COLLABORATIVE SUNDAY

Behind closed doors the children started work on a surprise for me as I made French toast and quartered fresh strawberries for our Sunday breakfast as a surprise for them. Many pieces of paper were involved in their collaboration, as well as crayons and tape, as I later discovered. Blue painter's tape, to be exact.

After breakfast, the children ran upstairs to their rooms to continue work on their surprise. In the meantime, I tried finding a way to stream the Liverpool-Norwich soccer game online for Sage and me to watch as I knew my boyfriend was watching the game as well. I wanted my son to see what a real soccer game looked like, particularly how the players worked together to pass the ball instead of simply all running toward ball as I had seen at his practice.

Several virus warnings later, in addition to a loud alarm on one of the sites which caused the children to come running to my room, I found a link which worked for about half an hour albeit at a slowed down rate. Sage and I watched the 'stop-motion' soccer game until half time when the laptop decided to reboot and I decided to put to rest the notion of being able to watch the game with my son.

A while later the children let me see what they had done thus far, informing me that more work was needed. Each one of them worked on a room of a house. They coloured walls and floors, making snowflake wallpaper and a 'Frozen' rug complete with Anna, Elsa, and Olaf. They worked on a television room complete with a television screen on which Saffron drew a grumpy news reporter.

Later in the afternoon, Sage constructed a daybed in his paper room from the cardboard of the Amazon package which arrived late in the morning. The order contained the girls' new box set books. Saffron was delighted to see a puzzle and game book as part of her set and worked on it for most of the afternoon as she sat on the carved wooden chair downstairs.

For some reason the day seemed never ending. My boyfriend and I chatted both on Skype and the phone several times today as he had the day off but it was not the same as being able to be together in person. Though we plan on our being together one day soon, it is never soon enough yet somehow we make it work.

Most of what surprised me today about the work the children did was their collaborative effort. As they each worked on their own part of the house, they learned how one part did not function well without the other and thus realised they needed to work as a team in order to complete their project. Quite the lesson to learn at such a young age.