Learning Notes - Week 7 (Oct 7-12)

This week's theme is Real World Unschooling through headaches and breathing troubles!

Monday

Still sick.  We had a rough, not sleeping night, and got up later than usual.  I could see right away that this week was going to consist of a lot of child-led learning.  Here's some of what we did today:

The 9yo decided on his own that he is entering a science fair.  And that his project is going to be volcanoes.  He built a large Lego model last week, which he wired to light up for the 'lava', showing both above ground and underwater volcanoes.  This morning he decided he was going to write an accompaning report.  I didn't help him with this.  He used this book, which he found on the non-fiction shelves:

Image from Amazon.

He copied out the facts he found most interesting in his best printing, and then illustrated his page with hand drawn volcano comics.  Mostly volcanoes talking to each other.  He made one very neat and lovely page of facts, asking me how to spell various words as he wrote, and then excitedly went to show his father.  He also decided to play the piano for a bit.  When he was finished that he read, without the timer keeping track of his minutes.  He went with Dad up to the library and found the Spiderwick chronicles series, took out and read book one.

I asked the 7yo to read a story aloud to the 5yo, and the 5yo chose a retelling of Cinderella.  Then the 7yo asked to practice cursive writing.  I wrote out a sheet of upper and lowercase letters to work through.  We ended up having a conversation about how to link letters together and why some capital letters in cursive do not easily link to their following lowercase.  Then she discovered a book of Sudoku math puzzles and spent an hour working her way through some of those.  She also had piano lessons.

The 5yo wanted to do math, so fine.  She went through two lessons, mostly guided by the 9yo.  When she tired of that, her preferred work was tracing things, including my wedding band, all over my planner.  With a pen.  Sigh.

They spent a large part of the day playing outside.

Tuesday

For the second week running the conservatory had to cancel the 9yo's piano lesson.  So again, we only had swimming lessons and the day was slightly shorter because of that.

Before swimming, the 9yo begged to be allowed to go back to the library and take out book 2 of the Spiderwick Chronicles.  So, okay, we did that.  He finished it in the car.

Image from Amazon

Wednesday

Morning Time

Yes, we actually managed morning time for, maybe, the first time in a week?  We prayed, sang the doxology and the national anthem.

Bible reading - we read Mark 1:34.  We discussed why Jesus would not want to let the devils speak about who he was.

Memory work review - everyone remembered days of the week, months of the year, provinces up to Quebec (we added on New Brunswick), the Lord's Prayer up to 'as we forgive those who tresspass against us' (we added on up to 'deliver us from evil'), and the books of the Old Testament up to Nehemiah.

Christian biography reading - The 9yo read about Jan Hus.  We discussed the definition of an idol, the latin language, and how to pronounce 'Czech', and 'Prague'.  The 7yo read about Selina, Countess of Huntington's marriage and subsequent birth of her first son.  We discussed the aristocracy, primogeniture, ruling Queens of England, why Elizabeth I never married, who the estate workers would have been in the 1700s, and travel by carriage.

History - We read the section of SOTW 2, Chapter 4: Justinian The Just Emperor.  We discussed the definition of 'just', and whether we agreed with the rules of the Code of Justinius.

At this point the day stopped because we had an emergency room trip for my husband, who was on day 4 of a constant stabbing headache.  On the way to the ER we stopped at the library and the 9yo returned book 2 of the Spiderwick Chronicles and borrowed books 3 and 4.  When we got home I took the 5yo out for lunch and a walk, then we came home and started out outside work to get the house ready for Thanksgiving and the following week when my mother in law arrives.

Thursday

The children spent hours today developing a time machine out of a dryer box.  I believe they were attempting to visit the Bermuda Triangle?  The 9yo was the captain, the 7yo was the repairwoman, and the 5yo kept forgetting what she was but it may have been engineer.  They alternated this with turning cardboard, glue and a bag of alphabet pasta into picture frames.  I spent the morning trying not to cough, and cleaning furiously for Thanksgiving.

In the afternoon, we did our morning time, ironically.

Doxology, national anthem.

Memory work - we reviewed provinces up to New Brunswick, and attempted the ENTIRE Lord's Prayer (with a great deal of success and minimal prompting).  We added 'Esther' to the list of OT books, which means we've memorized the order of all the historical books now!

