First Day School

The girls (all two of them, the LSG and a wonderful thirteen-year-old who is a marvelous influence on my wild child) finished up the puzzle books we've been making in First Day School today. We've been making them for like a year, because I am such a bad First Day School teacher that we've missed a lot of meetings. Each book has crossword puzzles, word-finds, a maze, a code-cracking puzzle and a word scramble in them, all on Quaker topics, that the girls made themselves. There are ten copies to share with our tiny Meeting and the girls made unique covers for each one. Today they were binding the books, the final step, by punching holes along one side and sewing the books together with yarn. It took longer than we had in the hour that is ours before Meeting starts, so I just had the girls keep sewing them up during Meeting on the other side of the room (our Meeting is so small that we meet in another church's Sunday school classroom instead of having our own Meetinghouse) and I sat and helped them. It was so nice, sitting there with them, the Silence punctuated by the soft clattering of their scissors and the rustle of their papers...the children were like a poem, working there, so quiet, but noisy in contrast to the other adults. I love them.