Last day of November

Oh, what terribly wonderful weather we are having!

There's nothing like strong winds, icy rain, and hail to make you want to stay indoors and drink hot chocolate!

Emma and I had a fun morning of school. It was clear when we started that neither of us were that motivated to get going, but with big mugs of hot chocolate and starting out by asking the Lord to change our attitudes, we were able to have a productive morning. I am soooo thankful that I have this year together with her, getting to experience first-hand her amazing, God-given capacity to learn. 

'Tis the season for drinking hot chocolate!

We are done with our daily November calendar! This month we focused on patterns. Each day Emma had to figure out what shape and color came next in the pattern.

A review worksheet...we focused on the letters "A", "S", "M", and "L".

Can you guess what the pictures are that Emma drew to correspond with each of the sounds? I have to say, I struggled a little to know what she had drawn, but I was really impressed with her imagination and choice of words to match the letter sounds.(Alligator for "A", skunk for "S", meat for "M", and Levi for "L".)

At the end, we went back to a previous lesson and found an activity that we hadn't had time to do. This is Emma and 3 of her friends under an apple tree.

While I had the camera out, I snapped a few pictures of the house. We are decorating little by little for Advent/Christmas. I'm not yet sure when we will put up our Christmas tree...last year we shocked quite a few people by putting it up the first week of December. (Norwegians usually decorate their trees a day or two before Christmas Eve.) Maybe this year we'll wait until the second week of December?? Or maybe not?? :-)

Here's our new coffee table...

This is for those of you who wanted to see a better picture of our purple chaise. And I just realized that I've not yet shown you a picture of our finished piano wall! There are actually LED lights built into the shelf above the piano, which weren't turned on in this picture...they are fantastic! And my favorite feature of the wall are the shelves that Markus and Egil built for me to hold all my piano music and piano lesson materials! And yes, our walls are still very empty...we want to wait to decide where to hang our pictures and clock until the rest of our new furniture is here.

I found these Christmas balls on clearance last week for just a few dollars!

This was a great thrift store find last winter. (I think my mother-in-law bought it for Emma??) Emma loves it so much and wants to carry it around the house with her at all times. I've warned her that if she drops it, it will most likely break so she is doing pretty good about trying to leave it be on the windowsill.

-Sarah-