I was in first grade and life was good. We lived in Santa Barbara.
Mom came up with this fun idea. Every month, we would collaborate on a wall calendar. She picked out a famous Russian poem that she would write, and that I would have to learn by heart, and the fun part was - I got half the page to illustrate! The portion of the page with the dates is not pictured here. It was done in my mother's extremely neat handwriting just like the poems.