January 29, AO year 1, week 11

We started our day with singing "Home on the Range." I read a tiny bit of our Italian bible. We read about the tower of Babel. We sang through our hymn.

Then I put on some Brahms to listen to as we did some cursive work. Fina wrote Shakespeare.

We worked on her recitation. We tried the memorization box. She recited one poem from A Child's Garden of Verse, one from When We Were Very Young, and one from the Shakespeare divider. Instead of using a post-it flag on the one we are on, I put a blank notecard with a paper clip on the top of it in each section as my "bookmark" for that section. They I put two sections at the front: one for brand new things to learn, and one for reviewing things until they are perfect and then will be moved to their respective section. It worked well.  (For Theseus' and Hippolyta's dialogue, Fina changed her voice to sound first like a man and then like a woman.  So cute!) We read a new poem, from When We Were Very Young, called "Lines and Squares." It was a funny poem.

We read "William Tell." As per the AO Advisory's advice, we used this version of it, rather than the one in Fifty Famous Stories Retold. It was very good. Fina quite enjoyed the apple on the head etc. She narrated it very well.

I read the rest of the passages from Judges: 6:36 - 7:25. She was able to narrate it well enough.  It is the story of Gideon. A little confusing, but she did ok.

We did chapter 7 of our catechism book.

We finished by filling in some of our math gaps. We did 28D, 28E1, 38F and 29B.  Reviewing telling time (she is great at it!) and subtraction.

Now we are going outside to play. It is going to plus 3 this afternoon!!!

January 28, AO yr 1, week 11

On Tuesday, we had our outdoor playgroup. A wonderful success. We are so blessed to be surrounded by like-minded moms. The kids had a great time. We were out for 4 hours.

On Wednesday, we went to the library to work in the afternoon. We did a lot of free reading in the morning and free play time. Halfway through the afternoon, our good friend L came to pick Fina up to play at her house, outside with her kids. It was plus 3 (incredible for January in MB!) and they played for a few hours. I picked her up and we came home and she got to play for another while outside in the dark with her friend K. She was outside for 4 hours. I'm so thankful L was able to help me out. I did not Fina to miss out on such warm weather. They got to build big boulders, though no snowmen. Again, not a common occurrence in MB.

Today, we started our homeschooling day with some cursive writing. We finished reviewing the letters. She is trying very hard to maintain a proper pencil group. It seems better.

The red is mom's writing, reminders of some of the letters. 

She wants to write Shakespeare tomorrow, so we had to learn k and p.

I read the next poem to her from When We Were Very Young, titled "The Four Friends." A cute poem. Fina recited her two poems from this book very well.  I didn't use the memorization box today, but I certainly will.

We sang our folksong "Home on the Range."

She recited all her Shakespeare passages to me. We continued working on the Theseus and Hippolyta passage. She knew the Theseus perfectly and wanted to learn Hippolyta's response to him, so she did. In just a few minutes, she learned the whole response.

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

And there was a Bonus passage, so she learned that too.

Puck Act III, Scene 2, 474-476

Jack shall have Jill;
Naught shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.

This one still needs a bit of work. But in 10 minutes, she learned all these lines. It is just incredible!

That is it for the passages from A Midsummer Night's Dream.  She really has a facility for recitation. I'm excited to see what the future will hold for her. She certainly has artistic leanings.

I read from Judges 6:11-24 and she narrated back to me.

We continued with our math. We did 28B, C, D and E.  We went back to continue with telling time.

I read a short passage from our Italian kids' bible.

It was a shortened school day, but it was a good day for sure.

She got to play outside after her friends came home from school. It is a lovely, sunny day here!

A Memorization box!

Fina has been memorizing a bunch of poetry and a few passages from Shakespeare plays.  I was trying to figure out how to keep track of what she knew, so that I'd be able to have her review them regularly. While we were only memorizing from A Child's Garden of Verses, I was using bookmarks to keep track of the poems she had memorized, so I could find them easily. With Shakespeare, I had printed out the passages she learned and kept them with my clipboard for easy access. Now we have moved on to our second book of poetry, A.A. Milne's When We Were Very Young.  How to keep track of those, while still referring back to the first poetry book? Now that Fina has memorized more items, it has become apparent to me that I need a better system.

