Every day that we possibly can, we open our big blue suitcase on wheels and pull out the textbooks.

Caroline has a big, green, shiny English 9 book and an accompanying dense black writing handbook.  A 10-pound U.S. History text, a geometry book, and all the tools to go with it (calculator, protractor, compass, etc) rounds out her list.

Conor’s stack includes a fat, red math book and two huge spiral-bound math manuals, a social studies book covering lands of the eastern hemisphere and its matching workbook, and a language arts book.  (We’re dissecting sentences and learning parts of speech.)

None of this really blends in with world travels: sight-seeing, trekking, photographing, eating strange foods, and moving over and over again to yet another new spot.

But schoolwork has become a necessary framework and, at times, a welcome one.  Even though, like at home, it causes a certain stress, it is a constant thread through our crazy changeable year.

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