December 11, AO year 1, week 10

We have been playing a lot of Go Fish lately. Fina wanted to make up her own version, whereby instead of fishing for a number, you fish for a suit (hearts, or diamonds or whatever). Well, she realized after one game that that was not as exciting. And we were left with two cards each, with no matching suit (13 cards of each suit). She did not want to play that way again. Deductive reasoning?  Ha!

Yesterday we FINALLY got some good snow and, yes, you guessed it, Fina FINALLY got to do her "tire sur la neige!" She was beyond ecstatic!

Is that a happy face, or what???

For those of you that are interested in the recipe. You get a bowl or tray and let the snow fill it. Pack it down a bit. We keep the bowl outside until we are ready to use it. Inside, bring some maple syrup and a little bit of butter to a very low boil. Allow the syrup to reduce a bit. Then, pour the warm liquid onto the snow in little strips. Get a popsicle stick (or anything like that) and stick it on one end of the strip. Allow the snow to cool the syrup down for a minute or so. Then you roll it up. And voilà, maple taffy! The poor kid has tried three times at least to gather enough snow.

Today, we hope to get out and build some snowmen. The snow was so wonderful yesterday, nice and sticky. That rarely happens here in Manitoba. Fina got to play with some of her friends and they made giant boulders of snow. It packed together so easily. (Sorry, I did not get any photos of their play time.)

Of course, drivers don't like this kind of weather. It is very wet and slushy. I often think that Manitobans would not be able to handle Ontario weather. They would go through the same (well, similar) shock we Ontarians go through coming here!

And, at church, there was a call for kids to take part in a nativity scene for Christmas eve. I told Fina about the email I had received and she right away said that she wants to be in it (I was shocked. She is usually very shy and wary to participate in things like this!). She wants to be either Mary, an angel, or a lion. We have to be prepared to provide our own costume. The kids aren't going to be speaking or anything. They will just be forming the scene as our Pastor incorporates them into his homily. So, they have asked for volunteers and will be picking the children randomly next week. We are going to borrow a lion costume from our friend S, who was a lion for Halloween. We have the Elsa costume that Mrs K made for Fina for last year's Halloween, which would be great for Mary. And we have the large, alternate flower girl dress Fina had for zia Aia's wedding (we had kind of forgotten about that dress. She can wear it for Christmas this year, and as often as she can while she still fits in it) and we are getting a pair of angel wings from some friends here in town. So, she is ready for the three parts. Chances are she won't get any of them. But I was pleased at how willing she was to take part in it!

And dad had our car assessed by the insurance company, and the damage isn't worse than we had feared. It is just the back end of the car that needs repairing and the insurance company even waives our deductible because we were not at fault. So that is all great news! And none of us have lasting physical effects from the collision, so we are so grateful.

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So, today we started with our morning prayer and our advent devotional, including our next Jesse tree ornament. We listened to some Brahms as well.

For those of you asking to see our advent wreath, here it is. We are still on the search for pink tapers to match our purple ones, but for this year, we have used a white candle with pink fabric on it.

We read through the two Aesop Fables for this week. She narrated them well.

We finished reading Hudson. We spent a lot of time with the globe, the map and the atlas, learning to find Hudson Bay, the Hudson Strait and the Hudson River. We also took the opportunity to review the continents. She knows all of their names and their locations too.

We read chapter 8 of Paddle to the Sea and we did some more map work to go along with that. Fina is enjoying that story.

I had her recite all the poems she knows from A Child's Garden of Verses. She recited: Rain, Singing, The Cow, Happy Thought, Time to Rise, Fairy Bread and the first four stanzas of Night and Day.  I read the last two poems to her from the end of the book. We will now be moving on to poetry from When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six from Winnie the Pooh.

Fina then proceeded to recite Oberon's speech from Act 2 Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She basically knows the whole thing. She recited it a bunch of times. She is replacing "throws her enamell'd skin" with "sheds." She feels she knows better than Shakespeare in terms of word choice! "Mom, a snake sheds his skin, he doesn't throw it!"

I actually didn't realize she knew the speech this well.