The 9yo finished the story of Jan Hus.  He was burned at the stake, which was a terrible ending.  We talked about awful ways Christians have been martyred.  The 7yo read to us about Selina, Countess of Huntington's donation of 10 pounds towards Bibles for underprivileged children and what that would translate into in current money.

History - we contined Ch. 4 of SOTW 2 and read about Justinian's empress Theodora.

Friday

We had to go back to the library because the 9yo had finished the 4th book in the Spiderwick Chronicles and needed to finish the series 'so he could watch the movie'.  I love that kid.

The 9yo and 7yo practiced the piano.

The 9yo also did two lessons in English and 2 lessons in math. 

Saturday

I have no memory of Saturday.  What did we do...I think we possibly went BACK to the library to return the final book and...there was school of some kind, I'm sure of it.  I can't remember...

But...that's not what that means, and other surface theology

Almost nothing riles me up more than people taking small snippets of a faith, reading them entirely out of context, and building a theological understanding out of them.  It's so aggravating.  Not just for me, but I imagine also for THEM, because the weird frankenfaith they've come up with is not equipped to handle anything beyond the most basic of problems.  There's no depth!  What are you doing with your pain?  How are you handling your difficult times in life?  What about horrible things?  What about wonderful things?  How do you answer your questions and live your LIFE???

Take this glorious example of ridiculous:

Taken from the Mindful Christianity Today facebook page - I don't know where they got it from.

It's from Facebook, which is obviously the best theological tool out there.  That being said, how on earth...what is this meme ABOUT?  So we've got a person giving another person soup.  Well golly, that's super nice of them.  Or maybe it's gruel.  Well, whatever - the point is I'm assuming Guy #2 is going to eat this.  Food is being passed around.  How lovely.  Now, we have two verses, separated for emphatic purposes by this picture.  Let's take a look at those.

Verse #1 - Jesus doesn't care how many Bible verses you have memorized.

Well, firstly, Jesus was an actual real, live, historical figure living in a real, actual, historical period of time, so he had a life, and his life was...Jewish.  Because he was Jewish.  He also wasn't white, but maybe that first arm is supposed to be you passing gruel to someone and not him, so I guess if you're white this picture would work.  Or if you had any gruel handy.  But if Jesus was Jewish, then the real, live, historical Jesus would have had opinions from the perspective of...a Jewish man.  So yeah, actually we have a lot of information available to us about historical Jewish men in the middle east, and based on that information, Jesus would have certainly cared if you memorized scripture.  Absolutely he would have.  He did it himself!  He did it so well he taught in the temple!  He did it so well he taught senior scholars in the temple while he was a child!  He had such a firm grasp of scripture that he developed a following and became a serious threat and was killed for it!  And what's more, the scriptures he had access to were the Old Testament teachings, not the New Testament teachings, so in fact he would have expected a decent understanding of the things LEADING UP TO the gospel accounts.  He would, in short, have expected historical faith knowledge.  But don't take my word for this - ask literally any credible Jewish scholar anywhere about the importance of Old Testament knowledge to their faith.  Any. One.

But maybe what the meme is trying to say is not so much 'Jesus' but 'The Holy Spirit'.  That's a pretty major error if that's the case, seeing as Jesus is not the Holy Spirit because they are two ENTIRELY DIFFERENT TRIUNE ASPECTS OF GOD.  It would be like saying 'Listen, Debbie, I know you wrote this essay but I'm going to say Susan did because you're both human females so, like, you're pretty much interchangeable'.  This would be incorrect.  And I want to say that whoever wrote the above piece of drivel doesn't actually believe that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are the same person but sure, let's, for just a moment, pretend that that's the problem.

So here is where I feel like a little Bible lesson would not be remiss.  See, Jesus DIED.  Like, he ACTUALLY FOR REALSIES DIED.  So now Jesus is dead, okay?  He's put into a tomb and he's still dead, bear with me.  Now, he COMES BACK TO LIFE.  Oh my gosh really, I know, it's shocking.  I'm not being sarcastic - this is shocking news.  It's so shocking that it literally actually changed the course of human history.  Now, what happens NEXT?  I mean, does he live a nice long life and then die again?  Does he start a religion called Christianity?  Does he overthrow the government like everyone seemed to hope he would?  Surprisingly, he spends time with various people, talks to them, hangs out, and then...he goes to Heaven!  So sometime approximately two thousand years ago Jesus goes up to Heaven, and...he hasn't come back yet.  Really!  He's still there!  Well, now that is crazy because these days you have lots and lots of things attributed TO Jesus that Jesus is not here to do.  Like, for example, caring about whether you, Susan, are memorizing your Old Testament!  But Jesus is not physically here, on Earth, because you remember he went to heaven and that is where he still is.

