more of the past months

Purim is a holiday of costumes and sillyness. Since my kids go to a Waldorf kindergarten, some order and seriousness have to remain in place.. each group has a theme and the children have to think of costumes that would fit within the theme. It is actually not such a bad idea, seeing how children in other schools and kindergartens go for the ready bought superhero or TV characters costumes, whereas in our community a bought costume was a rare sight and we avoided all the ben10s and bakugans and the rest. In Hilel's group the theme was "sea world" and he, after a year of planning on being a mamuth this year, shifted immediately to the idea of a killer whale. funny enough in his 3 years of kindergarten Purim celebrations he was already a squid

and a swordfish

and he only got out of the water once to be a monkey.

here he is this year, with Amalia.

Her group's theme was "circus", and she found the loveliest reference for an acrobat in our Pippi longstocking book, with the wonderful drawings by Ingrid Vang Nyman. She just had to add some plastic bits, the crown and a butterfly shaped key holder as a ring, and her fairy neckless.

It was a rainy Purim and we stayed mostly at home and made some masks together.

On fine, sunny winter days I try to take the kids out as much as possible. I pick them up from their kindergarten with some fruits and snacks packed along with my knitting, and we go to a playground. these are from February first:

and now that it became more spring like we had some really warm days, and started going to the small stream near Amikam, not far from here, usually with more friends. For these outings I add an empty plastic box, to collect tadpoles and then release them again when we're about to leave.

and this happened in our back yard, while I was hanging the laundry:

what a monster. They have been living in our yard since before we moved in, in a beautiful co-existance with a pretty big pack of eternally hungry street cats that wander through. A few months ago we found a tiny little turtle, I suppose there's a chance of that happening again sometime soon.