Bits and Pieces: Second Week of Advent

What a week!

On Sunday, we enjoyed our annual mother-daughter Christmas tea (which you can read about here).

Then I looked ahead at my week (during which my husband would be taking a business trip and my cutie baby turned four months old) and had to prepare my plan of attack to achieve it all:

• conducting the final three days of homeschool before Christmas break, 
• enjoying dinner at a Mexican restaurant with friends to celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, 
• celebrating St. Lucy's day, music lessons, taking the children to a local aquarium, attempting to see the Geminid meteor shower, 
• attending Scottish Country Dance lessons, 
• John's annual Advent football game with buddies, 
• and Daddy taking three of the children to see "It's a Wonderful Life" at a local community theater, 
• while in the background of it all I was finishing all our Christmas gift planning and purchasing,
• attempting to plan a Christmas vacation,
• potty training a two-year-old,
• and hanging on for the ride while Chris and the sellers continue house negotiations.

All of that doesn't count the myriad of activities on Saturday and Sunday next, but I shan't list those here because this post is in lieu of a Seven Quick Takes Friday.

Things I have not done: I haven't hauled down our shelf of Christmas books this season--I just grabbed a handful. I haven't set them up in a beautiful, accessible display. I haven't wrapped each book to open one per day as a gift-of-reading.

I did manage on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe to put out microwave popcorn and fruity snacks on paper plates (simple fare, folks) while I read a Christmas story to my captive audience . . . one of my favorites, and a dark story, "A Christmas Tree for Lydia." It's not properly a children's story (I do skip one paragraph of it when reading aloud), but it makes me cry and we love it.

We're also simultaneously in the midst of reading "The Bird's Christmas Carol"--also a poignant one we read most years--and Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"--which, when I read it, causes me to remember that classics are always vastly worthwhile, even if we had but a scant number of books available and they were classics, instead of scads of pablum. Quality over quantity!

My 11-year-old and I were taking turns reading "A Christmas Carol" to each other one morning, to my 4-year-old's initial protest ("no pictures!"), but then even the little one became hooked. Later, I caught him having convinced his 6-year-old sister to pick up the book and continue reading it to him while I prepared breakfast.

My heart was warmed when Mary dug off the shelf her violinist grandmother's stately copy of "An Encyclopedia of the Violin" by Alberto Bachmann (1925). "Of the many books written about the violin, none offers the breadth and scope of this renowned reference." Mary has declared the book 'wonderful' and has added it to her current tomes.

John (11) disappeared of late and was found curled up reading my dusty old hardback of "Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ."

 Mama scrambled to cook breakfast, so the kids gathered around for a read-aloud by someone else . . .

Margaret (6) decided last week to teach herself cursive from a book, so she's writing cursive notes to all of her family members throughout the day, dashing to hide them for finding or slipping them into our hands as she runs off. I love it! Check that off my to-do list. (Next: teach her when to use upper case letters!)

And two girls are in the midst of writing chapter books of their own accord, and all the kids are entering a drawing contest they read about . . . so I guess education--if not school--does continue even if this teacher is now ON BREAK.