Sick day on vacation

Wynn and Ann were both fighting a flu bug and not having much success Sunday night; Ann was really out of it Monday morning. I went to work in the morning and came back at lunchtime to take care of the ladies.  Wynn was taking it easy and was feeling pretty good after lunch - took Ann until evening to start feeling more like herself.

I love how Wynn can relax in just about any space / any position:

The End of Christmas 2013

We took down the tree this cold, cold morning and set the Christmas Castle out on the deck for the squirrels.  And Wynn built a solar-powered dinosaur robot.

It was a most excellent tree; still very fragrant and thirsty and held the ornaments beautifully.

 

The plastic fork & spoon for arms was Wynn's idea ... all the better to eat you with!

Squirrels love marshmallows and Kit Kat bars, apparently.

Christmas Eve 2013

We are thankful for everyone's good health this year, and the ability to share with the people and causes we care so much about.

So let's get going with the presents, already!

School pride!

Wynn drew one-page comics for each of us - she's explaining the action in this one to Uncle Paul...

A good day for Wynn, and good to know that we're donating an even bigger amount this season!

Xmas Cake 2013

The Betty Crocker kids' cookbook suggested we make a Santa's Castle Cake ... but it wasn't coming together well, so I grabbed some extra ingredients to shore up the castle wall - and well, the rest of the construction just kind of fell into place.  Santa's using a Japanese castle this year:

Only European kids served in this cafe. Is Becky really going to eat all those hamburgers by herself?

Santa's Castle looks like it's in Spain.

The construction hit a few snags, so I found some Kit Kats to shore up the castle walls, and, well, one thing led to another and now Santa is going to use a traditional Japanese fortress this year.

Christmas Decorations 2013

We learned how to make six-sided snowflakes this month, and used different papers we had here at the house as well as bigger sheets from school!

 

We got our tree again from the University of Minnesota's Forestry students - it was frozen up with all the branches together like a collapsed umbrella when we picked it out from the lot, so we felt lucky that the tree was so full and bushy when it thawed out!

Ornaments that look like Wynn and Shadow!

Bedtime Book Club - Harry Potter

Ann and I have decided that IT IS TIME - for Wynn to enter the world of Harry Potter!  Over Winter Break we'll read the whole first book to her & wrap it up by watching the first movie!  This should be fun!

Bedtime Book Club - Folk Tales of West Lake

We got this slim volume from our friends JM and Elena - JM's father worked for Northwest and traveled quite a bit in Asia - this book was put out in Beijing in 1981!  Each chapter is a different folktale from the Hangzhou area in east-central China... lots of supernatural stories, a few ghosts, wise judges and clever inventors. Wynn is fascinated with the tales. I am noticing how most of the stories seem to end with 'and you can visit such and such place today'. (As if this were an advertising series put out by the Hangzhou Chamber of Commerce in the year 1581...) We both are picking up on some parts of these stories being used in other contemporary books we've read, and that's what is really neat about reading with Wynn - how she pulls together ideas from things she experienced a year or more ago!