Appreciation

The girls are having breakfast while I make them their sandwiches for school.

Me: "Emily, would you prefer white bread or brown? I'm afraid we don't have ham, so how about cheese and cucumber instead? And Phoebe, is a plain cheese sandwich alright for you?"

Phoebe: [Reflectively] "Dad, I've just realised something. Every day you get us up and make us breakfast and give us a sandwich for school and then you pick us up from school and we go home and you cook lunch for us."

Me: [Smiling] "Yes, yes, my love. I do." It is nice to be appreciated.

Phoebe: "Your life is really boring, isn't it?"

Spelling

I just found this list that Phoebe wrote maybe a year and a half ago, when she was starting to teach herself English:

cAT
Dof
MAN
DAD
FRoG
pig
bear
rabbit
tiger
COW
duck
hen
autumn
BooK
EMLI

Very impressive that she has the hang of a difficult word like autumn and very amusing that she can't be bothered to find how her sister's name is spelt...

Did you know that

the Nile (6669 km) is the world's longest river, followed by the Amazon (6436 km) and the Mississippi (5969 km)? Or that the longest rivers in Asia and Africa are the Yang-Che-Yang (5471 km) and the Congo (4373 km) respectively? Or that the Murray and Darling River in Australia (3717 km) is the eighth longest in the world, beating Europe's longest - the Volga (3685 km) and the Danube (2850 km) - into ninth and tenth place?

No? Well you would if you'd been helping Emily revise for her geography test tomorrow.

And that's just the rivers! There are lakes, too! (Whatever you do, don't get me started on lakes! Did you know there was a Lake Baikal? I've never even heard of Lake Baikal...)

Phoebe wishes everyone

a very happy 2011!



(So does Emily, of course, but a photograph like this would be beneath her dignity - and might spoil her carefully coiffed hair.)