Brandy's (from afterthoughtsblog.net) blog post about memorization popped into my inbox just at the right time!  (I definitely enjoy Brandy's blog postings. She is a CM mom and she has great ideas about a lot of stuff!)

She used to use a memory binder system, but it was becoming too unruly for her. So she moved to a memorization box system.  There are many versions of this neat idea, of a memorization box, but basically you use recipe cards and a recipe card box. And dividers. And you do a memorization box.

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On a side note: 

I had actually already seen this concept a while back from SimplyCharlotteMason as a Scripture Memory System.  SCM has you set up the dividers like this, just for bible verses:

Daily, Odd, Even, Days of the week, numbered 1-31

It seemed a little complicated for me, though I get the point. You start your first verse in daily. Once it is learned, you put it to the odd and others to the even. Once they are really good (by doing them every other day on odd days), you spread them out to Sunday-Saturday. Then you spread them out to the numbered days. Within a few months, you could do this, for example today (Wednesday, January 27). You read the card in your daily tab, one in odd, one in Wednesday, and the one in 27.  This system keeps you reviewing your already memorized verses.

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Brandy has it set up differently. It allows her to incorporate more than just bible verses in the memory box. She sets up her dividers this way: 

Daily, and then categories (songs, poems, scripture, government docs, catechism, Misc., and Christmas).

She does all the daily ones (the ones they are learning) and then one from each category as review of old things. She uses a post-it flag to mark her spot in each category. As the daily things are learned, each one gets moved to the back of the appropriate divider.

(Brandy used to do the following dividers: daily, even, odd, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and everything would be randomly mixed in together. Which could work too.)

You could change up your dividers to suit you. I'm thinking one divider for a Child's Garden of Verses poems, so we review them all frequently. One for Shakespeare. One for our new poetry we are working on right now from A.A. Milne's When We Were Very Young. And maybe one for hymns. And one for scripture. And maybe something intermediary between daily and moving it out completely. Maybe odd and even. Just so that the new thing gets a bit more practice. Or calling it this week and reviewing it all week before moving it out?

I'd encourage you to check out afterthoughtsblog.net for ideas of what to memorize as well.  I think I'll start with her scripture verses. I have been wanting to do scripture memorization with Fina, but I'm the type of person that needs a good list to start from, rather than just picking things willy-nilly. I think an Awana list would totally help us!

I'm not sure yet what I'll do with my dividers, but I've started writing out our memorization on cards, and I have a box and dividers ready to go!

January 25, AO year 1, week 11

On Friday afternoon we were listening to Brahms. And being inspired by watercolours at co-op the day before, Fina pulled out the supplies.  "I want to be an artist when I grow up, mamma" she said as she created these watercolour paintings.

"Peaseblossom mountain" (peaseblossom is one of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream)

"3-Dimensional Images" - a wall, a vine, a witch, an apple

She really enjoys painting. I need to provide more opportunity for her to do dry-brush technique for painting something from nature.

On Saturday, we finally got to go cross-country skiing for the first time! We went with our friend K and her mom L. It was beyond incredible. I can not believe how well the girls did. We probably skied about 2 kms and were out for more than two hours. Fina did such a great job. They both loved it and have been asking to go back.

We both had a great time!

Monday morning:

I was doing some maintenance on my blog, changing some labels to be more long-term, like changing artist names to just "picture study" when I had the bright idea to give the search box another go. It seems like blogger fixed something.
I now have a functioning search box!!! Yay, yay, YAY!!!  
😀😃😊😍😍😍👏👌👏💚💙💛💜💗💖✅ 
I'm not all tech savvy, so I don't know what else to write that can express my abundant joy at this now working! (You will have to content yourselves with these emoticons.)

Dear blog followers, PLEASE try to search something in the box and let me know in the comments that it does actually work! (I want to be sure that this isn't just a dream!)

