Sabriya is the Solution Fairy. When she’s dressed like this, you can pose problems to her, and she will propose solutions.
It’s a sunny day, and Spring is in the air. Jan takes Liya, Bree, and Bree’s friend Nora (who lives a few houses down the street) to the park. It’s still a bit cold, but they happily play on the slides and swings regardless.
Jan, Anya, and Liya go skiing at Stevens Pass with visiting friend Sarah and her daughter Ruthie. There’s a lot of snow—and it snows more all day long! Sarah and Ruthie stick mostly to green runs. Jan and the girls try the back side of the mountain, which has great snow, but is too foggy to see well. We finish the afternoon just playing around in the powder.
It’s a rainy day for a visit to Seattle, so we take our visiting friends Sarah and Ruthie to Redmond Town Center for lunch and some indoor rock climbing at REI. Anya, Liya, and Ruthie all take turns climbing the indoor pinnacle. Anya’s taking a climbing class right now, and gets pretty far up a challenging route.
Anya’s class wraps up their Greek mythology unit by giving a performance of myth skits. Anya’s group performs the myth of the Sphinx. An announcer cheerfully announces that Anya Miksovsky will be playing the parts of “a woman who gets eaten” and also “the hero’s mother”. In the latter role, she gets laughs by offering to retrieve the departing hero’s binky pacifier for him.
Anya and Liya’s school does their big Spring Concert.
Liya’s front tooth has been loose for days, enough so that she disgusts adults by twisting it around 180 degrees. While eating a mango, the tooth finally came out!
Curling! At last year’s school auction, we “bought in” to the opportunity to go curling as part of a group at Seattle’s own Granite Curling Club. The activity’s apparently got enough of a following that it took a full year of waiting for our group to get a coveted Saturday evening time on the ice. The curling club lent us rubbery shoe covers, brooms, and everything else we needed. We broke up into four-person teams, and instructors led pairs of teams through the basics, leading up to a real game. Unfortunately, Angela’s leg brace wouldn’t allow her to even play the role of sweeper, let alone lunge across the ice. Jan was able to play though, and had a blast. At the end of the evening, awards were handed out, and our teammate Brent won the award for best hat.
Massive impromptu playdate. While Angela and Bree go out for most of the day, Jan stays at home with Anya and Liya. Since the weather’s getting warmer, the two of them want to rig up the rope ladder to our backyard treehouse. As soon as we’ve got the ladder up and last fall’s leaves cleaned out, Anya and Liya want to show the treehouse to Rachel and Audrey, two girls about their age who recently moved in next door. While they’re showing the treehouse to the neighbors, another girl materializes: Georgia, from around the block, who was looking for Rachel and Audrey. Later, when the girls come back inside, Jan notices that Georgia has gotten much taller. Wait, no, that’s Louisa, Georgia’s older sister, who slipped in at some point. The morning stretches into lunch, and Jan serves up six bowls of ramen to the crowd of girls. They spend hours alternating between bouncing on the neighbor’s trampoline, playing in the treehouse, doing Mad Libs, and playing upstairs in the girls’ bedroom.
Sabriya takes Jan to her Montessori preschool for their annual open house evening. She shows Jan her favorite “works”. She’s very happy, but tries hard not to smile for the camera.