End of the season

Tomorrow will be the girls' last market. School and travel and fall activities begin next week and will conflict with marketeering. Fiona managed to package up all but these little bits of tea for tomorrow and hopes to sell off almost all of her stock -- though I'm sure we will manage to enjoy whatever is left over!

She and I had been experimenting with dried peaches and walnuts for a while and this week we finally hit on a blend that we all really like:

Okanagan Orchard Tea

4 parts white peony tea leaves
2 parts crushed dried peach slices
2 parts toasted walnut pieces
1 part crushed cinnamon sticks

It's a warming tea that reminds you of summer while taking the edge off chilly mornings or evenings. It will be the grand finale tea for the end of the her very successful summer as an entrepreneur.

Tie-dye, family reunion edition

Noah's, Evie's and my shirts.

The sunshine and clear skies have been made to order for our reunion time.

Sophie risked using a "dangerous colour combination" on her shirt: dark green, purple and yellow. It looked like a moldy cabbage when tied up, but turned out beautifully!  

A classic spiral by Fiona.

Kids cooking

Last night Sophie made us Enchanted Broccoli Forest for supper. I am greatly enjoying the girls' enthusiasm for meal preparation. And, although I am not much of a pie person, I am really looking forward to the cherry pie she made for dessert tonight. She has ventured into the art of pastry-making with this. I'm no expert, so she was pretty much on her own. It certaintly looks lovely! And she is thrilled.

Fiona is making supper tonight. She'll be making us a mega-platter of nachos. Corn chips with shredded Tex-Mex cheese melted on top, and sides of refritos, pico de gallo, tomato-based salsa, sour cream with her home-grown chives, and cheddar-chipotle dip. It's a light family meal we have fairly regularly and all enjoy. Well, except for Erin. All the more reason to make it now, while she's away living off coffee, cereal bars and occasional hospitality spreads on tour with the NYO.

We loved the Cheddar-Chipotle dip we got in Calgary once and made our own version. It's become a favourite at our house. Here's our version of the recipe. We use chipotles tinned in adobo sauce and the leftovers keep well in the fridge. Super easy and super delicious.

Chipotle Cheddar Dip

1 1/2 cup mayonnaise
3/4 cup sour cream
1 whole chipotle pepper, finely chopped (more to taste)
1-2 tsp. of the adobo sauce the tinned chipotles come packed in
2 Tbsp. onion flakes
3/4 cup packed shredded-and-chopped aged cheddar cheese
1/4 cup chopped cilantro

Mix all ingredients in a bowl and allow flavours to meld for at least an hour before serving. Great as a nacho sauce, vegetable dip or cracker spread. Also great as a sandwich spread.

Needle bouquet

This makes me happy. 

Knitting needles

We decided that the "quiet activity room" of arts & crafts at next week's Suzuki Valhalla Institute would be enriched by some knitting needles and yarn and an invitation to contribute to the Knit-a-Squillion challenge. So we set about making a bunch of knitting needles for kids and parents to make use of, according to the directions in Melanie Falick's wonderful "Kids Knitting" book.

At the hardware store we purchased a couple of dozen 48" lengths of 3/16" hardwood doweling. We cut them into 9.5" lengths and used a pencil sharpener to make points on one end. Then we sanded them to smooth the shafts and shape and smooth the points to perfection.

Next we set about making knobs for the end out of polymer clay. Some of our polymer clay was left over from 1990, so it had a tendency to adopt the consistency of toast crumbs and needed a lot of kneading! Patience eventually resulted in a couple of dozen pairs of funky and quite fetching knobs which we then poked onto dowels and baked to cure.

After the knobs were hard, we removed the dowels from them and did the final finishing of the needles. We used aniline dyes on a few pairs of but left most of them natural. We oiled the shafts with walnut oil, and repeated this a couple of times. The oil will cure over the next few days. We filled the hole in each knob half full of PVA craft glue, inserted the end of a needle and left them to dry.

They look really enticing. They're not as teflon-smooth as $10 pairs of high-end bamboo needles, and the knobs are a little heavier than I'd prefer, but they'll certainly do the trick for basic projects.

Macro perspective

I put the magnifying lenses on the DSLR camera the other day and Fiona had fun shooting up-close photos around the garden. A change in perspective is truly magical.

Thyme

Parsley

Lupin top

Rosemary

Hawkweed

Hens & Chicks

Market upgrades

 It's market day tomorrow. Sophie got an order for 20 lollipops, so she's been busy stockpiling. Her dad made her a lollipop display stand and we are all very smitten with the fetching rainbow of colours. From left to right: raspberry, tangerine, lemon, peppermint, anise, root beer, maple, butter rum, cinnamon ... and repeat.

She's got new creative ideas she's planning to try with the popular lollipops. Stay tuned for special Canada Day editions of the lollipops, and a limited edition premium version.

Fiona ramped up her tea production this week. She is completely self-sufficient at mixing, weighing, heat-sealing the bags, and packaging. She gets help from me printing the labels from my desktop publishing program and punching the holes in the top (her hands aren't strong enough to work the hole punch).

New this week for her is this display stand. It's just a piece of scavenged pressboard with some holes drilled in it for wire pegboard hangers. Stuff we found in the bottomless pit of Chuck's hoardings of home repair stuff in the shop. And now she has a lovely vertical display which does her lovely packaging justice.

