Sixties and raining...

...and the spring peepers are peeping. Can you hear the deep humming of gratitude emanating from my house? The girls and I took a flashlight walk tonight, wondering if, after a little rain, we might catch sight of salamanders migrating from the creek down the hill, across the bike path, in search of one of the large vernal ponds that appear in the fields this time of year (they like these vanishing ponds, because there aren't fish to eat their eggs before they hatch!). I think it was not wet enough, though it was certainly our first spring rain, so we might have to try again in the next couple of days. We were beyond thrilled to stop in our tracks partway down the dark hill and be greeted by the distinct sound of the peepers singing their way through the evening.

The rest of the day was spent with this and that - counting by fives, making tally marks, talking about digestion (again - Ani just loves to go through the whole cycle, over and over...), reading new books from the library, including a cool Eyewitness book that shows the insides of a whole bunch of animals, including great white shark, mosquito, octopus and snail. Recommence the discussion of the digestive cycle...(where does the poop come out, mom? She can now read the words "mouth", "stomach" and "anus". Reading just comes in soooo handy, doesn't it?!)

We checked on the miscellaneous things growing in our kitchen - potato? Doing great. Avocado? Hm, nothing happening. After a little research on the WWW, we tried gently pulling off the skin. We'll see what happens.

Shelling peas - it was more fun to shell them than eat them apparently, but we found a few that had begun to sprout, so we put them in a jar to let them sprout further before we eat them.

Such satisfying work this was - the girls could have done this for a couple of hours. We had Prince Caspian on, read by Lynn Redgrave, which was captivating.

On to Jenga, which quickly became building, and you can see my mess of sewing stuff in the back there...

...and E worked on a mosaic kit she got from Gramma D for Christmas. She decided to make her own design (surprise, surprise!) and worked on this for quite a long while. Still listening to Prince Caspian.

It is another night without Papa, who is doing the hard work of writing papers for the end of the quarter, so it ended a bit later than usual, as we all found ourselves, post-peeper-walk, at the kitchen table (again), writing. I couldn't put a stop to that for something as trivial as bedtime, could I? Eliza has completed two pages of...the eighth book of Harry Potter.

You thought it was over, didn't you??? She is totally frustrated, not being able to read this series by herself yet (she works on it all the time), and while waiting for us to get and read book #3, she decided to get busy and write one herself. I am so impressed with her writing - the spelling is funky, but it is legible, very neatly written, and she is very interested in punctuation, and I'd say her average sentence length is 9 words. And what's more, Anika of course wants to do everything her sister is doing, so she, without hesitation, sat down, half-pajama-ed, and wrote, "I doo not wont met too et. Doo not git lost in the woods." (I do not want meat to eat. Do not get lost in the woods.) I don't quite know where that is going, but she was in giggles over it, and she did it all by herself.

I am giving myself another evening of listening to This American Life, while creating...something. I'm seeing oodles of family members next week at a family wedding in Oregon (I CANNOT WAIT!!!!), and it's my sister's birthday to boot, so there has to be some creation making to take along...