The person who IS here is the Holy Spirit.  Who is actually, tangibly HERE here.  No, you can't see him, he isn't in a human body like Jesus was, but he's here all the same.  So we know the Holy Spirit is here because 1) Jesus told us he would be here and 2) We can see the results of his arrival.  Like...like air.  You can't see air, but you're breathing, and you're alive, and fire works, and something is moving those leaves, and so forth.  You can't SEE air, but you can see the results of air existing.  So you can see that Jesus and the Holy Spirit, while both being God (God is an eternal, unchangeable spirit who is triune in nature.  Triune meaning 'three-in-one'  One God.  Three persons.  Three aspects.  Three separate aspects.  One God.  You'll easily able to tell why I am not a theologian.) are not The Same Thing.  Not.  Not the same thing at ALLLLLLL.  Very different in multiple ways.  In form, in purpose, in location for that matter.  Remember, Holy Spirit - here, with us.  Jesus - Still in Heaven, hasn't returned yet.

So what if what the meme is trying to say is that the Holy Spirit doesn't care how many Bible verses you have memorized.  Well, if anything, this is possibly more ridiculous than Jesus not caring.  What we need to ask ourselves is WHY.  Why would Jesus send us the Holy Spirit?  Why bother?  I mean, if the whole purpose of the Bible is entirely fulfilled by God the father creating us and God the son redeeming us then what's this invisible Spirit guy doing in the mix?  Well, he's there for multiple reasons but one of them is GUIDANCE.  So I'm terrible at examples but try and follow my poor storytelling.  You want to go somewhere, so you get in a car.  There's a road and it has lots of signs and everything guiding you to the place you want to go.  But signs and a road and a car are not enough to get from place A to place B.  What if part of the road gets washed out?  What if you make a turn off the road because you think you know a better way but it turns out you navigate like I do and you do not, in fact, know a better way?  What if the windshield wipers suddenly turn on and you can't get it to stop and you don't know what's wrong with the car?  Wouldn't it be handy if there was someone in the passenger seat who knew this road really, really well?  Who was part of the BUILDING of this road?  Who personally lived both at point A and also at point B and could navigate for you?  Well lucky for you, there is!  This is the Holy Spirit's JOB.  He specifically wants to help guide you along that road and all it's myriad twists, turns, wrong ways, detours and crazy oncoming traffic.  What does this have to do with this meme, woman!!!??  I'll tell you - the Holy Spirit wants to guide you.  His purpose in existing is primarily to be the guiding helper.  He will guide you despite whatever stupid stuff you may do, and thank God for that, frankly, but all the same he wants you to travel down this path.  He WANTS you to move towards Point B.  He exists in you to help you get closer to the end point!  This is what he does!  Do you think, knowing this, that he would not want you to deeply know your guidebook?  That he would say "hey, we're on this highway, but don't look at the road signs.  Or learn how to drive the car.  Or read the owner's manual."  Does this sound in any way logical?  It does not.

So okay, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit (and God the father as well but I'm hoping I don't need to explain that) all do, actually want you to know your Bible.  All three of them are deeply invested in you knowing your Bible, in fact.

Verse #2 - He cares how you treat people.

Right.  Well, yeeeees, he does care how you treat people.  Yes.  But that is not really in any way affiliated with how much of the Bible you know.  I mean, those two things, if they are in any way attached to each other, actually feed positively from the Bible reading side.  So if you read your Bible and know your Bible and study your Bible you will treat people BETTER because of that, not worse.  No one is asking you to choose.  No one is saying you can EITHER know your Bible OR you can treat people well.  But you only get to pick one of those things.   That's...I don't even know where that would come from.  Absolutely none of the Bible is about choosing between living in this actual world that God has created, and being a Good Christian.  I cannot even think where this dichotomy would come from, and I'm wracking my brains.

