Blue jays, knitting, piano, free reads and more

Fina was sewing some pages together with a felt cover, to make a little booklet) and she sewed the whole thing onto the table cloth. We laughed and laughed as we ripped out the stitches and she started over again!

She has been working hard on some knitting. She wanted this fancy, luxurious velvet yarn and she is really enjoying working on it with some thick knitting needles that we picked up at our local thrift store.

We've got some new snow over here and Fina is quite pleased about that.

We started reading Susan Tan's Cilla Lee-Jenkins: Future Author Extraordinare and are enjoying it so far. It is a funny story about a little girl growing up in a family with a Chinese dad and a Caucasian American mom. The author, having grown up herself in that same kind of family, incorporates many of her own life-stories, as she explained on this episode of the Read-Aloud Revival podcast.

We also started another Edith Nesbit book, Five Children and It. There are already some similarities with The Enchanted Castle. It is a page turner, for sure!

We really are having a fun time with our free reads this term. We just need to find more time in our day to sit down and read!

I don't know why it took me years to come around to this idea. A little basket with our free reads and historical fiction and biography. The rest of our school books are on the shelf. But these are what we pull from when we are just doing some extra reading. Perfect!

For the first part of the term, alongside reading from our poetry anthology year round, we read some poems by William Wordsworth. And in the second part of the term, we are reading some poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I was able to sign out the Coleridge book from the Poetry for Young People series from our provincial education library (if you homeschool in MB and don't know about that library, please ask me! It is a great resource. And if you don't know about that PfYP series, ask me about that too!) We are in the middle of their selection from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." And we are loving it. So much to talk about. Such lovely language. We are really getting into it. We read only 5 or 6 stanzas a day. I knew of that poem, but had never read it. This is a trope with our poetry. What a blessing to be exposed to so many wonderful things through our children. Moms are persons too. And moms also deserve the feast!

There are a couple of blue jays that spend a good part of their day in the crabapple tree behind our house. They keep coming to our tiny window feeder. They are much bigger than our feeder! Along with a dozen chickadees, a handful of white-breasted nuthatches, and some cool reddish thing we've yet to identify. We could sit on our couch for hours and watch them flit back and forth. Last year, we thought the chickadees were afraid of the blue jays, but these ones seem to take turns alighting on our bird feeder.

I hope he doesn't pull our feeder down. We are firmly entrenched in the below-freezing temperature range, and I don't know when I'd next be able to attach those suction cups. They need a warm-ish window to start. Then they will hold for a very long time!

And if anyone can help us identify this little guy with reddish on his back under his wings, that would be great! Zoom in to see some details.

Fina caught this picture of one flying away.

That band of red is on its lower back, usually hidden under its wings.

Please ignore the pyjamas. And the vibrato French. And the poor hand posture! Fina wanted to play it four times in a row with her eyes closed. And she did it! After much practice. We are having wonderful piano lessons right now.

This kid (aka "person") has a real knack of driving me 'round the bend at times. But I love her dearly and am so greatly enjoying the beauty of the everyday. Not all day, I'll be the first to admit. I have constant struggles. But every day. This is Charlotte Mason IRL, my friends.