Bits and Pieces of Our Days

My oldest daughter turned 16 last month. Sixteen. As in, "I maybe get to keep her around for a couple more years, but then ...." Yikes. Hey, fellow moms ... all those cliches about the years flying by? They're cliches for a reason.

Betsy made and decorated the birthday cake for her sister, thanks to her newfound skills (a friend of mine taught a cake decorating class for the girls last summer.)

I took Anne and Betsy and two of their best friends out to a fun little coffeehouse for breakfast.  The breakfast plans fell on the same day as our Writing Group, so I said we'd skip the group and head right for the cappuccino. But, much to my delight, none of the girls wanted to cancel it. They took their stories with them and we read them over french toast, coffee and hot chocolate. The only thing lacking in this coffeehouse/writing experience was an appreciative audience snapping their fingers for our compositions. 

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Anne-with-an-e and I are reading Fahrenheit 451. Wow. I haven't read this for years, and when I last did (high school?) it certainly didn't resonate with me the way it did this week. I could be heard repeatedly exclaiming, "Wow! Atticus. You've got to read this ... Wow! Listen to this ...." (I get a little predictable when I'm engrossed in a book.)

Of course the book deserves its own post and when I write it, I'll try not to quote so much of it that I violate any copyright laws.

The next bit of prophetic brilliance I want to read with Anne is Brave New World.

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Both of my older girls are thoroughly enjoying a video history course we're doing from The Teaching Company.   We will definitely be using more of their stuff.

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My SuperMom friend, previously mentioned here, has been keeping our 4-h group busy with a tie-dye apron project (though we all cheated and didn't tie anything -- we sprayed the dye on, so I guess it would be a spray-dye project, which lacks the rhyming quality but produced cute results), and a food packaging session at Kids Against Hunger  and a bread baking class. Even the littlest girls could easily handle the bread recipe -- I'd never done the bread-in-a-bag method before (similar to what you'll find at this link), but it was fun and totally my kind of clean up.

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If I were doing a meme that asked, "When was the last time you cried?" I'd have to answer, "Yesterday when I read a letter from my friend, Heather, who wrote to me about her reaction to my Rosary book."  Thank you, Heather, and a return letter to you will be on its way soon.

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