Perhaps what the implication here is is less that you're choosing, but that the sort of person who would memorize Bible verses is not the sort of person who would care how you treat people.  That's quite possible, actually, since the world seems to have this fascinatingly strange perception of Christians as weirdos just waiting to leap out of dark corners and throw Gideon testaments at innocent people just trying to have a nice time.  I don't even own a Gideon testament!  Or a long denim skirt!  Obviously someone should be taking away my Christian card.

The irony is that IF that is what this meme is trying to get at, that you can give away bowls of gruel to hairy armed poor hungry people OR you can be all worried about stupid stuff like learning the basis of faith and salvation, then this meme curls in on itself and becomes what it condemns.  It takes its truth, and it hold it above all else, and says 'prostrate yourself in front of this, and not that.  That is wrong, but this...this over here, this social justice, this feeding of people, this is right!'  It ignores the two thousand years where for large swathes of time the Western world owed it's learning and medical care and allievment of poverty to the Christians.  It ignores the Mission Aviation Fellowship pilots flying food to drought-ridden areas of Angola, right now!  It ignores the Wycliffe Bible translators who gave me brand new lovely snowsuits for my two oldest children when we were too poor to manage much on our own.  It ignores the elderly in my own church, who from there own meagre income buy food for the children at the small local elementary school here in town, so that no child has to go through the day without breakfast and lunch.  These people, they did not ignore their responsibility to their own faith, to read the road signs, to learn about the car, in favour of the easier visible things.  They didn't give the box of cereal and then go home and say 'well thank goodness that's done and I don't have to even LISTEN in church next week.'  The study was the fuel that led them forward.

And the Bible, strangely enough, has quite a bit to say about that, too.

Links to interesting things I've seen this week

My husband is re-sick now, from the previous sick.  And also the doctor's office still doesn't have flu shots in.  Despite it being mid-October.  Isn't that fun?  Plus I think my own personal sickness has now progressed into bronchitis.  On the plus side I'm hosting Thanksgiving dinner and I promised everyone I'd cook the turkey over a bonfire in the yard, using a metal tripod suspending a metal rack over the flames.  Also I haven't picked up my wood and Thanksgiving Day is forecast to be Quite Rainy.  Please don't roll your eyes like that.  Anyway, here are some interesting links of stuff I've read/seen online this week instead of cleaning my house for the holiday.

Link

C.S. Lewis' last essay, written in his trademark accessible style. - LINK

Something funny. - LINK

Something about missions that is a bit more serious.  Without dismissing this writer's experience, I don't know how I feel about this essay. - LINK

I'm going to make this! - LINK

My new favourite singer.  Love me some folk! - LINK

The Xerxes society local plant lists for North America. - LINK

I would never make these, but I love to look at them. - LINK

*********************************************************************************

I hope your Wednesday is full of amazingness and that your own house smells like lemons.

Learning Notes - Week 6 (Sept 30-Oct 5)

Monday

It poured rain most of the day, and we sat inside and coughed and coughed.  This cold is not going gently into that good night.

Independent Studies

9yo
30 minutes silent reading
30 minutes piano
Read aloud the first chapter of The Sword In The Tree.

Image from Amazon

7yo
30 minutes silent reading
30 minutes piano
Patterns of Nature - Lesson 3 (weeds and wildflowers)

5yo
100 Easy Lessons - Lesson 27
Patterns of Nature - Lesson 3

Tuesday

9yo
R&S English 2 - Lesson 10 (review)

Swimming for all three children.
Conservatory piano was cancelled today.

Memory work reviewed in the car.

7yo and 5yo finished their unfinished Patterns of Nature lesson from yesterday.

Wednesday

Morning Time

Prayer, doxology, national anthem

Memory work - review months of the year, days of the week, The Lord's Prayer up to 'trespass against us', adding Nehemiah on our list of OT books of the Bible.

Bible reading  - Mark 1: 32.

Christian biography reading - the 9yo read about Jan Hus's changing impressions of the church.  We discussed how Latin used to be the language of church services and I read something to the children in Latin so they could hear the language aloud.  The 7yo read to us about Selina's difficulties with reading and writing.  We defined 'dyslexia' and 'tutor'.

History - We caught up on the history reading from earlier this week.  We read section 1 of Ch. 4 in SOTW book 2, introducing the Byzantine empire.  I showed the children a picture of the Hagia Sofia.  We reviewed the year the Roman empire was split.

