Why the Name Trivium and the Trivial

When I started this little blog of mine, my number one reason for doing it was to write about all the great homeschool curriculum we use in our "school" and to include what has worked for us or what has been a complete failure and everything in between.  It was to be about school and more school with a bit of trivial things thrown in.  Really how hard could that be?  It seems like our days and weeks are filled with school and everything else is just a nuisance: like laundry, making meals, picking up after the dogs, etc.  I figured if I had anything to say it would be education related and now and then maybe I would write about something non-school related.  To my surprise after a few posts on our "school" I didn't have much left to write and so I began to neglect my blog, not because I had nothing to write about, but because I felt if it wasn't school related it wasn't worth mentioning:  as, alas, it was somehow too trivial to mention.

But after thinking about it the past few months I have decided it is the trivial, no matter how small, that keeps our home education going.  If we weren't able to live frugally, if I couldn't make yummy & healthy but inexpensive meals, if the laundry didn't get done, the dogs weren't looked after and numerous other trifling things, my children's education would be negatively affected.  As stated in my blog's name our homeschool philosophy is loosely based on the Trivium.  This is a rigorous style of education and if I couldn't keep the household running smoothly and if the trivial aspects of our lives fell apart, the education of our children, both spiritual and scholarly, would suffer.

And so I am not only going to write about how we educate our kids, but I will include the trivial along with everything else and beyond.  I am going to post about the laundry, the trivial aspects of saving money at the grocery store, the trivialities of decorating a home and anything else that comes to mind; because if I neglected to take care of these small items, our children, along with their education, would suffer.

Now as I look back I can see I picked a wonderful name for my blog - The Trivium and the Trivial:  A Classical Education and Beyond - and that is what this blog is about.