1. The park, frosted with an inch of snow, is empty and we are the first ones into the playground. We make footprints along the paths, and the children collect icicles to decorate their snowman.
2. We come to the end of our reading book, Harriet The Spy. It's quite a gruelling read, about a child navigating a huge life change as well as conflict and bullying at school, but we were swept along by the deft, light writing. And it let us talk in a non-urgent way about bullying and lies and truth and fiction and child neglect and snobbery and all sorts of things. It's one of those books that has jokes aimed at adults -- I read it as a child and I could tell there were things going over my head, and I'm so glad I've read it again, because it's very funny on that level, too.
3. The exercise we do in writing is a revelation -- write a sentence in one minute to a particular prompt. A minute is ages in terms of a sentence, and it makes me think that, really, no little slip of time is too short for a writing session.
