Season's Greetings

Wishing you the best of the holiday season and great happiness and success in 2008!

This year Kassie created our holiday ecard. To view previous years', click here.

Snowbound

Working at home today!

Mother-daughter book club

Reading books with Kassie is great fun. Currently she and I are reading the Charlie Bone series together. With her father she is reading The Diamond of Drury Lane by Julia Golding, a young adult novel set in Victorian England in and around the theatre district of Drury Lane.

With the Grade 5 Mother-Daughter Book Club, recently organized by the school librarian, we have just finished reading Kit Pearson's A Handful of Time. It was a great pick for a mother-daughter discussion. The plot centres around the plight of twelve-year-old Patricia who is sent out West to spend the summer with her cousins while her parents remain behind in Toronto to iron out the details of their divorce. Patricia is doubly unsettled, as not only is her family falling apart but she finds herself in an awkward setting: unable to relate to the cousins she has just met and unprepared for a summer spent at the lakeside. When she discovers an old pocket watch under the floorboards, and winds it to find herself taken back in time to the summer her twelve-year-old mother spent at the cottage, she begins to understand her mother's character for the first time, and gains new insights into her own personality as well as her inner strengths.

The discussion topics were varied: from the thrill of a first kiss to the rift between mother and daughter, and even what a sequel might entail.

Kassie and I can't wait for the next reading assignment and discussion.