Saturday, February 28, 2015

Spring like break in February

I had two goals for this break: have fun and read!

And there was a third goal that I did not quite choose: I had to take my break with Flat Stanley. Sure it sounded fun... until my English teacher added that we needed to write one journal entry per day about Stanley's adventure. WRITE? EVERY DAY? Wait, it's called a vacation isn't it?
And do you think I got empathy from my parents?
Nope. They just asked me if I wanted to have screen time during the break... Ok, understood.

So, I did it and you will see that Stanley was part of my every move for the past week.

It all began with some hard work with Papa. Last year we had birds using our gutters to nest so Papa suggested we should build bird houses for them this year and so we did. Ok, well, I watched more than I helped but I had to make sure that Flat Stanley was not being cut in half with the saw.
But we have two nice looking nesting places now.




On Sunday, Papa and I went to the Stadium to see the Timbers play soccer. My first game ever and the best part was... eating a hot dog with yellow mustard!

Monday, the weather was beautiful so we packed our bags and to the beach we went with our friends!
First stop was Ecola State Park. Beautiful!



A big lunch, card games and to Indian Beach we went. Sooooo nice! It's Oregon, it's the Pacific coast in February and we are in t-shirts! So much fun!


Soon we were heading to the condo and before even unpacking the bags, we were running to the outdoor pool. Yippee!

On Tuesday, we were barely awake that we were begging to go to the pool... and we did! But then, we packed our bags and to the beach we went.






We headed back home and Juliette spent the night with us so we had time for some more fun before I headed to my friend Ben's house for a playdate. No time to get bored, I'll tell you!



Thursday... what? Thursday already?
Time to bake a cake. Maman and I made a Far Breton. Yum! I got to share it though because, this time, Juliette invited me at her place and I got to see my other best friend: Pinnochio! I have tried and tried to convince my parents that we should have a dog too but they keep finding arguments against it. Well, when they tell that I'll have to scoop the you-know-what, I usually suggest that we should get hum, a fish?




Friday came too soon and it was time to maybe rest a little. So Maman took me to the library at noon and I chose 21 chapter books. By the end of the day, I had read 6 of them!
Saturday came and I read even more books. Thank goodness for libraries or my parents would go broke having to buy so many books to feed my brain!
Thanks to Uncle Dan I got a little break in my reading because he had gotten us tickets to see the movie "MacFarland USA". It was quite good I must say and Flat Stanley seemed to enjoy it just as he seemed to enjoy the whole week like I did.


Monday, February 2, 2015

Flat Stanley

In my 2nd grade class, we have been reading the Flat Stanley books.
A few weeks ago, my English teacher suggested that we should send Flat Stanley around the World for some fun adventures and she said that it would be better if it could be outside of Oregon.
So we each gave 2 or 3 addresses. I got to send him to 3 places:
Grandpa and Grandma in Arizona.
My cousins in the Alps in France
Maman's cousins and her daughters in Cameroun, Africa.

He arrived first in Arizona, spent a fun week there and arrived back at school today. Everybody was excited to see what he had done and Grandma had worked hard to make it fun and exciting for us. First, he came back in a big box full of great things to discover. And since my teacher took pictures, I can show you the exact moment we opened the box...


Here is what we found in the box:
- Bark from a palm tree... although they are not native from AZ, there are quite a bit of them around.
- Then there was a piece of cholla cactus. Ha, Papa has a nice story about that cactus. Grandma did say on the container that we should not open it but, when she told Papa not to touch it years ago, he did not listen and the cholla grabbed Papa's finger and it took tweezers to remove the needles... I still want to open the container at some point though...

- There was also a binder where Grandma had put the pictures of what Flat Stanley saw over there and they were even barrel cactus needles.
- I got to present and read what Grandma had written in front of the whole class.

Grandma also made a cardboard version of Flat Stanley and you could put sunglasses on him. At least that's what I told Maman who did not get to see that part.

Well, I sure wish I could have been Flat Stanley to get to see all those things too. Although flattened in a box would not be that fun.
Thank you Grandma! We all enjoyed what you did with Stanley.




And today I also received an email saying that he made it all the way to Africa, in Cameroun, so I know that he is going to have more great adventures!