American in Spain

Due to Easter falling early this year, the annual local children’s Carnival celebration fell during my annual February golf trip. I was quite disappointed, since I have very much enjoyed photographing the festival in past years. However, it has been raining pretty much nonstop for all of 2013, and the weather got particularly bad last Friday when they were scheduled to have their parade, so all the activity was kept indoors. There is some talk that they might try to do the parade later this week.
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On her last day of school for the calendar year on December 21, as foretold by the Mayan prophecies, Nora was instructed to come to school wearing a white turtle neck and white tights only, because the little hybrid cafeteria-auditorium gets very hot during performances. Her class had little costumes which were made during the week of workshops, which consisted of a little paper crown and a cloth sack with head and arm holes. We were informed that the Tortugas (the nickname for Nora’s 3-year-old class) performance was going to be at 11:00 AM, and we were to get there by 10:50 in order to find a place in the cafeteria-auditorium to watch from.
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Last week the three, four and five-year-old classes at my daughter’s school got together for an hour in the afternoon to do arts and crafts loosely related to Christmas. They were divided up into seven groups and each sent to a different part of the school with a teacher and some volunteering parents to do a craft of some sort. One room was face painting; another was gluing tongue depressors together into Christmas ornaments; another was constructing bits for a big nativity scene; another was baking marzipan cookies. Somehow, my daughter’s teacher’s husband found me and has been following me on Flickr for several months. I’ve yet to determine if his discovery was related to our choice of school and luck of school teacher. His photostream is much more impressive than mine. Anyhow, Nora’s teacher asked me if I could come and take some photographs of all the workshops. I was happy to volunteer.
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Today we had a meeting where the parents of all the 25 kids in Nora’s school class had to go and meet the teacher, get information about the school schedule, and see the classroom and facilities. Nora has been getting up at 10:30 or 11:00 this week, but this morning I had to wake her up at 8:45 to make sure we were on time for the 10:00 meeting. She was not pleased. But when I told her, “We have to go meet your teacher!”, a huge smile broke out across her sleepy face and she sat right up, ready to start the day.
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