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Monday morning school time:

Fina emptied the dishwasher with me.  We started our school this morning with reading part of the chapter called "The Unknown Land" from Parables from Nature. I read from the modern paraphrase today and it went well. We read about half of it, and we stopped three times for Fina to narrate. She did well with it. We followed the link to hear the warbler's song, which was neat.

We sang our current hymn and Fina recited "The Apostles' Creed."

Recitation: I asked Fina to recite all her poems from A Child's Garden of Verse and she was able to do all of them wonderfully. I think I need to make a memorization box with all of our poems. I had to flip around in iBooks to find the poems she knows. I'm going to write each poem on an index card and put them into a recipe card box, similar to the set up the SimplyCharlotteMason has on their website for scripture memorization. (Updated to add, Brandy just posted this at her blog, it is clearly laid out, http://afterthoughtsblog.net/2016/01/how-we-organize-our-memory-binder-an-update.html) I then asked her to recite "Corner-of-the-Street," the poem she knows from When We Were Very Young. She did that. She also had memorized another poem from there "Happiness" without my quite realizing it, so she asked to recite that as well.  I read a new poem from there, "Puppy and I," to her, and then we listened to Peter Denis' recitation of it on our audiobook.  Then I had her recite her Shakespeare passages to me as well. Which she did very well. We learned lines 5 and 6, the end of Theseus' speech. We will continue next time with Hippolyta's answer to him.

I read another little chunk from our Italian bible. We are still on the story of Noah and the flood. We only spend 5 minutes with it, but she is listening.

We read chapter 9 of Paddle to the Sea and Fina was able to narrate it, well enough. We like to linger over the drawings and pull out the atlas and look at where Paddle is. It is interesting (incredible, really!) how something so small could lead to geography work in the way that it does.

We sang our current folksong, "Home on the Range." Fina actually sang along with me!

We picked up our cursive, after a very long time! She tried very hard to hold her pen properly. We reviewed most of our letters, though we still have 6 or 7 left to review next time. She did a good job with her pencil grip. Understandably, after such a long hiatus, she needed a refresher on the letters.

We went on with our math. She said she was "tired" of doing the clock, so we went on to SUBTRACTION! She did wonderfully with it. We did 29A, C and D. We will go back to the missing pages and the clock stuff next time.

She is doing an episode of yoga while I write this blog post and while I'm preparing lunch.

That is it for our school work today.

She is really on this Hermia and Helena kick with her little friend K. She wants to put on a play of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is long term work for her, prepping costumes, deciding who will do what, making lists of characters, signs with the name of the play, etc etc etc. Fina just LOVES it!

January 22, AO year 1, week 11

Wow, week 11, finally!!!

We started with singing our hymn and the Lord's Prayer.

I read chapter 6 from Our Island Story, "The Last of the Romans." She did an ok job narrating it. Not great, but good enough!

I read two fables "The Frogs who Wished for a King" and "The Oak and the Reeds" from Aesop's Fables.  She narrated both very well.

She recited a bunch of her Shakespeare passages. She recited "Bottom's Dream" very, very well.

We learned the first 4 lines of our next passage, from A Midsummer Night's Dream Act I, Scene 1, starting at line 1.  Theseus speaking to Hippolyta. She learned it very quickly!

Here is the entire passage we will be learning:

THESEUS 

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hourDraws on apace.Four happy days bring inAnother moon.But, O, methinks how slowThis old moon wanes! ... 

HIPPOLYTA 

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;Four nights will quickly dream away the time;And then the moon, like to a silver bowNew bent in heaven, shall behold the nightOf our solemnities.

We are continuing our poetry from A. A. Milne's When We Were Very Young. Fina memorized "Corner-of-the-Street." We reread "Buckingham Palace," "Happiness" and "Christening." The poems are cute. And Fina was able to recite her new one easily.

We read the Noah story from our Italian bible.

We did 28 A and B from our math, telling time with hours and minutes, and writing them as digital time. She is doing really well. It isn't perfect. But she is getting it! So I am pleased.

January 21, co-op meeting #2

We were finally able to have our second co-op meeting. It was a great day!

