road trip #1

We had a short but very eventful trip to Boston last weekend. We had the Chanukah party, a party for Miriam/Gram's birthday, and a veritable blizzard. Here are some shots.


Cousins building "Snow Town" (I'm not sure what Snow Town had to recommend it besides a tunnel).


Eighty years old and loving it! (I actually made her say that when I took the picture. Oh, what my relatives put up with.)


"Too cute not to pick up," says one person in this picture. "Look, I have three teeth," says the other.

Next stop, Christmas in Virginia.

royalty

Behold Abe, the king of winter, upon his icy throne. Every year Ithaca has a display of ice sculptures on the Commons, and often the weather doesn't quite cooperate--things start melting instantly or it's too cold to even walk around and look at them. This was a good day, and the throne was intact, but some of the other sculptures, including the ice slide, had melted a bit too much for our tastes (and safety standards).

kindergarten homework

and another one

Look what Oscar can do! This was about my tenth attempt to catch it on video (which explains Sam's question). Luring him with a slice of pizza finally did the trick. The first thing he did with his new skill (after getting the pizza) was to crawl to a big box of duplo legos and start throwing them one by one across the room. I guess he's been waiting months to do it.

my dancing bear

Just a couple of tricks Oscar has added to his CV.

T-giving

We had a great Thanksgiving, we really did! We went to Amherst, celebrated with Aaron's family, also had my brother and a good friend visiting there, hiked, ate out, played Wii, snuck out to a movie, etc. Sadly, you'll have to take my word for it, since I neglected to take my camera out of its bag the entire weekend. But in the spirit of Thanksgiving, here's a poem Abe performed at his preschool Harvest Brunch.

and before that

Sam turned six! When I first had Sam, the limit of my imagination for my children was age three. Then it became age five. Now I guess I'm just going to have to get used to bigger and bigger kids (kids who might be taller than me in a couple of years, for example). We had a family party and then later a friend party. He wanted a chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting decorated with Reese's, and then a lemon cake with vanilla frosting decorated with mini M&M's. I'm getting tired just remembering last week's baking activities. There was also the school celebration...blueberry corn muffins. I might wait until Abe's birthday to bake again. Yeah, right.