Tonight when I got home, the girls had brought up some little folding chairs from the basement. We decided to create a beach in the living room – blankets as towels, the folding chairs, and a step stool as a little table to eat snacks off of. The girls even put sunglasses on. M read a "magazine" – a little comic book a parent at Temple Sinai made last year of her classmates – and A did her Leapfrog handheld game. I made them lemonade and they snacked on rice cakes. They pretended the light over the dining room table was the sun, and when A needed to go use the bathroom, she said she was going into the ocean. It is bitterly cold outside, so it was fun to pretend for an hour that it was sunny and warm.

We made it through books #3 and #4 of the M & A 2010 Reading Challenge. Both were Madeline books – Madeline and the Bad Hat and Madeline and the Gypsies. Both books suck. However, each girl wanted to keep one of the books, so back on the shelves they went, after stickers and noting the date we read them. Of note: 1) it is very difficult to explain to a 5 year-old what a "guillotine" is; and 2) I told M that gypsies are people who travel a lot and don't stay in one place, and she said, "Are Grandma and Grandpa gypsies?"

I keep meaning to write this. M & A, for some reason, have renamed Hillary Clinton "Lingonberry". I don't know how that started, other than that we had a jar of lingonberry jam around here for a while. So when Daddy has meetings with "the Secretary," the girls say, "Say hi to Lingonberry!" It is very entertaining.

Daddy finished reading Ramona the Pest tonight – a chapter book they have been reading for a while. Not sure what's next on their reading agenda.