It is so wonderful to have other moms and kids join in with us. We have a lot to learn from eachother. And I am so happy Fina gets a chance to hear other kids narrate and recite. Without siblings, it is hard. She gets a bit of that "listen to someone else and learn" experience through co-op. And I am so thankful for that.

Fina did a great job with her recitation. She recited Oberon's speech and Puck's speech from A Midsummer Night's Dream. She did a great job with the picture study. She was much less stressed out. And she realizes that she does see a lot and has a lot to share.

more finger knitting

Her narration portions of A Midsummer Night's Dream were very well done as well. I was proud of her. She is able to keep up with the "big boys" and I think it must give her great satisfaction.

She enjoyed the nature study. She did a great job with her dry brush of an oak twig, an oak leaf and an acorn. She was a bit disappointed with her colours, but I will try to give her a chance to try something out again. This needs more practice than what I am currently giving her. She enjoys it. I really ought to do it!

Oak twig, leaf and acorn

We enjoyed a nice time outside as well.

And she ate her applesauce after supper.

Thanks for following our day!

Leading up to January 21

On Monday, Fina spent some time preparing her Shakespeare play of a Midsummer Night's Dream. She has costumes all ready. She wants to be Hermia, her friend K to by Helena, dad to be Lysander and I'm to be Peter Quince. She still needs a Demetrius, a Puck, a Bottom etc. But she is having a hard time convincing any of her other friends to be a part of it! She asked T, and he said "I can be a part of the audience!" She was not impressed. She is thinking of using stuffies for the rest!

Here she is in her Hermia costume.

On Tuesday, we had our outdoor playgroup. The kids had so much fun. It was cold, but sunny and not at all windy down in the creek and in the forest where we were playing. Fina and her little friend S got "lost" for a while, and they were all quite pleased. S's older brother T and his two friends E and N (all in the 8 and under club) got "lost" looking for Fina and S. N said it was "the best day ever!"  So there you go! They wandered all over and climbed up a steep cliff many times, making an avalanche on their way down.

Don't they look like little rodents in a cross-section of snow?

After being out for about 4 hours with the outdoor playgroup, Fina went out to play directly with her friend K. They played from 4-6pm. It was pitch black by then and the girls love playing in the dark, with their fancy Ikea reflective vests.

All in all, Fina had 6 hours of outdoor play. On a day when we hit a high of minus 14 degrees celsius at 4pm (which is certainly warmer than usual for this time of year here!), I'd say that is a personal best for us. For those of you wanting to keep track of our 1000-hours-outside challenge, which we started on November 1, Fina is at 154 hours outside.  For obvious reasons, December, January and February are our slowest months. I'm sure we can reach our goal by the end of October!

All I can say is that she certainly slept well that night!!!

On Wednesday, we had some friends over for a visit. Little A is 3 years old and gives Fina lots of practice at being kind and considerate to little ones (she has some work to do in that area!). They played nicely with their 18-inch dolls and lots of other things.

Fina also got out to play for three hours with her little friend K. They even wandered into K's neighbour's yard. I love living in a small town where a couple of 5 and 6 year olds can play outside for hours!

Fina pulled her all the way to the far end of the park.

Yes, the filled the sled up with snow and then proceeded to pull it up a fairly large hill!

We continue to read the Bible at supper (most nights), and we are moving along in our current free read, The Red Fairy Book. Fina continues to recite her four Shakespeare passages. Soon, we will start the next one.

On Thursday, Fina woke up at 6am (oh my, again!) and after breakfast, she wanted to cut some apples for applesauce. We watched a video on kids with knives from http://kidscookrealfood.com/ together and then I set her to it. (The video is free every once in a while. The promotion is now over, but will come again.) She was ok. Not the ideal conditions I would have chosen to embark upon such a journey, but still.

If you ever want to know anything about technique, take a pic and you'll be able to analyze things a bit better. Not the best knife technique, but still! She did it and no cuts! Applesauce is cooking away in the slow cooker!

January 18, AO year 1, week 10

We started the morning with Fina's request to listen to some Zecchino D'oro, while she planned costumes for Helena and Hermia from A Midsummer Night's Dream. She has gotten it into her head that she wants to put on a play. I'm not sure with whom she plans on doing this: if it is for co-op or just with her friend K. We shall see how that progresses! She is certainly working hard.

