Beautiful things in my world

On Monday I went out walking with the kids. Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday has been such a slog this semester. But on Mondays we can take things a little slower. 

We had time to admire the leaves.

I made the kids stop in front of this one spectacular tree so we could make a leaf crown. Did the neighbours think we were crazy? Almost certainly. But that's okay. 

The little kids wanted to run home so they could play with their friends and Phoebe would not try the crown on, but here are my older girls being good sports!

I brought the crown home with us in case Zoë wanted to try it on (she did, and I think Alexander did as well, but he was really being so wild that I couldn't snag a picture of him with it on; Phoebe continued to refuse to wear it).

Here are the kids playing with the leaves in our friends' yard. Phoebe is in yellow, Zoë is in white, Alexander is under that big pile of leaves that the girls are throwing on top of him.

There he is!

Here's Phoebe hiding in the leaves:

And here she is making a leaf-angel (we don't get much snow around here so we have to make do with what we have):

I sat outside and read Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny, which felt like a good idea at the time. By Tuesday it felt like a rather depressing read, but Rachel and I passed this lovely bush on campus (an oak-leaf magnolia) that was simply gorgeous. This picture isn't really communicating how big those leaves are, so I will tell you that they are huge. 

Wednesday was a slow day, a creeping, crawling day. 

Thursday Rachel checked the mail and found out that every. single. university. wants her to apply.

We just finished our out-loud read, The Genius Under the Table by Eugene Yelchin (which was fabulous, by the way, and an interesting book for me to be reading alongside On Tyranny). In the book Yelchin recounts how school children were made to collect paper for recycling. If we had to do that in America in the present day, we'd be certain to fill our quota just by collecting flyers from colleges and universities!

Speaking of recycling, we rode our bikes to the park today to recycle the glass that's been building up in our garage. Benjamin, Zoë, and I all stuffed a backpack full and off we went. 

Here are the kids unpacking the glass and tossing it into the container. They like it when it smashes. Sometimes it does (more often when it's very empty) and sometimes it doesn't (more often when it's very full). Today it seemed things had a 50-50 chance of exploding in the bin. 

I much prefer the glass shattering there than in my kitchen (or all over the garage floor, as luck would have it, when Phoebe—Little Miss Butterfingers—decided to "help" load the glass and dropped a jar on the cement (I've spent half the week cleaning up glass, it seems)).

I didn't help with this part because I was too busy holding up my bike. I didn't want to get Phoebe out of her seat because I knew we'd just be hopping back onto our bikes to ride to the playground. But I couldn't very well leave my bike with her sitting in the seat (it would fall right over). So I played the role of supervisor and the kids did a great job getting the glass in and helping each other (Alexander isn't quite tall enough to reach but desperately wanted to drop something in, so Benjamin helped him).

And here we are at the playground...well...exiting the playground.

To be precise, here's Alexander climbing over the fence to meet Phoebe at the sandbox:

And here are the kids playing in the sandbox so nicely while I read and annotated a couple of papers:

It felt good to get out and enjoy our beautiful world, recycle some things, not contribute any emissions on our outing, and just enjoy each other's company. 

And guess what I did this evening! I finally earned my 2000 day streak on Duolingo. 

How long did it take me? 

If you said 2000 days you'd be....utterly wrong. 

I have no idea how long it really took me because I have used so many streak freezes over the past five years. Just...so many streak freezes, friends.

I will say that January through April 2024 my streak was perfect. 

October 2023 I somehow used six streak freezes. October 2022 I also used six streak freezes. I don't know what was so hard about those Octobers. This October I only used one streak freeze.

March 2022 I used eight! January—seven! 2022 was a rough year overall. I wonder why (I blame Phoebe). 

It looks like I started on January 3, 2019 and I had a perfect streak for quite a long while.

But 2137 days have elapsed since January 3, 2019. 

With only 2000 days under my belt, that means I have missed 136 days of practice in the past 5+ years (only 136 because it's past midnight so I still have a chance to get in my practice for "today" tomorrow,* which will make my streatk 2001/2137). That means I reliably practiced language for 94% of the time since January 2019. And that's not too shabby. 

I completely finished the Russian curriculum and really do feel it's helped me improve things (though I also think it was helpful to go in with some background knowledge). We just finished reading The Book of Mormon as a family this evening and I followed along the entire way in my Russian copy, which was excellent practice for me! I also sing in Russian at church frequently. 

Lately I've been working on my Arabic using Duolingo. That's been tougher, but I'm getting so much better at reading! Of course, I broke out one of our children's books to read with Alexander (who has also decided to work on Arabic) and I felt like a toddler trying to sound everything out without Duolingo to give me hints. But that's okay. 

What we can learn from all of this is that (1) you don't have to be perfect. 94% is pretty great, really. I have learned a lot more than I would have doing nothing, that's for sure and certain (pardon my Mrs. Lynde slipping in there—we've been reading Anne), (2) Forgiveness is lovely feature of a lot of things, so even if/when you "mess up," there are ways to fix things and move on, and (3) any day is a good day to make a goal and start learning and improving. See how I started on January 3 like a slacker instead of January 1? That's totally fine. There aren't actually any rules about when you can start a goal. 

* This juxtaposition of "today-tomorrow" reminded me of sweet toddler Rachel, who loved to ask if things could happen tomorrow-today instead of regular, ordinary tomorrow. Sweet toddler Phoebe likes to say—with very crisp enunciation—not yet. I say that she enunciates it crisply...and she does...but she also makes it sound like it's a single word not-yet. I'll have to film her saying it sometime.

"Is it Christmastime? Not yet?"

"Not yet."

"Oh, not yet."