6 things I learned in April

Linking up again this month with Emily Freeman to share some things we've learned, from the silly to serious.


1.  The Vacation Bible School preschool director is a paid position at our church.


Also:  don't raise your hand at a meeting to ask a question at the same moment someone says, "We need someone to be the preschool director."


Actually, I'm honored they want me to do it, and was about to say yes, until I found out it's a paid position, and therefore maybe more involved than I thought.  I'm still mulling this one over.


2.  There's more to crew than I thought.





This month I read The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown.  400 pages about rowing a boat doesn't seem like it would appeal to me, but it was really good.  I was fascinated by how the young men made it through the Depression, and the heart of the teammates as they sought to beat the Nazis on their own turf.


Also, crew is harder than it looks.  The 9-man boat is super long, but only as wide as a man's hips, with no keel to stabilize it, so the rowers must keep perfectly balanced as they're exerting great effort to take strokes as long as possible, in perfect unison.  They must synchronize their every movement to their teammates'.  Even a slight incorrect turn of the wrist makes the oar catch the water wrong, disrupting the boat's progress and potentially injuring the rower.


3.  Sieg heil means hail victory.


Also from The Boys in the Boat, although I finally had to look this one up.  Another one of the Nazi taglines, along with heil Hitler.


4.  Our homeschool support group does senior portraits.

Also the small senior class took a senior class trip.  How cool is that?  I'm thinking of arranging for the expansion of the portrait program to include students of all ages, so we homeschoolers would have school pictures to trade with our public school friends.


5.  France partially surrendered to Nazi Germany in 1940, and the general populace struggled to survive due to the subsequent lack of food and resources.

All pictures above via Unsplash

Consider this another illustration of my sweeping knowledge of world history.  Just as all I learned about the Civil War, I learned from Gone With the Wind, and all I learned about World War I, I learned from Downton Abbey; so just about all I've learned about World War II in Europe, I have now learned from another book I read this month, Kristin Hannah's excellent The Nightingale.


We all knew the prisoners in camps were starved and deprived of medical care, but The Nightingale illustrated how even the "free" citizens of France were starving (albeit more slowly) and lacking medicine.  I've heard of my grandparents in the U.S. using ration cards to buy foods, but according to this book, there was hardly any food to be had in France, ration cards or not.  The well-fed occupying Nazis hoarded food while the populace wasted away, trying to keep their children alive.  An effective method of cowing your victims into submission, indeed.


6.  Notes works well for keeping track of the softball score.

6-5, top of the sixth

I'm not sure I've ever used this app for anything before, but I've finally found a way to have some idea what inning we're in.  

If I could just figure out what the ump's hand gestures mean, and whether the run counts when there's an out on the field, I'd be pretty good at keeping score too.

What did you learn in April?