Lots of interests
I love homeschooling my children, partly because it means I get to keep learning, as much as possible, as often as possible, on every imaginable topic (and some I had not imagined).
My mother surrounded us with books. We had Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible; when the church published illustrated scripture readers, we pored over them. I remember many Little Golden Books and many Dr. Seuss’s Beginner Books. My mother went through a cleaning phase when I was a teen. She read all of Don Aslett’s cleaning books and several other organizational books, like Side-tracked Home Executives and The Clean Team. I lapped these up, especially the stories of people. I was not interested in doing the methods outlined, but enjoyed the reasoning behind dusting before vacuuming, and reducing the need for housework.
My eldest sister went to college and then married when I was four or five years old. My brothers probably gave us Dr. Seuss books on LP because my little sister and I begged to be read to so often. We had a TV when I was very little, but when it broke it was not replaced. My older brothers were interested in a variety of things: plastic model battleships, board games - especially Monopoly, cars - including rebuilding them, musicians like Billy Joel and Kansas, and books. The Hobbit and Star Wars both came out in my youth, and my brothers made sure I had toys and books and music. One of my brothers played basketball; one became an Eagle Scout and earned the highest band award in our school, the John Philip Sousa award. One loved Garfield the cat, owned all of Jim Davis’s books, and bought a TRS-80 computer from Radio Shack. We watched Star Trek the Original Series together. They also loved the TV show, MASH.
My sister and I acted out stories with our dolls and stuffed animals. My favorite was always something like Cinderella. I collected beads in jewel colors and shapes. Our Fisher-Price Little People started out dirt poor, in bare wood block homes on our desk. Very shortly, though, they got more jewels than they knew what to do with and I built fancy patterns and pretended the beads were everything: tools, food, money, animals, miniature people. About fourth grade I read The Borrowers and that inspired me further.
We inherited our siblings’ collections of middle reading books: lots of Scholastic titles and Weekly Reader books. I especially enjoyed Don Sobol’s books, not just Encyclopedia Brown but also Great Sea Stories and Strange But True. I vividly remember The Door in the Wall, about a lame medieval boy, and Secret Under the Sea, about a boy who investigates underwater with his pet dolphin. The Ghost Rock Mystery was also a favorite.
My third grade teacher had several shelves of books for us to read in class. I often borrowed The Human Body to read at home. It had illustrations of little people in the body doing the things it described, and while I knew intellectually that it was just for illustration, I was fascinated. When later I read The Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov, it felt awesome.
