Happy Friday! I always start off with an ambitious list of things I’m determined to complete while my mom is here in Seattle. Since my mom is the world’s greatest babysitter (Homemade Japanese feasts and treats! Art lessons! Never-ending willingness to play board games and charades!), I feel a certain amount of pressure to get as much work done as possible.
And every time, I don’t even make a dent in my list and throw in the towel mid-week. As far as spring break goes, it’s been mellow and uneventful, and we’ve done a whole lot of nothing. The best kind of vacation.
The one thing I have been doing is staying up way too late reading books. For some reason, I’d taken a hiatus from fiction for many months, but now I’m back at it. I’ve become a little obsessed with Patrick Ness and his YA novels. I just finished The Rest of Us Just Live Here and the first book of the Chaos Walking Trilogy. So good. There’s a generosity of spirit and humor in his writing, even when supernatural beings are wreaking havoc and bloody violence. I also read Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which took me a while to get into, but I ultimately loved it. You really can’t go wrong with Rushdie. As you can see, I’ve got a strong fantasy/sci-fi theme going on. K wants me to write a middle grade/YA novel one day, so I’m calling this recent spate of binge reading research. K recommended this book from her own personal library, and I read it in a day. It left me heaving with sobs and utterly spent emotionally. No wonder I needed to escape to fanciful worlds in which animals talk.
My watercolor bunny up there doesn’t have much to say, however. It’s Easter in a couple of days, and I’ve run out of time to make K an outfit. Ah well, let’s hope that I’ll find my sewing energy once the school routine resumes next week. These are the patterns in my queue at the mo:
Aster Top by Colette Patterns (I have the PDF ready to assemble)
Kelly Anorak by Closet Case Patterns
Have a wonderful weekend, my friends!
Hunting Easter eggs
is not as thrilling for K*
But she’s a good sport
*This year, our neighbor’s tiny tot is joining our annual Easter egg hunt, so the challenge level will skew to the ridiculously easy side. When do kids officially stop wanting to look for candy-filled plastic eggs? It seems like K is pretty over it…
I read “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” many years ago and loved it! Glad to hear that someone else has discovered this amazing book.
I didn’t realize that it was a book he wrote in the 90s, and I especially loved that it was meant as a kid’s book. I thought it was so clever!
Have a wonderful Easter. I love your little watercolor!
Thanks Greta! We had a super fun Easter. Tons of eggs, delicious brunch with family and friends – hope you had a lovely one too :-).
I love JF, but recently read “The Dressmaker of Khair Khana” based on the true story of an Afgan family that starts dressmaking during the Tahliban occupation. Amazing book! Enjoy Easter and your visit with your mom. 🙂
I sent that book to my mother-in-law on a friend’s recommendation and she loved it! I’ll have to check it out too. Thank you, Kristi!
Hide them better. We had Easter Egg hunts well into our teen years with my Dad working hard to outsmart us! Our chocolate bunny way always the worst. He would hide it somewhere impossible(like inside furniture or ceiling tiles!) and give us hints about how close we were. It was a lot of fun and the difficulty level grew with us.
Maybe start having a separate hunt inside with just her first thing in the morning? Or colour code the eggs at the regular one, that way each child is only looking for their colour and they can be hidden accordingly 🙂
Genius!!! I ended up having my husband take care of egg-hiding duty and he did a great job. There were about a dozen kids ranging in age from 1 to 13, so he had to get creative!