We prayed the Lord's Prayer together(-ish). I read a bit from it Italian bible. We sang "Canticle of the Turning" (Gather, 527). We sang the first verse and the refrain. I think we'll stick with this one for a bit. The hope is that she will join in more and more.

She recited her four Shakespeare passages to me. She does an excellent job with that.

Fina did a couple of episodes of her cosmickids.com yoga.

We started reading from When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne. We have this big collection of Winnie the Pooh that includes both story books and both poetry books.  We read the first two poems, "Corner-of-the-Street" and "Buckingham Palace."  We also borrowed the audio book on Overdrive, read by Peter Dennis, and listened to his readings of the two poems as our second read through. Then we looked up a photograph of Buckingham palace and talked about how the Queen lives there.

I read "King Alfred and the Beggar" from Fifty Famous Stories Retold and Fina did an excellent job narrating it to me.

I read the story of the spies to Canaan and the grapes from Numbers 13:1-14:9. She also narrated that well enough.

I thought it was high time to start some folksongs, so I found this version of "Home on the Range" (sung by Gene Autry) and I sang along to it. Fina recognized it because my brother has sung a different, funny version to her. So she enjoyed that. We will stick to this folk song for a little while, I think.

We did our next lesson of math, session 27, just the hours in telling time. We reviewed minutes and she did a great job with that. Next, we will do hours AND minutes.

I read one story from The Red Fairy Book, her current free read. I read "Jack and the Beanstalk." It was great. Right at the start, someone has "fever and ague." We had heard about that in The Little House on the Prairies series, and we looked it up and it is malaria.  And then Fina remembered that in Hudson the sailors got malaria from not eating enough fresh fruits and vegetables. Charlotte Mason would call this the science of relations. I love when these types of connections are made.

We had a great start back in earnest today. I carefully avoided all writing with a utensil today. We need to keep working on that pincer grip and I didn't want to tackle that today, so I wrote down her math for her.

Leading up to January 17

Tuesday January 12

We read one page from our Italian bible for kids. La Bibbia raccontata ai bambini, by Card. Gianfranco Ravasi. This bible has very nice illustrations, and a wonderfully rich Italian. It isn't easy, but it is good quality writing. (I though I'd try to pull out our Italian kids' bible in an effort to be more intentional about doing foreign language studies.)

We also read two stories from The Red Fairy Book. Fina is just continuing to love these stories.

We have our outdoor playgroup today.  You know, it is only a million below, so we are going to try to see how long we can last out there. Some very brisk air will do us good, I'm sure.

A friend of ours told us her husband heard on the radio that they are looking for Nicholas to contact him to do an interview. How funny is that!  So he quickly ran out the door to school to get this done. At least one more Bowie interview for him today.

I'm thinking about looking into the Baltimore Catechism for Fina. Our catechism from church is ok, but I see a lot of Charlotte Mason people have gone back to the Baltimore catechism. That should be interesting. I will look into it in the next little while and use it in addition to our parish catechism.

Wednesday January 13

Our outdoor playgroup went well. It didn't end up feeling quite that cold. It was sunny and the winds were calm, so we did quite well.

On Wednesday, we went to school with dad all day, in order to hear him speak at chapel. Fina spent a lot of time painting. They have an open area with acrylic painting supplies always available. Fina loves it there.

Thursday January 14

We went back to school with dad. Fina and I sat in on his first lecture of the term of his Popular Music course. Fina was very well behaved. She didn't care that much for it. However, when dad went around the room asking the students what their favourite music was, Fina had me answer "The River Lea, by Adele." So there you have it! And she got to paint some more. We rushed home in order to go work at the library for a few hours in the afternoon. Fina had fun, as always.

She just loves signing in books.

She was able to get in a short outdoor play time before supper.  We have continued reading from The Red Fairy Book. She is beginning to recognize the tropes (the prince consults the moon, then the sun, then the wind) which is great!

