Dixie Dillon Lane

Excited today to share the first three pages of my book, Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream (coming June 18). See next tweet to get your copy!

Me: This morning is not going how I wanted it to. Child: Like you wanted more chores to get done? Me: No, I wanted the morning to be really relaxed. Child: [hanging halfway off the couch, upside down] But I'm *really* relaxed!

@AaronIrber Parker is *so* good!

Is Eleanor Parker good?

Great round-up this week; I thought the piece by @erikabachiochi & @IvanaDGreco was very meaty, careful, and useful, especially. Also delighted to see @SiobhanHC_OLY 's Hearth & Field review of The Country Bunny in the link list!

@SiobhanHC_OLY @FairerSexFD Hey, that's awesome! Congrats, Siobhan!

Thank you @FairerSexFD for including my reflection on The Country Bunny, motherhood, and dreams! It’s been such a joy to share this in anticipation of Easter. hearthandfield.com/wisdom-swiftne… @DixieDillonLane

I'm distressed by what the husband said. "I would never allow my family..." What does that even mean? Would he "not allow it" by cleaning it up and keeping it immaculate himself? Or is he underlining his expectation that his wife keep the entire home immaculately clean and perfectly tidy in order to meet his standards? I don't like it.

was a mess, so much so that her husband grimly said to her on the drive home, "I would never allow my family to live in those conditions." I think reading this as a young mom set back my ability to make mom friends by years. In later years the same woman got very upset about

When I was a young mom, a co-religionist mommy blogger posted about her and her husband visiting another large family to help with a big household repair. She was scandalized, because, while the public areas of the house were immaculate, the usually-private space they went into

@LeahLibresco Just listened to that section -- excellent!

Currently covering the trad point of view that it doesn't matter who earns more because all money is held in common in a marriage. x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Making these to freeze for Easter dinner, with the help of the bread machine! kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/big-ba…

@teachermother1 @triciapickren I was astonished by the reactions to that picture. People responding as if an absolutely normal ebb-and-flow of more-and-less-tidy is an atrocious and morally intolerable situation.

@triciapickren yes, it's genuinely fascinating to me that there are people who apparently see no difference between the two

The responses Wayne gets to these posts confirm my belief that most people don’t know what natural child activity is like, nor how it scales once they outnumber you.

That's an astute comment. I think that many people are trying to reinvigorate marriage and family life by focusing on roles. Sometimes this also means we make the mistake of expecting a person to fit into a role or a family to fit into a constellation of roles, rather than for roles to conform to the needs/talents/etc. of the particular people and contexts. Ivana does a lot to help us see that a fixed idea of a role is only ever a starting place, really -- and it's hard to figure out language with which to discuss this, even within a family!

It’s been hard to thread the needle between homemaker and paid worker. Even in our own household, the dynamic changes so quickly that it’s hard to explain our roles to ourselves. @IvanaDGreco’s explanation of the false dichotomy is immediately helpful to me. Check it out.

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Why I am going to Austria and Bavaria on pilgrimage this December: I want to go to Austria because there’s a hard-won depth to these old places, like the smell of the leaf bracken and soil in the woods if you put your nose right down into them. It’s not even necessarily about the present place, which, like any place, is not somehow spared from difficulty. Visiting the present place is lots of fun, and we’ll have lots of fun on our trip! But it’s even more about all the people who have come and gone and how we are perhaps connected to them, to the generations who have prayed in the same abbey, walked on the same streets, read in the same libraries, and cried and laughed and worshipped and loved all the way through life. It’s like that to visit such a place; you have fun, and yet you feel connected. Yes, you’re a tourist, but sharing a faith with the history of the places you visit makes something electric happen, too — it’s an experience of the communion of saints. And it seems a fitting immersion for Advent: to enter into the history of a well-worn place in order to give ourselves new perspective on our own faith lives in our own valued homes. It’s a journey, a real pilgrimage — from something into something and back again, just in time for the Nativity. My co-leader Kristin Haakenson and I would love to have you along with us. We promise that it will be not only meaningful, but enjoyable, beautiful, and worth every minute. It’ll be prayerful and it’ll be fun. We can’t wait. Come with us? (See next tweet for info.)

For @TheArgumentMag, @IvanaDGreco and I took a deep dive into what the evidence actually says about adult literacy skills (spoiler alert: unlike what @mattyglesias and many others have repeated -- and I don't fault them for it, as there was a Bad Stat Gone Wild situation -- the 'half of Americans reading below a 6th grade level' stat has no factual basis), the trendlines, and how we can strengthen American literacy through both educational and family policy to maximize the number able to navigate this era of disinformation.

@1NickMiller @IvanaDGreco @NadyaWilliams81 We'll discuss the benefits of taking summer off in later posts! But also, I think lots of people who do school in the summer (including Ivana) take lots of breaks during the year. Very sorry you never got your snow days :)

@IvanaDGreco @NadyaWilliams81 @DixieDillonLane Shoot, we didn’t even get snow days. At least give em the summer!

Should you homeschool over the summer? @NadyaWilliams81 , @DixieDillonLane and I have different approaches. Today, I have the case for homeschooling over the summer - soon we will hear from the other ladies at Bad Moms Homeschool on the case against. open.substack.com/pub/badhomesch…

This is an excellent piece by my dear friend @IvanaDGreco on mothering without being pushed around by the influencers.

I really enjoyed this whole issue.

@rclu Congratulations, Rachel!

I’m stepping into a new role at Law & Liberty as Senior Editor. Effective tomorrow, but I figure I better post this today, cause tomorrow is probably the worst possible day to announce your promotion.