piles of dead fish and paper

Here's a quick update of what's going on in our neck of the woods:

Rachel's been hard at work re-creating a Goya painting (with acrylics thankfully). One of her assignments is to re-create a famous painting that's as close to the original as she can get. Naturally she chose a pile of dead fish. 

I've been doing the paparazzi thing when I walk by her room, snapping pictures of her progress.

And yes, Rachel is a bit of a slob. She's not only a bit of a slob, she also does that thing that creative people do, where we abandon everything but the project we're working on.

We made our tried and true orange rolls recipe, which needs to prove twice but is totally worth it.

These are without icing for a reason. We're usually unanimous about not putting icing on things in our house and when we're not, we put it on the side.

Izzy and I have been working on our first collage together. We've been cutting out pieces for a couple weeks and just started pasting the pieces down.

Our little book club is still going but has evolved. I'm a little proud of it. It goes like this:

1. Read a chapter

2. We each pick out a favorite word from the chapter and write a poem with the word.

3. Izzy uses an old-fashioned dictionary to look up the words. She writes them on index cards for the future.

4. We also talk about what we've read that day.

5. We go over the flashcards before we read each day.

This is going to help her with spelling and vocabulary. She has also expressed interest in poetry and has attempted to write it. But I don't think she's had much experience with reading/listening to it and learning about it. While we craft together I put my music on shuffle. My music library has a ton of poetry mixed in so she's started listening to it as well.

We've been taking a lot of walks. I've been compiling a lot inspiration for future art projects.

This is Josie-pie with Robert. Any time we come up to a wall she immediately leaps up. She loves jumping. Margo has never jumped up on a wall. She was even scared to get in the fountaing. 

But look at Josie's face. Isn't that the sweetest face? She really wants to be a good dog but she has energy for days (which is code for trouble) and still assaults people with her love. She's a hoot.