Snow, snow, snow

I just spent an hour slipping and sliding home on my evening walk. (Every night, M puts the kids to bed while I go for a walk by myself. It is the key to my sanity.) Tonight it started snowing quite heavily while I was out. I stopped by the grocery store to pick up a few things and was very focused on staying upright so I would not break the jar of pickles I had in my bag. Next time, I'm going to bring a pair of yaktrax! 

Laurel is really enjoying getting to read and respond to the introductions on her BW book club board. She was also highly motivated to sit down and start reading The People Could Fly (tearing her away from Rick Riordan books is a bit of a challenge these days). She also dressed up and put on jewelry for poetry teatime. Every Tuesday, we are eating a treat, lighting candles and reading poetry. 

Marko whined his way through all of his school work but he did get it done. We read a little bit about Chinese new year and then looked at the globe while paging through the How People Live book section on the different ethnic groups of East and North Asia. He picked up his Duolingo mandarin practice again for the first time in a while.

Max took his first zoom class and talked about the sense of hearing and made a telephone out of two paper cups and a string, and a flute out of straws. The hardest part for him was waiting for the class to start. Today Max remembered that there are haiku poems in his Cat Kid Comic Club book and he brought it to share with us at poetry teatime. His decoding skills are improving every day. 

I cooked blueberry almond breakfast cookies, lentil soup with butternut squash, and chocolate mousse made with silken tofu. 

M spends a lot of his day talking on zoom, but this afternoon he had a particularly important meeting that required the type of quiet our children were not able to give him. We made an impromptu trip to my parents' house to go sled riding right before the sun went down. It was cold, but the snow is all fresh and powdery and they had a good time. 

I keep thinking of the Chronicles of Narnia and how the witch came and made an endless winter. The Groundhog saw his shadow so six more weeks of winter for us anyway.