let's meet at the pool!

 

Jean's "I am really happy and listening to everything although I look bored and unhappy" pose.

 

See - raising my child in a bubble. 

I just do not think they will be dancers one day, look at that Mr Bean pose!

Sharing Sorbet

My kids never drink soda - they shared this tiny can and did not finish it.  They really do not like it.  Martinus did like the icing on the birthday cake.

It is almost summer in Texas, soon we will spend all our afternoons the way we did today, because there is really very little else you can do when it is 100 degrees outside.  At the moment we are enjoying perfect days.  Just as I thought that we were in for the long haul and that everything outside will die, soon, we had a week of rainy days, with some more in the forecasts for next week. The average day temperatures have been around 80 degrees (26 in Celsius), and it cools down at night to around 65 (18) degrees.

It still feels wrong that the year winds down in May.  PSIA state meet is over (Melva won fourth place in Music Memory), and math team try-outs are behind us too (she made math team).   The choir performances are coming up this week, and if Jean did not accidentally break our piano teacher's husband's favorite lamp, the piano recital would have been this week too. 

I had a feeling from the beginning that she was a bit highly strung for the likes of us, but she really overreacted and although she apologized afterwards, I opted to pay for the damage and resume our quest for a piano teacher.  We need one who can teach a squirmy girl and a very near sighted boy, both with strong opinions and no ambition to become pianists.  And we want them to be serious about it. I think I am starting to see why we have not yet found that perfect person...

I still have energy, while I see my friends slipping into the vacation mood the way we do in November in the Southern Hemisphere.  But with the end of the school year, I am hoping that everyone will adjust their pace of living to what we maintain for most of the year, and I cannot wait to spend more time with friends, just visiting.  I am also making plans - I want to teach knitting to the older girls, I want to build a doorway puppet theater and perform some plays with the bigger kids for the smaller ones, I want to sew bags for every activity that we have planned for next semester... If I manage to do just one, I will be happy.


In the mean time, I have been knitting a rabbit. Melva said we should not embroider facial features, apart from the eyes, then it can be a Waldorf bunny.  You can pretend that it is either happy or sad.  I laughed, but I guess it is true.  It looks a bit cross in this picture, and if I knit a bunny again I will first sew on its limbs before I finish the face, it kept looking at me while I was pushing the needle though its torso.  This little one was a present to the girl whose birthday party was today, and I think she really liked it.  I started looking for bunny patterns the moment I we finished  "The Velveteen Rabbit", about two weeks ago. I will now cast on to knit the boys some bunnies too.  Jean wants a blue one.

Melva knit her own bunny, with yarn she dyed after researching online (she followed Elizabeth from Keep on Spinning's tutorial)

Amazing.  She did it all by herself. While working on it, reading the tutorial, she called to me: " Hey Mom, this is L's friend, the one who once sent her a package." (in Afrikaans, but I translated)  This online community is in many ways very real, and the people I "meet" have are such a positive influence in my life.  Because really, she did not do it without any help.  Elizabeth taught her.

Have a good week, dear friends and family!