Friday January 15

We read some more of our Italian bible for kids. We also read a bunch of stories from The Red Fairy Book. Fina also went out to play by herself for an hour this afternoon, with her stroller from when she was little and an umbrella. You know, you do what you've got to do!

We had an ok weekend. We had some I-cannot-stand-still issues in church again. I'm going to tackle that starting Monday.  And we hope to restart our homeschooling a bit more in earnest. We have to finish up week 10!

Leading up to January 11

On Saturday January 9, we spent a few hours playing outside in ridiculously low temperatures! We took Fina's friend K to the forest behind the museum. The girls had lots of fun. My toes and fingers were just frozen. We have been so spoiled this year with a warm winter. We kind of forgot what this feels like.

We have been reading a lot from our free reads, The Red Fairy Book, Paddington and The Chronicles of Narnia. Fina has also been doing a lot of Lego. What fun!

Fina continues to recite her three (plus one bonus) passages from Shakespeare. Incredible. I think she is ready for the next one, which is the final passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream. After this next one, Ken Ludwig moves us into Twelfth Night. Should be fun.

She also drew two things from artforkidshub. She really enjoys that as well.

(Almost) every night, dad reads a chapter or two from the Bible aloud to us after dinner. We finished Genesis and have moved on to Exodus. Fina and I also end each night praying Night Prayer and often Evening Prayer as well from divineoffice.org.  I am really enjoying it.

We keep struggling with Fina's pencil grip. I am going to take the advice of one of my Montessori friends and try having her play with tweezers, playdough, tongs etc to strengthen her pincer grip. I really wish we had dealt with this a long time ago. But I have to be thankful for all the things that are going well, and not focus on what is a struggle. I just don't want her to get discouraged or exasperated. "Parents, do not exasperate your children" the Bible says (Ephesians 6:4)!

We had a good Sunday on January 10th, heading into the city for church etc.  We read another two chapters from The Red Fairy Book. The chopping up of humans by trolls etc does not seem to phase Fina in the least. I love it!!! And it is funny, of the first 5 fairy tales we have read, two are from one of the authors of the Norwegian Fairy Tales book we borrowed from our friend. Who would have known!?!

On Monday morning, we woke up to the news that David Bowie had died. (Dad wrote a book about Bowie in 2015. Dad also wrote a book about Morrissey a few years ago.)  Fina's comment, as I told her what had happened: "I'm glad Morrissey didn't die too, because there wouldn't be anyone left for dad to write a book about. Though, wouldn't it be funny if dad wrote a book about Adele?" Oh the innocence and joy of childhood!

Fina spent a good hour playing with our homemade playdough. We made two half batches on Sunday night and two more half batches on Monday morning using this recipe from artfulparent.com (we used the second recipe, the boiling water, no cook one). It is very soft and nice.

This is a pic of the first two batches we made. Then we also made purple and pink.

Fina also wanted to read a few stories from The Red Fairy Book before breakfast, so we did that. She really loves fairy tales. I'm flabbergasted at times.

Then we got very busy following dad's busy day of interviews regarding David Bowie's death.  He gave an excellent radio interview live on Newstalk770 out of Calgary that we listened to. It was quite the experience for Fina and I to hear dad live on the radio (well, on the computer). He had many other interviews, for print media, for radio and even a TV news crew came out from the city to interview him for the 6-o'clock news. All very exciting!

We got the chance to read A Midsummer Night's Dream: For Kids, by that same author of The Tempest that we own, Lois Burdett. We got through ILL. It was equally as cute!

Fina played with a lot of playdough today. Here is to hoping that it will help her with her pencil grip down the road!

It was a fun, but hectic day. We had planned on starting schooling today, but that didn't quite happen, but we are good with that!

Thanks for reading!

Leading up to January 8

On Tuesday January 5, we did "this and that" at home in the morning and then went to our outdoor playgroup in the afternoon.  We were a small group, but we had so much fun. We went down on to the creek and the kids found a bicycle half frozen into the creek and they spent probably an hour trying to chip it out. Our friend T was able to make quite a hole in the ice. They all used long sticks to try to measure how deep the water was and it was just wonderful.

