Jan tries baking bread for the first time. Angela gave Jan a ceramic bread cloche (bread oven) for Christmas, and he finally has some time to try it out. It’s amazing! It looks just like, you know, actual bread. He eats nearly half the small loaf right away for lunch. He bakes a second loaf for dinner, and we all have grilled cheese sandwiches on fresh bread, and the girls love them.
Sabriya is going to be ready to start kindergarten in the fall. We’re counting on Anya and Liya’s school having a spot for her, and are fairly far along the admission process. Today’s the next step: a “visit day”. Bree spends the morning at her big sisters’ school. It’s a bit of a shock to see her and a bunch of other five year-olds milling around outside the school. When the morning is over, she says she had a pretty fun time.
Even bread constitutes a lesson opportunity. Jan bakes another loaf of bread as a side dish for dinner, and the girls, who have decided they like the crusty bread, end up arguing over who gets the crusty heel of the bread. Jan proposes baking little baguettes next time so there will be more crust. “How can it be”, he wonders aloud, “that you can get more crust just by changing the shape of the bread?”
Anya leaps in. “It’s easiest to see what happens if you first imagine you have a loaf of bread shaped like a cube.” (She sounds just like a physicist stating an abstract problem: Suppose you have a frictionless roller coaster ridden by a spherical person…)
She continues: “If you cut the cube in half, you’ll clearly reveal a lot more surface. If you then stack the cube halves on top of each other, you cover up a small amount of surface — but less than you created with the cut. You can cut the bread again. Each time you cut, you add more surface than you take away. So the long, thin bread ends up with more crust.”
Whoa.
Something’s clicked inside Bree’s head: in the last few days, she’s jumped from “reading” a book from memory, or sounding out a word or two to reading some complete sentences.
Today she asks Jan if they can have some “reading time”, but when Jan asks what book he should read to her, Bree says that she is going to read to him. She pulls out “Go Dog Go”, by P.D. Eastman, and jumps right in. Some of what she’s saying is from memory, and she’s stumped by some of the pages, but she seems to genuinely read much of the text directly off the page. It’s delightful to watch this development unfold, almost right before our eyes.
Happy Birthday, Angela! For her birthday, she wants a family ski day, so we all go skiing at Crystal Mountain. It’s unseasonably warm for mid-February, with no new snow, but the weather is clear and beautiful. We get a nice view of Mount Rainier from the top.
Drive to Big White, BC. We head north for our quasi-annual ski week in the cold, isolated, but nicely powdery ski resort of Big White. It’s a nice day for a long drive, and the two mountain passes we have to cross are actually sunny and dry for a change. And the audio book we’re listening to (“Under Wildwood”) keeps everyone fairly civil during the long drive.
The photo shows us making our traditional rest stop in the town of Merritt, BC. Last year we wrote a little song about this town, which included the words: “This town is boring. This town is dusty. It has lots of wood.” It does indeed have lots of wood.
Bree says goodbye to Lambie before she heads off for a day of ski lessons. This is her third year skiing, and she loves it.
After her lesson, Jan skis several runs with her, and she happily shows him a nice run through the trees she had discovered with her class.
Angela and Liya at the top of Big White. This is the land of the “snow ghosts” (trees completely encased in snow).
The weather alternates between sunny and cloudy — and, by cloudy, we mean the top of the mountain is actually in the clouds. In the afternoon, Liya and Jan are doing a run through a glade and hit a complete white-out; we can’t see anything. Jan ends up launching off a snow-covered rock (6 feet high? 8 feet?) and lands ungracefully but fine. Liya manages to pull up in time to avoid going over the edge, and finds another way down.
Liya tries snowboarding for the first time. Some of her classmates tried snowboarding instead of skiing during Winterim, and when Angela suggests Liya might want to give it a try, Liya’s up for it. Most people take two or three days to get the hang of the sport, so we’re hoping she doesn’t get discouraged and give up.
We sign her up for two half-day lessons. She does very well in the first lesson, and then spends the afternoon with Jan on the bunny hill. She’s already practiced some heel-side edging, so Jan has her try some toe-side edging. At one point while trying this, she switches from heel-side to toe-side. Jan says, “Hey, you just made a nice turn!” This is a critical “A-ha!” moment for Liya. Now that Liya knows what she’s trying for, things quickly click for her, and she begins linking turns down the slope.
Jan compliments Liya on getting the hang of snowboarding so quickly. Liya cheerfully responds, “It’s because I’m awesome.”
Liya pushes Bree to ski school. This morning, Bree’s excited that her big sister Liya is also going to be taking lessons: Liya’s signed up for a half-day snowboarding lesson. It’s Liya’s first time trying a snowboard.
Sabriya walks through the small village at the base of Big White Ski Resort following a half-day ski lesson and lunch. She skis with Angela in the afternoon, tackling a long run off the Ridge Rocket chairlift.
Liya’s second day of snowboarding goes as well as her first. She does another half-day lesson, and then Jan takes her on some long green runs in the afternoon. Jan’s happy to have a new snowboarding buddy.
Anya and her friends Kaila (pictured) and Jane discover the Sundance lodge’s upgraded game room, complete with new pool table. The girls play pool right up till bedtime.
Partial family photo. Anya was skiing with the family of her friend Jane when we took this. (The groupings of kids skiing together were so fluid that, for four days, we never managed to get all five of us down a run at the same time.)
A long drive home. The weather reports for the two mountain passes on the shortest route home indicate heavy snow, so we opt for the longer, but less stressful, drive. This takes us all the way down the Okanagan Valley from Kelowna to Wenatchee. We’ve been to Eastern Washington before, but never made this particular drive, and it’s quite beautiful. Long, though — it adds an extra 1½ hours to an already long drive. We have to stop for dinner after coming across Stevens Pass, but have the good luck to find a Mongolian barbecue place we’re all happy with.