birthday, Portugal and snow

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow
Had a Christmas card from friends in Portugal today – they home educate in the summer over here and the children go to school in Portugal in the winter as home ed. is illegal there. Schools sound much better than here with much smaller class sizes though it is a very small school. Very interesting to hear how warm it is and about the fire salamanders. Apparantly if you see them coming into a house it is a sign of rain!

“It’s been the best birthday ever”. Words uttered by Charlotte last night. I assumed it must have been the present that she played with non-stop all day as we didn’t actually do anything very exiting, even ended up going food shopping as had run out of juice and bread. But no, on questioning her as to the cause of the “bestness” of the birthday it turns out it was because “there was no school to ruin it”. As to the much adored pressie – it was a total surprise to her – a Nintendo DS. We had seen the new (much loved) Spyro game advertised but Charlotte had told me she couldn’t have it as you could only get it for the DS. It didn’t even occur to her to ask for such an expensive thing for her birthday which is what made me want to get it for her. So it was a very screen-culture day with Dan getting a playstation game he had wanted too – Waldorf people will be tutting I know Ended up with lots of Dickens (again on TV screen…) with us watching a really good film version of Nicholas Nickleby (the school in that… oh my goodness, worse than the one in David Copperfield – Dickens may have shared Charlotte’s opinion of schools ruining everything) and then Bleak House which is so exiting now – can’t wait for the final episode tonight!

Very wintery – were so close to the Solstice now that it really doesn’t seem to get properly light at all here now – at half past two yesterday I felt it beginning to get dark and it’s not really very light now at 9.45am and… it’s snowing!

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