Plot Points #84 💌

Homeschooling, heritage fashion, movement nutrients, and lost dictionaries

Aug 08, 2025

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Happy Friday! I hope you’ve all had a lovely first week of August. I’m trying not to rush into fall, especially since we’ve had such cool temperatures the past few days, but it’s tough!

Like many of you, we started back to school this week. Our daughter is still attending a local co-op for two full days a week, but our son is home with me full-time. Lucy skipped 6th grade and started 7th, Theo started 1st, and we’ve had quite a few exciting changes in this area. In two months, Lucy will get to attend homecoming for the first time and, oh, my heart! It’s wonderful and brutal, this parenting gig.

I researched a handful of curricula for this academic year, but ultimately decided to go with a tried-and-true favorite, The Good & The Beautiful. Every subject book is visually lovely, offers a whole-person, faith-centered approach to learning, and gives scripts for parents in order to help the loquacious teachers among us (ahem) from rambling off topic. It’s also a more affordable option in comparison to other popular homeschool curricula. This year, Theo is taking Language Arts (which combines art, geography, and culture into each lesson), History, Math, and Sparks & Stars, while on days Lucy is at home with us I am teaching them both Music Appreciation and Intro to Spanish (using the Homeschool Languages curriculum, which is similar in both look and feel to G&B). We also start our day with readings from the Daily Office and The Book of Common Prayer and end each day with a read-aloud chosen from the master book list I created. Our favorites right now are the Narnia series and James Herriots’ A Treasure for Children, which I snagged at the thrift store 😍.

I might write more about our homeschool journey later if that’s something you’d like to read, but for now I’ll leave it here.

Thanks so much for spending some of your time with me today! I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

Wendi

Word of the Week ✍🏻

Weemoed: (n.) A tender, nostalgic sadness for the past.

Point #1: It’s worth the search.

A while back, I thrifted a pair of ‘70s Sedgefield jeans that fit like a glove. Fifty years later, they still hold up like they were manufactured yesterday. When you first start thrifting for high-quality vintage, it can be hard to know what to look for or where to start. This piece from

trouvé

on the top heritage brands to look for has a place on my bookmark bar from now on!

Point #2: “We’ve lost the signal of real completion.”

I own a wind-up clock, an analog watch, a record player, and a Polaroid camera. Each of these items has one specific purpose and they’ve been so helpful for me as I seek to minimize my reliance on the attention-sucking devices that offer so many tools in once place I’d never have to leave my couch if I didn’t want to. I loved what

tiff

had to say in this defense of the tools that don’t perform, notify, or update: “I thought it was another one of nostalgia’s quick tricks, but a pattern surfaced. I was reaching for things that weren't necessarily better, but clearer. Something that began and ended without vanishing in between.”

Point #3: Never heard of “movement nutrients”? Neither had I.

Okay, this piece is fascinating! It describes how our calorie in/calorie out perspective on exercise and nutrition actually ignores one really important issue: That what matters most for long-term health is not how long or intense our workouts but how “nutritious,” meaning how often we’re using our muscles for the tasks they were designed for. People who like me (who hate the gym) will find this such a helpful and encouraging read!

Point #4: OOP.

He said what he said.

Tip Jar

Reading in The Nook 📚

About a month ago, I went through my entire library catalogue and picked out all the books—both classic and modern—that I’ve long wanted to read. I set those books in order of preference on our mantle and am now working my way through them. I just finished a delightfully spooky middle grade novel called The Clackity by Lora Senf, which gave off serious Hocus Pocus vibes with a bit more fantasy, and now I’m reading The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake, another popular fantasy series.

I took a break from this genre for most of the summer and now I’m tip-toeing back in with the hopes of finding solid plots and strong characters without whole chapters of smut sprinkled in. We’ll see how that goes…

Another wonderful book I finished recently is The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. This is a historical novel set at the turn of the 20th century which fictionalizes the real story of the people who spent decades of their lives putting together The Oxford English Dictionary. It follows the life of a young woman named Esme, who collects words deemed unnecessary or inappropriate for the dictionary—often those of the poor and underprivileged. The first hundred pages were slow-going, but after that I sank into this cozy, wonderful story like it was a warm blanket on a crisp, autumn afternoon. Highly recommend!

What are you reading right now? 👇🏻

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