We have had a good week here! (She has been often reciting her three passages from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. When we are walking through town, or just whenever we think about it!)
You already saw that on Monday, we ended up getting called to work at the library.
On Tuesday, we got to spend a good chunk of time at our outdoor playgroup, and it was great fun.
Fina is in purple. This is our favourite sledding hill in town.
Here she is climbing a bush with her friend.
Then, we got a tonne of snow. Wednesday and Thursday saw treacherous driving conditions. School for kids was cancelled on Thursday.
On Wednesday, we had our friends E and A visit us for the day. It was lovely. A is only 3 and Fina has a fair bit of work to do with the be a better sharer with a 3 year old. She does ok (mainly) with more similar aged friends, but she was expecting little A to give her turns. Seriously!?!?
Cutest (and very deep down) snow angel ever.
Skiing on a sled.
Our neighbour buried her in the snow up to her waist (sitting, obviously).
Then we had some impromptu friends over to give their mom a hand while taking a University exam. K and C were here all evening and they all had a lot of fun together.
On Thursday, it was still snowing and visibility wasn't great, so dad stayed home to do some marking. Fina played outside for a long while, as our parking lot snow pile grew and grew.
Out came the balaclava, for the first real time this winter.
Her and I went for a walk to check out our creek (still not frozen. The minus double digits that we have now should help that process along!) and had a nice picnic of hot chocolate and mandarins. No pics available. It feels like we are living in a Christmas card scene. The snow was just everywhere. The evergreens are covered. It is just lovely.
This pic will give you a bit of perspective of the size of our parking lot snow pile. Great fun to be had there, until they care it away (which, I'm assuming, will be soon!)
On Friday, Fina played outside again for a long time, mainly on her own (as her good friend K who lives across the street was busy and couldn't come join her. The two of them have such fun times playing together in the snow in our yard! One day, I would love to record even just the audio of their imaginative play times. They often end up creating this whole Narnian universe, where princess are becoming queens, etc. Just incredible!).
As the sun was setting around 3:50 (the sun is set at 4:30 right now in this part of the world) we had this lovely vista.
The spot on the right is the setting sun. The bright spot on the left is a sundog. I didn't get a pic of the sundog to the right of the sun, because it was a blocked view, blocked by houses and trees.
My pics do not do it justice. For those of you non-Manitobans, here is a definition of sun dogs. I had never seen ones like this, though. You could actually see the who rainbow in each sun dog. It was incredible. I'm sorry my pic doesn't show the spectrum of colours at all.
On Thursday, December 17, we started the "O Antiphons" section of the Jesse tree. It is so incredible. The O Antiphons are 7 antiphons from the Magnificat. They conclude advent. They come from the Medieval church.
- December 17: O Sapientia (O Wisdom)
- December 18: O Adonai (O Lord)
- December 19: O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse)
- December 20: O Clavis David (O Key of David)
- December 21: O Oriens (O Dayspring)
- December 22: O Rex Gentium (O King of the nations)
- December 23: O Emmanuel (O With Us is God)
The advent hymn "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" has 7 verses, one verse for each of these. So we have been singing the appropriate verse each day. We also have another hymn called "Maranatha, Lord Messiah" by Kathy Powell that also has the 7 verses, one to match each O Antiphon. Maranatha means "O Lord, Come." It is a lovely hymn, and we have been singing the appropriate verse each day as well. So powerful.
So, that is our week in review. Our next math item is learning to tell time. I'm sure that will provide some interesting blog material!
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