It's That Time Again....

...Time once again for The Sonlight Order.

In case you are reading this and, umm, not a Sonlighter, Sonlight is the name of the home schooling curriculum we use. Sonlight is a literature based program, using wonderful "real" books to supplement and provide the bulk of the history, reading & literature courses. Sonlight also gathers science materials (and writes their own), math materials, language arts (again, also their own), and extra-curriculars to provide a wonderful one-stop shopping experience for home schoolers.

We have used Sonlight from the beginning, from the time Timmy was 3.5, using what was then called Basic PreK (and is now called something like Core P4/5, if I have the correct catalog...). That first order was only a few hundred dollars, and our order size and price have gone up every year since.

This year we were looking at $1200 for all three boys, before Quentin made me cull down to the bare minimum. Once we did that, we were "down" to "just" $1015. GULP.

With the exchange rate the way it is (insanely unfavorable to the Real), that was just a next-to-impossible number. And so I did, at Quentin's prompting, a very humbling thing. I checked eBay.

Ebay didn't work out, but in the process, I happened to mention it on the Sonlight forums. And a mom just happened to have the main thing we were needing, which was the bulk of the cost. And she just happened to be willing and able to sell it to me very cheaply.

I love how God "just happened" to work all that out. Her generosity saved us right around $400, bringing our total down to about $600, including what we paid her. Amazing.

I hate that we had to buy used. I am grateful for Sonlight, which offers a Used For Sale Forum on their site to make such transactions possible. I am grateful for Sonlight being a curriculum that doesn't get used up, so that it *can* be passed down. I am grateful for people, perfect strangers but virtual friends, who see a need and are moved to meet it.

I am deeply humbled at us being in this place of need, and at God, meeting us here. Just at Thanksgiving I posted that I was thankful we could homeschool, had a great curriculum and the money for it. And then, we didn't have the money. Not without shuffling some things that we didn't think it wise to shuffle. And then someone stepped up, and we didn't need as much money after all. Did I mention how humbled I am by this??

Thank You, Father God, for providing for us through this fellow child of yours. May we return the favor one day soon. AMEN.

The Big Read: The Top 100

Okay, I'm borrowing this idea from a friend's blog, so, indulge me. It's an easy post, and fun, and ties in with our last conversation, and my goal to read more purposeful books. That goal was sparked by this list, so I thought I'd share it with you. Maybe you'd like to read some of these?

These are the top 100 books printed, and according to one website, most American adults (or the average Joe, anyway) has read 6 of the 100. Six. That's it.

So, here's my list. How do you compare? (I've read 34 of the 100, so far....)

KEY:
* = a book I've read
% = a book I plan to read
** (or more) = a book I LOVE
# = a book I HATE
? = a book I'm not sure if I've read or not


The Big Read – Top 100 Books
Pride & Prejudice -- Jane Austen
** The Lord of the Rings -- J. R. R. Tolkien
*Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte
**Harry Potter series -- J. K. Rowling
*****To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee

**The Bible

*Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
*1984 -- George Orwell
His Dark Materials -- Philip Pullman
?Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens
**Little Women -- Louisa May Alcott

Tess of the D'Urbervilles -- Thomas Hardy

% Catch 22 -- Joseph Heller

*% Complete Works of Shakespeare -- (have read some, not all, but want to read the rest)

Rebecca -- Daphne du Maurier

*The Hobbit -- J. R. R. Tolkien

Birdsong -- Sebastian Faulks

%Catcher in the Rye -- J. D. Salinger

The Time Traveller's Wife -- Audrey Niffenegger

Middlemarch -- George Eliot

% Gone With the Wind -- Margaret Mitchell

% The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Bleak House -- Charles Dickens

*War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy

% The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams

Brideshead Revisited -- Evelyn Waugh

*Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

?Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck

*Alice in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll

The Wind in the Willows -- Kenneth Grahame

%Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy

%David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens

**Chronicles of Narnia -- C. S. Lewis

*Emma -- Jane Austen

Persuasion -- Jane Austen

*The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe -- C. S. Lewis

**The Kite Runner -- Khaled Hosseini

%Captain Corelli's Mandolin -- Louis de Bernieres

*Memoirs of a Geisha -- Arthur Golden

*Winnie the Pooh -- A. A. Milne

*Animal Farm -- George Orwell

*The Da Vinci Code -- Dan Brown

*One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A Prayer for Owen Meaney -- John Irving

The Woman in White -- Wilkie Collins

*Anne of Green Gables -- L. M. Montgomery

Far From the Madding Crowd -- Thomas Hardy

The Handmaid's Tale -- Margaret Atwood

*# Lord of the Flies -- William Golding

Atonement -- Ian McEwan

Life of Pi -- Yann Martel

Dune -- Frank Herbert

Cold Comfort Farm -- Stella Gibbons

Sense and Sensibility -- Jane Austen

A Suitable Boy -- Vikram Seth

The Shadow of the Wind -- Carlos Ruiz Zafon

*A Tale of Two Cities -- Charles Dickens

Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time -- Mark Haddon

Love in the Time of Cholera -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

%Of Mice and Men -- John Steinbeck

Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov

The Secret History -- Donna Tartt

The Lovely Bones -- Alice Sebold

%Count of Monte Cristo -- Alexandre Dumas

On the Road -- Jack Kerouac

Jude the Obscure -- Thomas Hardy

%Bridget Jones's Diary -- Helen Fielding

Midnight's Children -- Salman Rushdie

*Moby Dick -- Herman Melville

? Oliver Twist -- Charles Dickens

Dracula -- Bram Stoker

**The Secret Garden -- Frances Hodgson Burnett

Notes From a Small Island -- Bill Bryson

Ulysses -- James Joyce

The Bell Jar -- Sylvia Plath

Swallows and Amazons -- Arthur Ransome

Germinal -- Emile Zola

Vanity Fair -- William Makepeace Thackeray

Possession -- A. S. Byatt

*A Christmas Carol -- Charles Dickens

Cloud Atlas -- David Mitchell

The Color Purple -- Alice Walker

The Remains of the Day -- Kazuo Ishiguro

?Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert

A Fine Balance -- Rohinton Mistry

*Charlotte's Web -- E. B. White

The Five People You Meet in Heaven -- Mitch Albom

*Adventures of Sherlock Holmes -- Arthur Conan Doyle

The Faraway Tree Collection -- Enid Blyton

*# Heart of Darkness -- Joseph Conrad

****The Little Prince -- Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The Wasp Factory -- Iain Banks

Watership Down -- Richard Adams

A Confederacy of Dunces -- John Kennedy Toole

A town Like Alice -- Nevil Shute

The Three Musketeers -- Alexandre Dumas

*Hamlet -- William Shakespeare

**Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- Roald Dahl

**Les Miserables -- Victor Hugo