Yesterday the girls and I were playing a new game that A10 had just learnt. B6 was invited to play but declined. He did hover around as we played, however, as he didn’t want to go off by himself. Instead he spent his time shooting small plastic dogs with his machine gun(toy hockey stick). Then he moved on to blowing up vehicles with another weapon(again his versatile toy hockey stick).

I remember watching him play cars years ago. Now we had toy cars long before he came along. A10 enjoyed playing with cars when she was younger, she even had her own hot wheels track. I was watching him play when we had visited friends with three boys. B3 was playing cars with another three year old and I realized that the main point of the game was crashing the cars at high speed. As I said there had been car play at our house before this, but it had involved racing, driving, making towns, roads, garages and parking lots, never crashing!

The other day B6 made a cardboard snow board after watching a short clip about the US snowboard team for the last winter olympics. He launched his cardboard snow board off the kitchen chairs. Then he disappeared for a while only to return and tell me that his snowboard worked really well going down the bottom rail of the stairs to the basement. He told me he wouldn’t do it again even before I told him he wouldn’t do it again.

A month or so ago we were doing a reptiles and amphibians unit with a couple of other families. I was teaching the reptiles part and we divided the group into boys and girls for convenience. I had the same material for both groups but it was only the boys group who wanted to see every single picture of the crocodiles devouring their prey. So you see it is B6 that Andrew thought of when he found a National Geographic video about what bullfrogs eat.

There is a new house on our block, in our living room to be precise. A10 is the proud owner. As we are listening to Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright at present the new house has been named the Villa Caprice. The house is not totally furnished yet, but the kitchen is looking cosy.

And there is a comfortable chair by the window if you would like to sit for a while

Its not every day you get to be a cover girl. We were invited by a friend to be part of this cover shoot for last year’s Lee Valley Christmas catalogue. The location was just outside of Ottawa after one of the last snowstorms in early 2005. A huge Christmas tree was attached to the sleigh and we took a ride into the woods, smiling and freezing. B4 is sitting on my knee and the girls are next to us but obscurred.

It is strange to see it being reused this Christmas on the cover on one of the national lifestyle magazines.

There isn’t much chance of a sleigh-ride this Christmas. The weather has been above zero for much of the last week and there is little snow left. Normally by now the outdoor ice in the park down the road is open for skating. Maybe we’ll have our first Brown Christmas since moving to Canada.

B6 started to get creative with some scissors.

No problem, dad can fix it.

This weekend was what we term not terribly accurately “a free weekend.” There was much to do but it wasn’t rehearsals, classes, meetings scheduled by someone else.

So they raked,
I baked,
I ironed,
he ran errands,
the childrens’ friends came over and they played,
they knitted,
they created,
we read,
I stamped and created,
we worshiped,
we napped,
she quilted,
we ate.