Golden Shovels with Green Gables

We've been reading Anne of Green Gables and started a "golden shovel" poem together (ages ago). I had the kids finish up their poems drafts on Tuesday while I was on campus and it was lovely to see these come through in my email.

Basically, we took a line from AoGG, "The birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine," put those words down the righthand side of our page and then wrote into those words. It can be harder than it sounds to pull off!

Here's Benjamin's:

 I was meandering through the
countless birches
that made up the greenwood in
Tongass NationalForest. The
fir and maple hollow
that I found myself turned in turned
into a burning  torch as
the golden
flames reached the temperature as
burning sunshine.

Looking forward to some calmness

So much happened last week...month? 

With the school shooting in Winder at the beginning of the month, and then the hurricane at the end of the month, we have felt like our phones have been just about blowing up with public safety alerts. We were very lucky to have so little damage in the storm. Our friends in Tallahassee didn't suffer too badly either. We can't say the same for our friends in Augusta and especially not for our friends in Asheville (though I did finally hear back from my friend Emily (who taught English in Voronezh with me) and she is, at least, safe. Asheville has been entirely cut off from the world—no roads, no internet. Western North Carolina was hit very hard. 

So we've been feeling like we're in a perpetual state of panic and/or mourning this month. 

*****

Naturally, the kids all skipped out to play outside once the hurricane blew over. The neighbourhood kids were all so happy to have had such a long weekend. The grown ups were all stressed out about trying to catch up on the work they'd put off (while attending to hours of household maintenance and childcare duties they weren't necessarily planning on (I mean, we always plan on having our kids at home while we work because that's our norm, but our neighbours typically send their kids to school when they work at home (perfectly valid); and none of us had really set time aside in our work calendars to prep for a hurricane, you know? That's outside of our normally scheduled week). What I'm trying to say is...that we sent Phoebe outside to play under the supervision of her older siblings. 

Naturally, they eventually abandoned her because—let's face it—babies can get kind of boring. So the kids were all playing together and then Phoebe was just...exploring the yard on her own.