Happy New Year!

I know I promised to blog math, but I'm sure you can hold on a little while longer . . . I wanted to pause for a moment and savor several things today in no particular order.

Pamela finished a finger-knitted scarf for Baby Alive today. She also celebrated the Chinese New Year by collecting twelve animals to represent each year. She must have been planning this for at least a week. Last Saturday, we went to Michael's to pick up yarn for me. She asked to buy a small animal toy, and we thought nothing of it. Today, we know why. Pamela was missing the tiger in her Chinese calendar menagerie. She knows what year is associated with what animal, of course, and the three animals linked to leap years and the nine for common years. Pamela never stops amazing us.


Pamela drew this cute little elephant on a thank-you note for someone. How can that not make you smile?

Reading books together has yielded some sweet moments. When reading about aristocrats in our book on the presidents, Pamela thought of the Disney movie The Aristocats, which she just happened to purchase on our shopping trip last Saturday. We talked about how they were a rich cat family, and aristocrats are what she called "rich people families." While reading about the laying of the transatlantic cable, Pamela was trying to recall what it was for and said, "Television? No, that's silly." I smiled at how she caught herself in her own howler and corrected herself, a sign of more thoughtful speech.

Pamela's ability to infer is getting better and better. When asked what a thingamajig was in the poem Manual System by Carl Sandburg she answered, "Telephone." After finishing Choose, I made a fist and asked what this meant--her reply was "angry"--and then I made an open palm and asked what it meant--her reply was "happy."

Finally, I think I found a craft group for Pamela. My church just started a ministry of making items to donate to good causes in the area: lap blankets for shut-ins and folks in the nursing home or tote bags and useful things for the local children's home. While the ladies were busy making a tied-lap quilt, Pamela and I worked our way through several tasks. First, she finished finger-knitting the scarf. Then, she cut out pieces of felt for a strawberry needle book she is making. She sewed the leaves onto the strawberry and might be able to finish it when the craft group meets again. Then, we shifted back to starting a new scarf for another baby of hers (she has four now). For now, we are going to do our crafts in parallel. At some point, I hope to scaffold her into helping with the projects.