Liya’s homework is to use rods of rolled newspaper to construct a 3D shape big enough for her to fit inside. After some discussion with Jan, she decides to create an approximation of a three-sided radio tower. The homework instructions indicate that Jan has to limit his assistance to rolling up the newspaper rods (winding pages around plastic straws, then taping them), so Liya does all the taping together of the rods on her own. When finished, it’s very light and reasonably strong, which is good — the easiest way for Liya to get inside it is for Jan to lift it over her head and lower it down!
Angela takes Bree sledding up at Snoqualmie with Bree’s best friend, Lillian, and Lillian’s dad Jonathan.
We’re going to try cello lessons for Bree. Angela and Bree pick out a teeny tiny cello at an instrumental rental store. Bree enjoys playing with it — so far, so good.
Bree’s doing an after-school girls singing group this season, and Jan takes her for “watching day”. Bree enjoys the singing, and also has fun playing a bit on a xylophone.
Anya is an irrepressible engineer. While we’re eating lunch today at Essential Bakery, the girls are playing with some of the bakery’s business cards. We eventually try forming them into shapes that can be blown across the table, sort of like little sailboats. Jan notices that Anya has been able to make a bigger sailboat by sticking two business cards together.
Jan: “How did you get them to stick together?”
Anya: “Cheese.”
When we get home, Jan and Anya construct a small flotilla of more elaborate sailboats, some of which glide across a table quite nicely.
It occurs to Jan that he’s sung a bedtime song to at least one of the girls nearly every night for the past decade. He started sometime around when Anya was 5 months old, or about 10 years ago. Since then he’s sung to Anya, Liya, and Bree. Pretty much the only nights when he doesn’t sing a lullaby are date nights and the rare times when he’s traveling.
His repertoire’s not particularly big (maybe 20 songs?), but the girls don’t seem to mind. Anya’s favorite bedtime song used to be, “I’ve been Working on the Railroad”. Liya liked, “Home on the Range”. Bree’s hasn’t had just one favorite; it changes every 4-6 months. These days she has “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in heavy rotation. Bree has somehow finagled things so she gets TWO songs, instead of just the one her sisters got.
Anya and Liya stopped asking for bedtime songs when they were five or so. Bree will turn five this July, so Jan’s trying to enjoy this while it lasts.
Liya’s 3rd grade class wraps up their unit on Greek myths by writing and enacting a series of skits featuring gods, goddesses, and heroes from the myths. Liya plays two parts: a person selling something to a hero at a garage sale, and a woman selling ice cream. She’s selling three flavors: vanilla, vanilla, and vanilla. The hero chooses vanilla.
Jan realizes that he’s now lived in Seattle’s Madison Park neighborhood for over 20 years (15 years in our house)!
At Bree’s cello lesson, her teacher Mikala is teaching her a very basic sequence of four quarter notes. Mikala’s searching for a four syllable word, and Jan suggests, “Pomegranate”. Bree’s happy with this. Eventually this composition expands into the following song (all on the same string):
Pomegranate smoothie
Tastes so good to me
Messy Project
a poem by Anya Miksovsky
So much
Depends
On
The
Recycling bin
When cleaning
Up the
Mess
From making
Paper
Snowflakes.
We go to parent-teacher conferences for Anya and Liya in the morning. It’s fun to hear another side of their school experience – both girls talk about school if we ask, but sometimes interesting accomplishments or milestones are achieved in the classroom that we don’t get to hear at the dinner table. Anya never talks about Spanish, for example, so we’re kind of stunned to see a charming little book she wrote and illustrated for Spanish class. And her science teacher, whose many years of teaching experience make her seem hard to impress, is nonetheless effusive in praising a detailed anatomical diagram Anya made from memory of the human digestive tract that lists 90 different parts. Liya’s teacher, for her part, shows us a beautifully illustrated fantasy story Liya wrote about a girl who keeps both her family and her friends with the help of a magical teleporting plant.