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!