Melissa, a homeschooling mom of 3, says she initiated Mental Multivitamin (M-mv), which bears the tagline established in October, 2003 for readers, thinkers, an autodidacts to “chronicle my reading and other learning adventures and synthesize what I was learning.”  Averaging 5 posts per week, this literary blog also includes arts commentary (see Fine Art Fridays- sometimes posted on the occasional Thursday), media commentary, birding, and more.

Still, literature is the meat and potatoes of the blog. The monthly Reading Life review chronicles the author’s nightstand collection, and the frequent Poetry entries provide insight into poetry and sometimes link to choice sonnets- just because.

“Given the glut of ‘mommy blogs,’ I wanted my blog to do and say something else, something not that, if you know what I mean,” says Melissa. While M-mv is not a “mommy blog” a great deal of the books discussed and reviewed have a parenting, motherhood, family and homeschooling bent, clearly mirroring the experiences and interests of the author.

My favorite series is Chapbook Entry, in which Melissa lets us into her personal notebook and provides commentary on key passages in the books she reads. Simultaneously a sort of Cliff’s Notes and window into her mind, the entries are brief but give a cogent flavor of the book in question.  A recent entry on Love in a Time of Homeschooling by Laura Brodie bears the quote:

p. 54h

Still, long-term homeschooling held no allure for me. I wanted plenty of time for my own teaching and writing and solitude. One year was the limit of my excitement.

To which the author adds her own commentary:

COMMENT: Interestingly, one of the many reasons long-term homeschooling held holds great allure for me is that I wanted plenty of time for my own reading, writing, thinking, and, yes, solitude.

Melissa, like every mom who has made some type of decision about whether and to what extent to work outside the home, has strong and thoughtful reactions to Linda Hirshman’s “Get to Work” manifesto. Her analysis of her own stance with respect to Hirshman’s edict is very descriptive of her general viewpoint on life, in which she relishes identifying her life with Tom Sawyer, something Hirshman denigrates:

This morning, as I nurse my second cup of coffee while correcting math lessons and counting birds at our feeders, I have neither the interest nor the strength to enter into a meaningful dialogue on the subject of women and work, so I’ll confine my remarks to this query: Which text did Hirshman read that made her think Tom Sawyer has no power (i.e., influence) in or over his world?

[Added later: From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:

[T]hey came to jeer, but remained to whitewash… Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

The blog is a refreshing window into the mind and musings of an individual who has first and foremost made a commitment to “Read. Think. Learn”, as the footnote on every page exhorts the reader, while homeschooling her children and eschewing the fast-paced life. It will appeal primarily to moms and parents, but it is not a parenting blog (family anecdotes are conspicuously missing).

The following passage, a response to Margaret Renkl’s The Rewards of Relaxation in Ladies Home Journal, perhaps best summarizes the author’s philosophy:

Of course, not all idle moments result in creative genius, and sometimes we squander them… but there’s something liberating in the idea that I’ve been espousing for three years: Stop being a slave to the to-do lists and chore charts and schedules and just, oh, look up! Dream! Think.Breathe deeply. Take a nap. Wonder.