This week we are taking a detour to Byzantine Istanbul.
It's perfect. There's a decent amount of it in the WinterPromise books, and my Mother-in-Law kindly sent us a large pile of books from her Christian Library.
I'm teaching the kids how to say a handful of things in Turkish. They love learning a new language, and I love being able to use that part of my brain again.
(in case I've never written it on this blog, I lived in Turkey for two years after college, teaching music at an international school. LOVED the country. Wasn't such a fan of being a classroom music teacher. I love the food, the culture, the language, the music...thus the planned detour!)
And to push us to really make this big, I'm planning an Open House for Friday afternoon. It guarantees I'll get the house clean, I get the opportunity to make a bunch of Turkish things Josh and the kids don't like but others might, and it motivates the kids to keep moving in the school stuff!
Next week (week 9)'s Hideaway is a Mosque. But I'm going above and beyond.
This week we're going to construct Aya Sofya (Hagia Sophia to those of you who don't speak Turkish), complete with orangy-pink paint and mosaics inside.
And then next week, instead of starting from scratch, we'll turn our beautiful Byzantine church into a mosque. Put up minarets. Whitewash over the mosaics, pulling off some of the pieces. Pull off the crosses. Show them what it was that happened in 1453 and why it is that so many of the the pictures of the mosaics have huge sections missing. Why you can see holes in the walls where there should be crosses.
And I should now get back to planning this party...
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