patter

Rachel:

“I think this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Faerie-Stories”

In his essay, dear old Tolkien was talking about children and fairy tales―but his point can be applied elsewhere: there is loads of false sentiment surrounding children nowadays.

Now, I can be just as sappy and sentimental about children as the next girl, but my sentiments have grown out of a life spent with eleven of them. Thus, my ideas are very different from those of people who have confused children with those chubby little angels artists insist on painting, whose wings probably sprinkle fairy dust and talcum powder when they fly.

For example, whoever coined the phrase “pitter-patter of little feet” didn’t have children. He had mice. Children don’t pitter-patter except when they don’t want you to know what they’re doing, or when they’re sneaking up on you. When, for instance, they all wake up at some unearthly hour of the morning while I’m babysitting. I lay in bed, deep in slumber, when a pitter-patter in the hallway alerts me to the fact that the children are congregating. I groan inwardly, because in this case “pitter-patter” means “We’re awake, we’re starving, and if you don’t get up and feed us breakfast in the next five minutes we will pitter the bedroom door down, storm the bed, and patter all over the mattress until you’re either up of your own volition or bounced right out of bed.”

I sleep in the basement, so I get to hear all the noises feet make over my head every day. I’m pretty good at interpreting them by now. For instance: “Pitter-patter-pitter-patter-pitter-patter-pitterpatterpitter
patter-squeeeeeal-CRASH” means the kids are running down the hallway in socks, sliding across the kitchen floor, and landing in the pots and pans we keep by the back door.

Recently, “Pitter-patter-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM” meant that our teenage girls had been strewn all over the living room floor playing with makeup. Specifically, they were painting half of each face to look like it had just flown in from Zimbabwe while the other half remained relatively normal. Just then a complete stranger (a male one) drove up and knocked on the front door. The girls did a vanishing act with sound effects. Imagine a buffalo herd on a plywood floor and you’ll get the idea. Thirty seconds later they were all in my room, heaving sighs of relief and fiddling with their hair in my mirror.

Our house isn’t often empty, but when it is, every little noise starts to echo hollowly. Silence is golden, but after a while even gold can tarnish. Every time a car goes by I jump up, until finally the van pulls up in the driveway. Everyone piles out and comes in, and then the pitter-patter-boom-crash-squeak-squeal-skip-hop of little feet (and big ones) is the most welcome sound imaginable.

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