City girls

A month since my last post. Yikes, I'm getting lazy about this blog! I blame it on Facebook! I either Facebook or Blog, but find it hard to do both! I'm due for a serious update on birthdays, birthday parties, Guang Qi Academy, and everything else that has happened since the Chinese New Year Holiday. But I'll take a little break and give you a word-y post instead.

Last week I read aloud to my first and second graders from Edith Nesbit's "The Five Children and It." I picked it up because a portion of the text was used in a writing exercise in the Grammar and Writing curriculum I am using. Well, it took one paragraph for us all to be hooked, and I brought the book home to finish reading aloud with the girls. It's a great book about five children spending the summer in the country at the turn of the last century, and they uncover a sand-fairy in a gravel pit near their cottage. But this sand fairy is a hairy-little-monkey-snail-like creature whose magic is a little bit tired. He grants wishes, but none of them turn out as the children hope they will.

The first chapter opens with a family, heading to a summer home their family is renting...

"...and so the house seemed to them a sort of fairy palace set down in an earthly paradise. For London is like a prison for children...and London has none of those nice things that children may play with without hurting the things or themselves - such as trees and sand and woods and waters. And nearly everything in London is the wrong sort of shape - all straight lines and flat streets, instead of being all sorts of odd shapes, like things are in the country Trees are all different, as you know, and I am sure some tiresome person must have told you that there are no two blades of grass exactly alike. But in streets where the blades of grass don't grow, everything is like everything else. This is why so many children who live in towns are so extremely naughty. They do not know what is the matter with them, and no more do their fathers and mothers....but I know. And so do you now. Children in the country are naughty sometimes, too, but that is for quite different reasons."

As soon as I read it I laughed. So just insert 'Shanghai' where you read 'London' and there is a quote I can identify with. On top of that add 30 plus days of rainy weather and no sun and you can imagine the naughtiness level at our house the past couple weeks!

But the sun came out today and we've been celebrating birthdays like crazy...so lots of joy with the tiresome days of a rainy winter.

I'll leave you with an early morning photo of my lovely little ladies and their puppy dogs ....