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​Hi,  I'm Laurie.
I work to give children fully human lives, awake to wonder and surprise.
I'm a paper girl. Unblushingly. Take me to a stationery store and I am helpless...and not just before the floral prints, the delicate parchment, the linen and the embossed...but the sturdy yellow legal pads, the regimental accounting books, the precious primary dotted lined and the stacks of newsprint and construction paper also call my name.  I love everything about paper, the way a pencil catches in a clean notebook, how my fountain pen bleeds into the fine ivory invitation, how scissors crisply round a corner, the smell and hopefulness of a brand new Moleskine journal and how the watercolours melt over my thick sketchbook pages.

The loveliest thing about paper is its something-must-be-done-with-it-ness. Which leads me to my second love: words. 
We think with them, write with them, pray with them, read with them and collect them for their own joyful symbolic sakes (my family once tried to fill a mini dollar store address book with collective nouns -- did you know several kittens are called a "kindle?") Maybe I love words most for the ideas they embody and the truth they can so unflinchingly carry. 

 My third and ultimate love: the WORD and finding Him present not only in scripture but in the wonder of science and nature, the "great matters" of Literature and History, the kneading of bread, conversation with friends, and "supping on oysters."

 Robert  Lewis  Stevenson's "the world is so full of  a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as Kings" somehow speaks to where my three loves unite: Once Upon a Time a wise teacher named Charlotte Mason invited me to "bring up my children as students of Divinity and (to) pursue (my) own life-long studies at the same school."  My children are all grown and at last count, I have 19 different notebooks, after her "forms of vitality," wherein I have variously recorded the common grace of this daily feast.  Keeping a Book of Centuries will make a round 20.  I wonder if you would like to join me in exploring this wild intersection of paper, words and The Word and learn with Charlotte to become unaccustomed to wonders?                                                                                

Besides daily keeping and writing about this adventure, I encourage parents and teachers as we all learn to live more fully for the sake of the children in our care.  Please let me know how I can come along-side you as we go.


Copyright Laurie Bestvater 2011-2023