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.

On the way home from my folks’ house, we adopted a rather large white rabbit.

His name is Tucker. He is very sweet.

The house came with a ramp. It is useful for people who cannot ascend stairs. Currently, we are all fortunate enough to have good use of our legs, so we decided to demolish the ramp and put the wood to uses that would better suit our needs. Martin began by removing the handrails.

Next, he took off some of the planks of the main ramp. He put the ramp itself aside for later.

I was thinking perhaps it would come in useful as a one-piece item, but I changed my mind.

He unscrewed all the rails and boards of all parts of the structure.

Akiva assisted with the drilling—

—and the pulling of nails.

Iris collected all nails and screws.

She separated them into various containers, sorted by length and head type.

She put those which were deemed unfit to go back to work on another structure into a bag for recycling.

She also organized the wood according to size.

Everyone worked beautifully together excepting me.

I just took some photos, did laundry, fed people, and enjoyed watching my family.