On Wednesday morning, as Fina was colouring my nails with pencil crayon in her newly built nail salon (!), she learned Bottom's Dream from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act IV, Scene 1, lines 214-26.

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.… The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom.

Aside from her bad attitude (I fear this will be a trope throughout the life of my blog, and hopefully not through Fina's actual life, though we will continue to work on it), she was able to recite the whole thing in less than ten minutes. I can not recite it. She certainly can! Nonna would say B-R-A-T!!!

Today is the actual feast of the Ephiphany, though the Canadian church celebrated it on Sunday, and the wise men made their way to our little nativity set.

Later on (after public school let out), she had a lovely indoor and outdoor playtime with her good friend K across the street, and was even invited in for dinner with them. My little girl is growing up. They had a wonderful time! Here they are playing outside with K's little sister C.  I can't say how important these friendships forged in our little town are to us.

On Thursday, January 7, we did our christmas catechism. Chapter 6 is about God sending Jesus to us and about the Holy Family. We also did the art section on p 218. We also did the Christmas section in the liturgical year part of our book, p 157-160.
She cuddled in bed with dad for a long while, reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and also from A Bear Called Paddington.

Fina and I got out for (nearly) three hours. We had lunch up on the top of a snow hill and then wandered around town and stopped and played in various spots. She again worked on a never-ending igloo.

When we came in, she did a whole bunch of Lego.

On Friday, we read the entire The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin. What a great story. It is from our free-read list.  Fina asked to read something from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, so we read "How the Leopard got his Spots" and I had Fina narrate it. It is from week 12, but since she asked, we read it.

We also read the first two fairy tales from The Red Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang. This is also from our free-read list.  Fina loves the fairy tales from his The Blue Fairy Book that is scheduled in our readings, and has so much enjoyed the Fairy Tales from Norway that I thought I should give her more fairy tales.

It was a stay-indoors-and-read type of day. Fina also had some Lego going on and off all day.

Leading up to Monday January 4, 2016!

We have been playing lots of Ludo with our 4-1 game board from Ikea. Fina has won every single Ludo game she has played. It is kind of freaky!!!

On the 31st, we had a calm day at home. She kept saying to everyone (in person, or on Facetime with extended family) "see you next year!" and having a blast with it.

On January 1, she went outside to play with her good friend K and they were out from about 6 til 8pm. They had so much fun playing outside in the snow in the dark. With sand toys, shovels, digging, singing, etc.

Here she is building a snow castle with her sand toy.

On the 2nd, we went to play in the forest with our good friends. The morning was lovely and sunny, but we went in the afternoon when it was cloudy, but still lovely and not too cold.

Here she is sledding with Acorn the chipmunk (wearing his loom knitted scarf we made last year),

as we waited for our friends to arrive.

On Sunday January 3, we finally got to go out for sushi after church. Fina has been begging for a long time to go for sushi.  One of our favourite places in Winnipeg is SushiJet, they have an all-you-can-eat type of deal, where you order off the menu (not buffet).  Yes, she did actually choke on an avocado roll (actually choke as in that I had to stick my fingers in her mouth and pull out the offending seaweed strip that covers the roll right out of her), but she still had fun!

Oh yes, that is Acorn enjoying some miso soup.

We also swung by our mall to make a return, and Fina got to spend a little bit of a time in front of her favourite huge fireplace with real flames. (It was nice (!) to see the mall still had their Christmas decorations up - though they started with them in November - in this seemingly take-everything-down-on-January-1st protestant world. Christmas isn't over yet, people! It is funny how Christmas has taken over advent and then people just give up.)

On Monday January 4, we headed out to the forest with our friends J and J. It was a beautiful, sunny day. Fina's disposition was less than sunny (!), but still it was a lovely time out.

On our way, we stopped at our town's nativity scene. Fina loves it.

Then, after her first day back to school after the Christmas break, we had our friend K over for a "party" that she and Fina planned out. There was lots of dancing, fancy costumes, a fancy dinner menu planned out by Fina and lots of fun to be had. Then we went out in the 50km winds and got in some more outdoor play time, in the dark, with their matching reflective vests.