Hello warmer weather and melting snow. Good-bye busy weeks of drama classes and field trips and ski days and Saint Patrick's Day celebrations. March was a good month but I confess to feeling a sense of exhale when I look at April's slightly emptier calendar.
From the kitchen - As we've been journeying through Lent, one small fast has been no meat Fridays. This has actually been a really good practice, we don't eat a lot of meat anyways, but the structured discipline means simpler meals as we end the week. Dinners have looked like a lot of soup- curried sweet potato and lentil, French onion, hearty vegetable- or comforting lentil daals. I've made this recipe twice now for company and will make it into muffins for an Easter breakfast on Sunday. It's so yummy and uses up last year's rhubarb while we wait for spring to bring forth this year's crop.
From the schoolroom and homelife -
Where does school end and home life begin? Some things are obvious, the maths and grammar, but other things are all blended together. We've been using Little Way Chapel's Lent and Holy Week guide this season and it has been fantastic. One small reading each day, one small action revolving around fasting, prayer or almsgiving. I didn't grow up practicing Lent and so each year we layer on learning about it and incorporating into our family culture. Instead of giving up one thing for forty days, there's small sacrifices throughout Lent to introduce the concept of fasting and why we would fast from various things. It's simple enough for my seven year old and spurs great conversations with my big girls, highly recommend it. We also love their St. Patrick guide. The girls wrapped up their session of drama classes this week, between those and an almost weekly field trip throughout the month , we spent a lot of time in the van which meant we listened to a lot of audio. We finished up the Laura Ingalls series with everyone agreeing that The First Four Years wasn't our favourite book of the series, we discovered a new podcast , and listened to our favourite art history podcast as well.
Bits and Bobs -
One good podcast episode, Why Read Classics to Our Kids . One good podcast series - Grief mini-series from Risen Motherhood .
This article on Lent and the Natural World, from a fellow Canadian. I appreciated the perspective of Lent and the weary wintertime. This article on travel and grief, I found this to be profoundly true throughout our time in Portugal.
We finished season three of our beloved All Creatures Great and Small and are now finding new titles to watch for family night. One recent hit was Jack, the Giant Slayer - a live action fairy tale re-telling, strong female and male characters, great story arc. 5 out of 5 liked it. We are always up for movie night recommendations that would be great for all ages.