Quieter Days

*First, I have to mention that there is a give-away of Young Scientist science kits over at Ordinary Live Magic (Too!)! The link will take you to the post where you can enter in the comments section. If you haven't ever visited Stephanie's other site, Ordinary Life Magic, you should have a look around. She is an endless source of inspiration and JOY and good stuff in general...*

Our last few days have been close to home - Eliza is slogging through a cold and as the temperatures have dropped even more, it feels cozier to stay put. We have made a raindate for this invitation to dad to join us for lunch uptown:

Ani and I have been looking through the ingredients in her favorite tea and loved to find one of our favorite roadside flowers, chicory, among them! We had to do some drawing...

She and I have been waking a bit earlier than the rest of us, and we've been playing games over our "first" breakfast. They are mostly reading games, using our Quiddler cards, and this morning the game lead to her writing her first note to me. Notice how the first sentence wraps around in a zig-zag? I thought that was pretty interesting...

"Dear Mama, This note is from me. From Anika"

Then we had looks at a little dead spider we found in a corner...
There was an evening with Papa, Jenga, and Katamino...
And yesterday was filled with lots of ginger tea - sort of a tamed-down version of our cold elixir - and laughing, and reading...starting with A Kid's Herb Book story about ginger.

The giggles and faces are over the reading of Gee Whiz - It's all about Pee! We'd read Goodman's The Truth About Poop a year ago while I was prepping for my poop class - this one was just as filled with fascinating and unbelievable facts about pee...you know you want to read it! We've also been listening to more of Cornelia Funke's Dragon Rider and making our way through the pile of library books we gathered earlier in the week.

Eliza took this picture of her sister

Our day was surprisingly derailed by a spontaneous visit from friends. I have a hard time judging what is best for all of us on the fly, and this time I did not manage a wise decision. I have spent the fall protecting our space, our flow, and a lot of that has to do with protecting the relationship between my girls. On this day when they were so delighted with each other I should probably have found a polite way to tell my friend it was not a good time to interrupt our day. But we had no real "plans" and were obviously just home...so I didn't. And we just didn't get that day back. The evening was full of bickering and rudeness, which was not a good way to spend an evening that we have Dan at home for dinner and bedtime. Sigh.

So today we start over again. Lots of reading. More tea. Now some listening and playing and responding to requests and making some food for friends (African groundnut stew - oh man, I think it might be GOOD!)...and so the day goes.


Protecting the "yes" and the peace in our home today. So far, so good....