Geography - the 9yo and I reviewed our globe work - hemispheres, climate, weather, equator, tropics of capricorn and cancer, climate zones and axis.  We reviewed some of the end of chapter questions again from Chapter 1 and began Ch. 2 - the Tropical Zone.  We read half of our chapter and then brought out the world map to find Brazil and discuss the tropics.

Individual Studies

9yo
 - Read aloud Chapter 2 of The Sword In The Tree.  The 9yo thinks the uncle is terribly rude and doesn't like him.
-R&S English 2 - Second half of unit 1 test.
-Saxon math 5/4 - Lesson 14
-30 minutes piano

7yo
-30 minutes silent reading
-30 minutes piano

The 5yo and I walked up to the library and read many stories together, just the two of us.

Thursday

We're STILL SICK HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE??

The 9yo spent a very long time playing a math game online, then the children and I went for a cold and wet walk in the rain.  The afternoon was taken up with piano practice, reading and playing with Lego.

Friday

I called a PD Day today because we had dr. appointments and also I needed to clean the house.  The children read a lot, and also watched some of the episodes on this nature documentary:

Image from Amazon.

I remember the 9yo loving this documentary series when he was younger but had completely forgotten that there were sad bits in it - like the mother giraffe dying!  Ack!  There was also some piano practice.

Saturday

I can't say I'm sad to see this second week of illness leave us.  We went to the launch of this season's Operation Christmas Child work in a nearby city and the children did no schoolwork at all.

Reading Notes - What I read in the second half of September

I'm very behind on my reading lists - to beat last year's total of 70 books I have...a lot left to read.  Onward!

Image from Amazon

 I've reread all of Bryson's travel books many a time, and this one is no exception.  It's classic Bryson.  He writes in a sort of 'vaguely belligerent guy' tone of voice a lot of the time, and he thinks nothing of colourful language, but he's very funny.  He's definitely an author who uses his publishing opportunities to air his opinions and his travelling as a way to outline every beer he drinks from one end of a hike to another, but again...he's funny.  You'll have to decide if the pro outweighs the cons for yourself on this one.

Image from Amazon

 I have heard so much about Paul Theroux, and I love a good author recommendation, so last year I bought The Great Railway Bazaar and read it.  It was...okay.  I mean, I love well written travel literature and he had such a cult following I thought maybe I had puffed it up in my imagination and the reality would forever fall short.

No matter, I thought when I found this title on a used bookshelf a while ago, I'll give him another go!  Pretty much from the get go I could tell I was not going to love this book. His language was harsh and he made endless references to the opposite sex, but even if you could look past this - his trip seemed miserable, and he was miserable because of it.  It wasn't the kind of miserable that makes a great story, it was the kind of miserable where he discusses how much he can't stand his train companion, and he can't find a hotel room, and the food is awful, and then he meets up with his hated train companion and the poor fellow (clearly unaware he was going to be talked about in an upcoming book) offers Theroux an extra bed in his nice hotel room and Theroux takes him up on it and is miserable all through dinner and all through the night and all the rest of the time he interacts with this fellow until the time when he crosses into another in a string of countries he seems to hate equally.  Every city is a cesspool, every country riddled with corruption and social problems, every meal paltry, every village decrepit and poverty stricken.  He's too hot.  He's too cold.  There are dogs and he doesn't like dogs.  There's a screaming baby.  He can't write in his journal.  Some guy offers him a comic and he didn't like that comic because only stupid people read comics and whine whine whine.

Image from Amazon

Auntie Mame!  Do you have books you remember from your younger years?  Not childhood books, necessarily, but books from your pre-teen or teen years when you were set free upon the bookshelves of your relatives?  Well, Auntie Mame is one of those for me.  I read it in one gluttonous day of lying in bed when very sick this past week and it is as ridiculous and outrageous as I remember it being when I first pulled it in a dusty 60s paperback from the shelves of the family lake house.  I imagine it must have belonged to my grandmother when she was a married woman - sort of the Candace Bushnell of books in the day, one might imagine.  Ah, Mame.

It's Raining. Again.

Let me be your sunshine on this grey, awful morning.

1)  So if you, like me, are looking down the tunnel of autumn and feeling the darkness of dreary November wrap her icy fingers around your soul...take heart!  Apparently the internets think that horrible squealing noise my car is making IS actually maybe brakes, and NOT the transmission.  So let's all be happy about that!

