Homeschool

 Here is Violet's first semi-official school photo.

Off and on for the last 5 days, she's been attending Homeschool, with Miss Cora as her teacher.

This was all Cora's idea; she set up a school one afternoon in the hallway, and David and Chris came over to help. Later, Cora moved her school into the playroom. She set up two desks (AKA the cardboard houses for Safari and Muffin) and a reading area, and put up a calendar and number chart.

Violet took right to this, and has been a very willing pupil.

 Cora taught Violet about the seasons, in a very scholarly manner: "Violet, what comes first? Winter, or summer?"

 Cora also tried to teach Violet about writing letters, after asking me to get her a dry-erase board and marker.

 Cora really relished reading to Violet before her naptimes over the weekend.

 We had been promising to take Cora ice-skating since she got a free entry from the library over the summer. This Sunday, she and I sneaked away for a few hours of fun.

I love doing things like this with my girl, when we're able to. She always impresses me on the rink - she's careful and cautious at the start, and builds to skating quite well, with decent speed. She falls quite a bit, but always gets right back up without any tears or whining.

While we were out, Stace worked on his MG while encouraging Violet to return to her nap. Sadly she hasn't fallen asleep once since we moved her to her toddler bed (though she has been doing much better at night, falling asleep by 8:30 most nights).

Stace has done quite a bit of work on the MG over the past month. He's focusing on some minor body work at the moment, and cleaning up the wheels.

On Sunday evening, we Skyped with the Roberts for the first time. It was great seeing their beautiful new house and huge green back yard. The kids really enjoyed talking to each other face to face, too.