This weekend is the King Tut Festival at the St. Antonius Coptic Church in Hayward. The festival features Egyptian food, picture taking in ancient Egyptian costumes, having your name written in hieroglyphs, Egyptian jewelry and souvenirs and other cool things to buy and a tour of the church. There is a park next door where kids can play. My kids went last night and had a very good time – we are going back today for them to have their picture taken ($20).
I hadn’t thought much about the Copts and Coptic for quite a while. I learned the language twice and forgot it twice. It’s one of the easiest languages to learn, I’m not sure why, though perhaps it was my (now lost) background on Ancient Egyptian that made it so. But both times, I had no problems learning it – just to unlearn it within a year or so. As a language, it’s not particularly useful – nobody speaks it anymore, though it still forms part of some Coptic liturgy. I was trying to see if I remembered any words in Coptic, but I can’t even remember the alphabet 🙁 (except, strangely, for the letter for “sh”). The Copts wrote in the Greek alphabet, to which they added a number of signs to express sounds that did not exist in Greek. The language, derived from Ancient Egyptian, has a very simple grammar. Most of the texts we have in Coptic are religious in nature. I took out my Coptic textbook
A couple of years ago, thinking I could save enough money to go to Egypt for my 40th birthday (it didn’t happen), I got a copy of Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar
Perhaps for that reason, and not just for the cost, I’ve decided not to go to see the King Tut exhibit which is touring the country. It’s painful to see something once so familiar and now so foreign – to not be able to read the inscriptions, to not remember the details of the religion, to have forgotten the whole history. To be old.
Still, I’m thrilled that Mika, my 7-year old, is so into Egyptology now (after reading the Theodosia books
Author: marga (Page 56 of 158)
Well, it turns out that both girls love scrapbooking and are thrilled with their kits. Mika decorated the front of her otherwise boring album with stickers, and has already finished 14 scrapbook pages (fortunately it will take 100! – the one I got for Camila only takes 20!). Alas, she’s not very careful when she does it by herself, but we just did a couple of pages together and I think they turned out quite well.
I made the mistake of getting glitter for the kids. They’ve LOVED using it, but now my whole living room is covered with sprinkles. Mika will vacuum when she’s done, but I don’t see them getting out of the little crevices between floor boards. I guess this is one way to have a sparkling house 😉
I think the kids love scrapbooking because it’s 1) quite easy and appropriate for all developmental levels and 2) more creative than some of the other crafts where pretty much all you do is follow directions.
In any case, I’m glad we’ve found something that we can do together and that they enjoy so much. 🙂
Here is one of Camila’s pages:
And here one of Mika’s:
I’ve been watching and enjoying Top Chef Masters for a while, but only tonight I came to the realization that Kelly Choi, the host, is a real life Bratz doll. Look at the enormous head and enormous eyes on that tiny body, the super skinny legs and arms, the oversize hair. I’ve always thought that Choi looked weird, but now I realize that indeed some girls grow up to look like Bratz.
I came upon scrapbooking while looking for crafts to do with my kids. I had tried scrapbooking before, when Michaela was first born, but quickly discovered that I neither had the time nor the talent to dedicate to it. Still, it seemed like the sort of thing that kids would like, so I figure we should give it a try.
As usual, I went looking for a kit. After seriously considering Alex My Scrapbook
Given that I didn’t get the Alex kit, I can’t really compare the two. The Toys R Us one is pretty nice, very pinkish and girl oriented, and it comes with a variety of frames, stickers and so forth (read this review for a complete list of contents). I wish there were more sizable stickers (the ones they have are mostly tiny ones), but all in all I think it was a good buy. I started scrapbooking with Camila (my 4.5 yo), and she was quite happy with it.
Today, I was at Michaels shopping for beading needles
The kit (which does not appear in the Creativity Inc. website and must have been discontinued as soon as it hit the stores) includes a 12″ x 12″ album with 50 page protector pages and 100 thick pieces of paper. We’ll get bored of scrapbooking much before we finish this album. But the album is your standard ugly, brown, photo album. While the Toys R Us ones is red (or is it pink?) and lets you put a picture on the cover, this one is definitely austere. Mika (my 7.5 yo) was quite disappointed.
The stuff that comes with it is also very disappointing. They didn’t have any of the stickers and punchouts taht were featured in the box, and instead they had a bunch of individually-wrapped packages of boring images in muted colors that are just boring for a little girl. What’s worst is that they included several packages of the same images – why not offer some variety? Clearly, this kit was not put together with any care whatsoever. And indeed, it was put together with no thought. The largest picture frames they include are 3 x 5 – who gets 3 x 5 prints anymore? Everywhere you go they give you 4 x 6, so the frames (all 80 of them) are just useless.
Oh well, live and learn.
Recent Comments