Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Meet My Family, Part 2--Mom

Updated 1/10

This is my mom.

My mom is a career homemaker who raised and homeschooled five children. Mom is the middle child of three siblings. She was raised in a wonderful Christian home in Indianapolis. She is a highly intelligent person, and musically inclined--she has played the piano and violin since early childhood. After graduating from high school, she worked and took a few semesters of college (early childhood education) before meeting my dad and getting married.

Mom is more quiet and reserved compared to some of the more outgoing members of my family, but she is happy to talk once you get to know her.

Mom is good with languages. At one point, she was studying six!!! languages--Romanian, Hindi, Italian, Spanish, French, and Dutch. I asked her if studying all the different languages at once was confusing, and she said no, she really enjoyed seeing how the different languages compare. Hindi was especially interesting as it uses a different alphabet with 44 characters, with four different types of "T's" and four different types of "D's." It sounded pretty complicated to me! Now, of course, living in Israel, Mom is studying Hebrew.

Mom also plays the violin and the tin whistle--the last few times I heard her play, she was playing a lot of Irish folk music. (Did you know that she has perfect pitch?) She also designs and pieces quilt tops, and gardens.

Mom's mind works in unique and interesting ways (at least, I find them very interesting). She likes numbers and patterns. Once she designed a quilt top based on prime numbers. And just for fun, she recently worked out all of the repeating decimals up to 16 places. Even phonics instruction became an exercise in geometry, as she laid out grids of words that followed certain phonics patterns (all of her children became avid readers, for what it's worth).

Mom was happy to have me and my sons join her in her Texas home last summer. My brother Jesh finished school and moved in on the same weekend, so for a short time, Mom had three of her children at home, and the other two (married) within a short distance. But then Dad was invited to move to Israel, so she and Dad packed up and left. While Mom misses her family, she finds the challenge of settling into a new country to be quite interesting. She now spends quite a bit of time studying Hebrew, but still finds time now and then to post to her blog.

Coming soon: Meet My Family, Part 3!

2 comments:

  1. Ha! Quite reserved about her accomplishments too. I knew she was studying Romanian, but had no idea she was studying 5 others as well!

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  2. Wow, I really admire people who can learn many languages.

    I think once I'm finished home schooling I will be too tired to learn anything new.

    H x

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