After the lighting of the fire, Iris leads us in song.

Then ceremoniously, we each add wood to the flames. Toss!

(Toss.)

Huzzah! Toss!

Put.

…and it burns.

On Wednesday, Iris was running across the playground at school when she slipped and fell. She landed on something that tore her pants open and left a gaping wound on her knee. The cut could have used at least eight stitches, but my experience bringing kids to the hospital for stitches hasn’t been so great so far, so I decided just to tape her knee up. I forgot that they don’t just use tape at the hospital: they also use liberal amounts of surgical glue, which I don’t yet keep around the house. But by the time I realized this, it was too late to stitch her up, so the scar will just have to be a bit bigger than it would have been had we gone to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Iris’s knee isn’t as bendy as it usually is. Instead of going for a walk in the woods, I take the kids on a bike ride down to the Massawippi river at the spot where, the summer before last, the children used to go swimming. Akiva decides he would like to cross the river by himself while Iris & I sit on the bank together.

“…I did it!”

In second grade, the kids need to bring in a collection of 100 small objects to use as math manipulatives. Not one to settle for pebbles or pennies, we made 100 wax hearts, ten each of ten different colors.

Every morning, in the blue light of dawn, six deer come to graze in the field behind our house as the sun burns the fog from the cool ground.