2)  When I'm trying to fall asleep I've taken to listening to podcasts, because my doctor thinks I need to not look at screens or something.  Candy Crush and I are deeply saddened by this, but there you have it.  Listen to your doctor!  Here's a podcast I've made my way through recently.

3)  Here is a recipe I would love to try this fall.  Except that I doubt I could even buy half of these ingredients where I live but this is a post about happiness!

4)  Here is a recipe I HAVE actually made, and my children love it.  Make of that what you will.

5)  I need another cloth shopping bag like I need a hole in the head, as my mother would say, but I like this one anyway.

6)  The grocery store had a big cart full of various shelf-stable foods they were getting rid of for some reason.  The expiry date said 2021 on the foods I looked at, and the packages weren't damaged at all, so my guess is that they are phasing out these foods from their stock.  This has happened before at this store.  Anyway, I bought some of these!  I like to have a stock of faster lunches available for when I don't have enough of the last evening's supper left to feed the children in a timely manner.  The Pad Thai is not great, but the peanut noodles were really nice.  My children argued about which ones they got to eat, then complained about the ones everyone else got, then complained when I suggested they share the flavours, then complained because they didn't want to use a fork but ALSO didn't want to use chopsticks...but they DIDN'T complain about the flavour.  Ta da!

7)  I used to be in the 'meh' camp with flu shots.  I have had the flu, it's not that bad, and scheduling something else into my day was just often one thing too much.  Other innoculations, sure, but the flu?  But in the past few years I have had an about face in regards to the flu shot.  This blogger sums up my thoughts well with

 "I would go so far as to say that all of us who are ABLE to

do things to protect the more vulnerable among us have an

actual ETHICAL DUTY to do so: a small thing for each of

us to do, but something that collectively makes a HUGE

difference in the protective barriers around others"

Read the post and see if you agree.

8)  Here's a picture of a turkey family we saw recently:

Whenever you're thinking to yourself at four o'clock in the morning "but what if it IS the transmission", or, as Simcha Fisher put it so well "oh Lord, there's so much rhubarb", I want you to remember those turkeys in that field and think "At Least I'm Not A Turkey In October".

Thoughts about rich/poor city/country dynamics.

I mentioned in a previous post about how we used to live in a big city, and then we moved to an even bigger city, and then we moved to a small town, and now we live in an even smaller, tiny village of 600 people.  Mostly in that post I wanted to hash out my own thoughts about why I preferred city living to rural living (and by rural I am including the predominantly agricultural based economies of the towns I have lived in, not just off-in-the-bush type living).  But actually there are other urban/rural dynamics that have occurred to me over the years that I think put me in a minority.  There are a lot of assumptions made about urban living or rural living that, just from a personal perspective, have not rung true for me.  One of these is...

image from The Graphics Fairy

The city is expensive.  The country is cheaper.

Now, in some ways, yes, the city is more expensive and the country is cheaper.  In some ways.  But a lot of it depends on your lifestyle and despite the fact that most of my opinion is anecdote based, I am still going to share it.

So, when we lived in the second Big City, a city of multiple-millions of people, we had a small, one bedroom apartment.  We were newly married, two cats, no children, and it worked for us.  The apartment, like all apartments, had positives and negatives.  It was small, and older, damp and not well lit, but it was in a great location in a shared house with the landlord who was lovely.  It had a good sized walk out to the back yard, which we also had access to whenever we wished.  The landlord was prompt and efficient, we didn't have a car but the apartment came with parking if we had guests over, we were close to public transit, and nearby were several grocery stores and so forth all within easy walking distance.  There were no laundry facilities on site, but there was a laundromat about 5 minutes away and without children to make it challenging we didn't mind going and sitting beside our washing for an hour with a book and a coffee from the local shop.  We walked to the library, which was big and well stocked, and to our church, both within a maximum of 20-30 minutes at a meandering stroll.  The apartment was not, don't get me wrong, a great apartment.  But it was an okay apartment in a great neighbourhood.  

