Friday, January 25, 2008

happy friday

Last night, we had a friend over for dinner for an assortment of soups, and then sat down at the dining room table for several hours of beeswax manipulation.

This was good colorful fun, and the kids created a produce market, inspired by the image on the box of wax. This is an activity that takes some time, and is more satisfying when the weather's warm, because the wax is more pliable. The wax needs the warmth of your hands to make it pliable, and that can be challenging when it's cold outside, no matter what the furnace and the thermostat say. For some reason, though, I never think to do it in the summer. It's a great thing for cooped-up winter evenings.


Bev is making an abstract, as is Little One. Little considers the wax to be exclusively his own, and was very generous to allow all of us to play with it.

Big One and Joe got interested in making their stuff as realistic as possible, and the results are here. This is a bowl full of carrots, a basket of lemons, and a large yellow thing that I believe is a tangelo. Somewhere there is a bowl of blueberries as well.

Oh yes, I left all of this out on the table last night, thinking that the kids would want to get right into it this morning. I'm always trying to think of ways to get them out of their warm sleepy beds and their rooms full of books. Not easy. I thought the wax would do it.

But this morning, instead of continuing to construct their produce market and their abstract scupltures, they were playing Library.

Big one has set up a library in his room, with sections by genre, and a front desk where he uses his old manual typewriter to make out a list of books you've checked out.

So this is where I found them this morning. They've started to get into a habit of getting dressed in the morning, without being asked, and what mother could possibly find anything amiss in the sight of an older son reading to a younger son?
Not me, anyway... I was happily downstairs, playing my own version of Library, reading this book, which is completely fabulous, by the way. I love Margaret Atwood, and this is an unusual book for her. They are miniatures, according to the fragment of the review from the Toronto Globe and Mail on the back of the book, and they are stunning. Hilarious, absurd, sarcastic, cynical. And the writing, of course, is breathtaking.

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