Gotta love PBS!

This morning, Marika gently reminded me that I hadn't scanned any of her recent work. What better time to post some of it?


Lately, Marika has really been into rainbows. I take that as a good sign - rainbows are for happy people, right? She also loves ladybugs (as most of you know) and she loves to spell new words. Today she was watching "It's a Big Big World" and learning all about how to save water. Marika has learned all sorts of good things from PBS - and who doesn't love Sesame Street?

What a funny kid... when we were eating lunch out recently, she asked when Daddy was going to return with her lemonade because her tongue was "spiced" from eating some salsa. And when I asked her if some of the ladybugs in her bug container were dead, she answered (without missing a beat), "Apparently!".

Both of the girls love to write. This is a perfect sample of Marika's "stories". You may think this is all nonsensical scribblings, but she "read" the story to me (written 4/1/09): "The ladybug came from London. She came to her house. She went to another place. She did not want to get lost. So, she went back home and then she went out again. She went to the forest and then she collected many many leaves and bugs. And then she went back to home to drop them off and then she went out again to collect more leaves and bugs. The End."

She makes grocery lists for me in the same manner. You think it's all meaningless until she reads back the list to me - perfectly! Either she has a weird photographic memory or she's created her own written language!

Mika especially loves writing. For Christmas, she got a notebook that allows her to draw a picture and write a story about it (all self-motivated). Lately, she's been focusing on the stories, not the pictures. She's still spelling phonetically, so there are several errors, but when you point out her mistakes, she is extremely quick to remember and not repeat the mistakes.

She writes stories about Batman, too, but last night's story about Word Girl made me smile. "Peas Bider" is supposed to be "Peace Builder" - a pledge they make at school about being a good person filled with harmony.

And I have to share one more funny story about the girls. Marika found a weevil (beetle) at Mika's school. She was painstakingly explaining to her daddy what a weevil was - Mika chimed in, "like evil and witch!" It took me a second to figure out what she was trying to say, but I guess she thought "weevil" was an appropriate combination of "witch" and "evil" - which I thought was pretty darn funny! Weevils, I will point out, though - are charming-looking creatures. I might be a bit biased, of course... (but not much!)