Where did January go?

Can you believe it's February all ready? Where did the 31 days of January go? 

Well our month of January seemed to be spent with a sick Jonas, thankfully he is now over the whole thing (knock on wood). On Tuesday they had grandparents day at daycare, so both my parents and Frank's parents went with him to daycare. Last year my parents were here to attend the grandparents day, but back then Jonas only had been to daycare for a week, and he hated it. This time around he had a lot of fun, and so did the grandparents:)

This coming Tuesday they are celebrating Shrovetide, which I wrote about here last year. This year he is dressing up as a lion. I borrowed the costume from a friend, and so far we haven't had too much success getting him into it, but I hope that I Tuesday morning can dress him like I do every morning, and maybe he won't realise that it's a costume:) Hey you got to use the little tricks. So hopefully sometime during the next week I will be able to post pictures of my little lion:)

Hope you are all doing well, and have enjoyed your weekend!

"Fastelavn" - Shrovetide

"Fastelavn" is a Danish tradition where kids dress up and go from house to house singing a song and get candy, so it's very similar to Halloween. "Fastelavn" stems from an old Christian tradition, where they 7 weeks before Easter celebrates Shrovetide ("Fastelavn"). In the Christian tradition "Fastelavn" marks the start of 40 days without meat, though I doubt that is the reason why most people celebrates "fastelavn" today.

At most "fastelavn" parties kids will hit a wooden barrel with at stick (very much like a pinata), the one who gets the barrel destroyed ends up being "Cat King". The game is called hitting the cat out of the barrel, and until the 1830's they put a real cat inside the barrel, because they believe that a town could be spared of the plague is a black cat were killed. Today there is only candy in the barrel, and sometimes the barrel is decorated with a painting of a black cat. I guess out cat Gilbert should be glad that tradition has stopped, otherwise he should be hiding most of the month of February.

Jonas and his friends celebrated Fastelavn with the other kids from the daycare. He was dressed as a spider, since I figured it would be the best costume for him since he probably would be too impressed with a big costume. So he was dressed in black, and I had put some velcro on his back and some velcro on some stuffed socks. So he suddenly had 8 "legs" at least if you count his own arms and legs:) I had knitted a hat for him, and put eyes on it, though he wasn't too fond of the hat:)