Random Blessings

We are so blessed to have such wonderful friends in our lives. I truly do not believe in coincidences, but instead I think that God puts people in our paths for certain reasons. One special person we have known for a short while is Barbie. She is a mom that I met at playgroup who is a very sweet soul. We have had so much fun getting to know her and her son in the past year. Little did I know when we met that she has a tremendous gift - art! Not only is she talented at creating things, but she also has a wealth of knowledge in it's history and a love for teaching children. She is also generous enough to volunteer an afternoon of her time each month to teach Zora some art & art history. This past week we went to her house for our first lesson.

First we talked about the who, where & why art was started. Then Zora made a "cave drawing" of her own...

Then, they explored many different aspects of Egyptian art from hieroglyphs (this is Zora's name in hieroglyphs!)...

...to pyramids...

...and finally a clay creation (Zora chose to make a little bowl for her jewelry)...

All in all she learned a lot and had a lot of things reinforced that we've been studying about ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.

As I mentioned in the last post, Lily is learning by leaps and bounds. She is doing much more right now than I originally intended for her to do, especially in writing. She loves to try to write letters all by herself. Not only does she write her name, but she is writing almost her whole name! I only have to help her with s, u & e in our last name. She also surprised me a couple of days ago when she said, "Mommy, I just wrote your name." I looked at the page not expecting to see anything that actually resembled my name (because she didn't even ask me how to spell it) and I saw...

She actually wrote it, just from right to left instead of left to right. With a little bit of instruction she tried again and got it perfect :)I'm so thrilled that she loves to learn!

Lily also has a fashion statement all her own. I now understand why there are children at Walmart sometimes with the craziest things on... sometimes clothing is just not worth a battle. Anyhow, Lily loves to pick out her clothes every morning. Sometimes she does a pretty good job and sometimes it's hilarious. If we have somewhere important to go I do enforce an outfit change, but if we're not really doing anything I usually let it go. I recently got down some boots from the attic that used to be Zora's that Lily is now old enough to wear. They were an instant hit. She loved them so much that at bedtime while she was getting ready for bed she just couldn't hardly bear to take them off...
That's all my random thoughts for now :)