We moved from the Great Big City to the first smaller town.  That town had approximately 4000 people.  We moved into, again, an apartment.  And again, this apartment had pluses and minuses.  It was better lit and it was bigger.  There were small windows around the house but the front living room window was nice and big.  All of the rooms were larger in size and there were more of them - there were two bedrooms in this apartment plus a third room used as storage.  This extra room was important for our family because this is the apartment we brought our first child home to.  It also had hook-ups for a washer and dryer, though we didn't have a dryer at that point.  From a negative view, though, the apartment didn't have a yard, it had a very awkward layout and also ancient carpeting and therefore a problem with mold.  Although the apartment was bigger, the neighbourhood was not as nice, the neighbours were not as nice, and the walk to access our church and grocery shopping was long.

What you may find interesting is that those two apartments were the same price.

The smaller apartment in the big city in a nice neighbourhood close to everything, and the bigger apartment in the small town in a not nice neighbourhood far from a lot of stuff.  For us, there was no price difference in our rent, although when it came to utilities, we did see a marked difference - the bigger apartment was heated with electric baseboard heating and the price to keep it warm was astronomical - several times the heating cost of the small, better insulated city apartment.

Image from The Graphics Fairy

The area where housing costs really seem to show a big disparity is if you are buying a house, which we haven't done anywhere we've lived.  In the areas we've lived in, in the country you can get a lot more house for your dollar than in the city.  That being said, some cities cost half a million just to break into the housing market, while others have houses half that price, and depending on where you look and what you want in a place, the country can often cost nearly what the city costs.  But I would say it's accurate to state that generally, in a set locale, the equivalent house in both the country and the city would show an increase in value in the city.  

In the two cities we've lived in, we've had access to public transit and not kept a car for that reason.  In the small town we lived in we didn't have a car either, and found it a challenge.  In the tiny village where we live now we have always had a car and frankly would have trouble surviving without one. 

I've heard people say that the cost of yearly public transit is close to the cost of maintaining a car but I can't possibly see how that could be true.  Once you factor in maintenance, gas, insurance, and any sort of upgrades, even if you do a lot of this yourself, it is significantly more to own a vehicle.  I took the opportunity to look up the prices of a year's worth of monthly unlimited ride passes in three Canadian cities.  Here you go:

In Toronto, Canada's largest city, an adult could have a monthly pass for $151.15.  The total for the year would be $1813.80.  

In Vancouver, the cost is $177.00 a month, or $2124.00 a year.

In Ottawa, $116.50 will get you unlimited monthly fares, or $1398.00 a year.

This is just the most expensive, regular adult fare.  If you qualified for any other sort of discount - low income, senior, student, etc., then obviously your fare would be lower.  At least one of the cities also offered a discount in the monthly pass fare if you bought the year's worth of passes at one time.  Even in the most expensive of these cities (and these are three sizable Canadian cities, with populations of 2.93 million, 675,218, and 994,837 respectively), the cost of keeping a vehicle would drastically outweigh the cost of a year's worth of unlimited rides.  This is true right up through getting multiple unlimited ride passes, at least for us it would be.  Gas where we live is a lot more than in Southern Canadian cities, and our grocery store is a 90 minute round trip away.  If we travelled into the city 2.5 times in a week, we would need to refill the car, and at our local gas prices, that would be half the price of that monthly bus pass right there.

Now in terms of food and household supplies, I've found the price differences to be a mixed bag.  When we lived out on the East coast of Canada, the cost of 4L of milk was close to $8.  Here in central Canada, the cost of 4L of milk is under $4.  In fact, almost everything was more expensive out there!  I have found when buying stuff that the city is almost universally cheaper than the country and I assume the reason behind this is the simple fact of lower prices with increased competition.  If there is one store, that store costs more.  If there are two stores, suddenly there is a competition for your money.  Multiply that by a hundred and suddenly you have the stores in a city.

I've had people tell me that this sort of understanding wouldn't work for them.  That their work is in the country and therefore living in the city is more expensive, or that the price difference is drastically higher or lower than I have experienced.  Or that 'things have changed over the years' ( I find this one odd, since 1) my experiences spread over many years and 2) my experiences are Still Happening Now.  Not all in long ago reminiscences.).  I understand, not all people have the same experiences.  If you live in South Africa, maybe cities are different.  If you live in Hawaii, maybe houses are different.  If you live in the Yukon, maybe food is different.  Absolutely.  In MY experience, though, the arguments for urban/rural living from an economic perspective have been skewed; cities are often just as inexpensive, and very frequently MORE inexpensive in almost all categories, than rural living.

As long as you don't buy a house.  :-)