Long time no write

My summer holidays just started for real yesterday and life was a bit hectic last week. We had the graduation ceremony of the pre-schoolers and the fourth-graders at school and all teachers were preparing the decorations for the party all week long.

Friday evening we celebrated Finland's 90th independence day at home and cooked a Finnish meal for some relatives. We offered Carelian pies (rice porridge in a rye crust topped with a mixture of cooked and mashed eggs and margarine, picture below) as appetisers and they went down really well. The meal consisted of mashed potatoes, Carelian stew (pork and beef with some onion, leek and carrots), rosolli (a kind of salad made with cooked potatoes, beetroot, carrots and some pickled cucumber and apples, eaten on Chrimas) and just normal salad. Dessert was ginger bread, oat bisquits and a cake made with dried dates.

Saturday, then, was the graduation ceremony. I took my mum and the princess along thinking that both might enjoy the ceremony. My mum certainly did but the princess just wouldn't stay still for a moment. I had taken some things for her to eat, some small toys and a little notebook for her to draw but still she was really restless. It was tiring for my mum who had to stay at the table alone with her as I had to stay with the rest of the teachers ready to do whatever was needed to be done during the ceremony. However the ceremony itself was nice and the decorations were great :)

On Sunday we had a bbq lunch at the school celebrating the school's 15th aniversary. And then on Monday mum was off to Finland. She left in the afternoon by bus and flew to Brasília in order to stay one night with my friend over there. This evening she'll leave Brasília for Lisbon and will arrive in Finland on the 12th.

After Monday's teachers' meeting I'm now finally enjoying my summer holidays. I started teaching the kids some English at home as they (or the princess really) always keep asking me about vocabulary. I bought them their own special English notebooks which they received yesterday from their Christmas calendar and we had our first "lesson" yesterday. I'm using some pre-school material I have at home from school and I think it'll be fun to sit with them for a while every day and look at some things in English. I obviously won't force anything on them; I'm really only doing this because they seem interested.