Celebrations

My Valentine.  I'm so lucky to have one who enjoys cooking and putting
together a picnic.   

I spent my birthday this year bringing the kids around to three different birthday parties.  Birthday parties for other kids.  JB was away on a men's retreat for the weekend, so it actually ended up being a great way to pass the time.  One of the parties was just a gathering at the farmer's market, which we enjoy going to anyway, so no pressure there.  Another party was a where-what-you-choose "masquerade ball" and Benjamin had it in his mind that he wanted to make a mask.  Specifically, the fish mask in the middle of the page below from "King Bidgood's in the Bathtub":   

It would have been pretty easy to shift his attention away from this project.  And I don't really do big involved crafting projects.  But why not, really?  It's not so hard to make a papier mache mask, is it?  

I'm actually very glad we took this on.  The kids both had fun with it--especially the painting and decorating part.  I had a loose plan, I let go of perfection (or even a tail that stays on!), and we all had fun.  Ben was delighted after he got over the initial fear of putting the thing on his head.   

Benjamin has also been enjoying making cards and "scenes" for people.  He makes these great little scenes and then says that they are for specific people, puts them in envelopes, and I never see them again.  So I've started taking pictures of them before they disappear.  

Here's the one for the masquerade ball.  It was so much fun to watch him delight in figuring out (more or less) the spelling of words.  The picture at the top is "The Giving Tree," by Shel Silverstein.  He looked at the pictures in the book, counted the falling apples, falling leaves, and the rocks the boy hides between and put just that number in his own picture.  I love it.  

For my birthday I asked for a scene of my very own.  What I think was at first a purple scribble turned into a map of our trip to Caddo lake last week.  On the left is our house.  The road leads around to grandmommy and granddad's house, then to our cabin in the woods, and finally to the canoe we took out on the Cypress swamp, in all of its gloomy glory at the bottom of the picture.  I think all of us people are squished in there in the swamp.