The easy pickings of wild ginger are almost over for the year, so she is beginning to think about the next tea blend. Lots of herbs are growing in the garden, but they're nowhere near ready for harvest yet. So she's considering some fruity blends and wild-crafted wellness teas. We have a huge collection of wild rose petals and dried rhubarb, some red clover, mint and nettles. We also have some organic ingredients we've purchased: sencha and white peony teas, red rooibos, vanilla bean pods, coconut and other toasted nuts, chamomile, orange and lemon peel. The possibilities are endless!

Purple, purple and more purple

Erin has left us. Her cabin is now officially vacant, and so a grand reshuffling of rooms is taking place. My teaching studio will move into the cabin that Erin used to occupy. I hope that I can winterize it a little better, as violins do not tolerate the low temperatures that teenagers tolerate.

Sophie is moving into what was the teaching room in the basement. It's tiny, but it will fit the essential furniture. And more importantly it will be all hers, and with a little bit of extra privacy due to being on the lower floor.

The walls used to be a warm grey. But when I stopped quickly for dog food last week unbeknownst to me Sophie made a beeline for the paint chips in the back of the store. Once I had dropped Erin off at the airport she presented me with her choices. Dark, medium and light purples. So be it. She is working really hard on this room. It's going quickly. She'll be ready to move her bed down by tomorrow.

Which will leave Fiona in a room of her own as well. With the lower bed removed from the cramped L-shaped arrangement we had before, she'll actually have room to walk through the room, and the lower space under the loft bed will become a proper desk space. Her redecorating plans are less ambitious at this point but she is turning over a few ideas. I expect that once she can see the space she'll come up with some plans. In the meantime the co-operation between Sophie and Fiona in all the work required for this room-shuffling and redecorating is amazing to see.

Second market and other bits of news

Quick update from the second market. Despite the dreary weather (cool and raining on and off all day) Fiona sold out her teas again quickly (proceeds: $25, initial investment now recouped), and Sophie, who had taken huge quantities of candy with her, sold almost all of it. Just a couple of lollipops left, one gift jar, half a dozen loonie bags. I think she sold about $80 worth. She was thrilled but also a little overwhelmed to think how much candy-making this project will require to be sustainable on a weekly basis.

We will have to skip the next market as we'll be taking Erin to put her on a plane to NYO that day, so that gives both girls some breathing room in the production schedule. This is particularly good as Sophie is waiting on a Canada Post delivery of more natural flavour oils and lollipop sticks, and with the rotating postal strikes that are currently taking place it may take a few extra days to arrive.

I managed to get out to meet my running group for a quick 10k this morning. I've joined a running club based 45 km to the east of here, in the hope of being able to join some of their Friday long trail runs. (And, truth be told, because I wanted to be able to buy one of their awesome club jackets). I did a fabulour long run with them three weeks ago; then Beauty and the Beast got in the way. More on that later. Anyway, today they were coming this way to run a trail almost in my backyard. I ran out along the trail to meet them at their end, then ran back with them as far as the spur back to my house. It was a soggy run what with the rain, and I ran at the front because I had to be home soon, so it was fast and tiring. But I made it back in time to get Sophie and Fiona to the market.

From there Erin and I went to a meeting at the school. We're all trying to perform a delicate dance: keeping everything kosher and honest, supporting Erin in her ambitious musical plans, letting her live elsewhere to get musical training, while also maximizing her chance of cleaning up a bunch of post-secondary scholarship money next spring through the local school district, and getting her all the academic requirements she needs for admission to her program of choice in 2012. So she's officially "travelling" to Montreal a few times next year (and also, incidentally, travelling to China with her Montreal-based orchestra). Her permanent address is here in New Denver, and for reasons of scholarship eligibility her school enrollment will be split between the bricks-and-mortar school she has "attended" the past three years and the DL program that her siblings are part of. She'll write her midterms in January, after the China trip, when we'll have her home for a family Festivus celebration (in lieu of Christmas).

Ah, yes, Beauty and the Beast. Erin and I for some strange reason enthusiastically volunteered to commit to playing in the pit orchestra for a full-scale high school and community production of this musical in Nelson. The orchestra was all adults, mostly very good amateurs or semi-pros, all volunteering. Great bunch of people. Erin's first experience playing in a pit, and it was a true pit ... a tiny cave directly beneath the stage, wired with mics and monitors and such. It was so much fun! Partly to have the time together playing reasonably challenging music mostly solo on each of the two violin parts, partly because of the feisty, fun company of the other players in the pit, and partly because of the trickle-down energy and enthusiasm of the cast, many of whom were friends of Erin's. But my, it was a lot of driving and a lot of time.

Now Erin is back to practicing Mahler, Richard Strauss, Tchaikowsky and Shostakovich symphony music and Haydn quartet movements in preparation for her NYO summer. We're still working on Montreal plans but she was enthusiastically accepted into the orchestra she wanted to join, and things are looking more hopeful all of a sudden on the accommodation front. It also looks like her current slate of school courses, plus the 3 she'd planned to do next year, will satisfy McGill University when she applies next winter.

First Market

It was a cool day with a little bit of sun and the first Friday Market of the year was fairly slow. The late spring and cool temperatures have kept the tourists away, and the kids are still in school.

Still, business was brisk at the Tea & Sweets stall. Fiona sold out of all the teas she had packaged up. Sophie, who had brought considerably more stock, sold about two thirds of what she had. After paying the Market Society 10% they are both about half way to paying off their start-up costs.

What they learned: People really like loose-leaf tea around here. Raspberry is the candy flavour of choice, while lemon was relatively scorned. Lollipops go like hotcakes when there are kids around, and that demand will escalate greatly in July and August when the schools are out.

What I learned: Fiona and Sophie are excellent prioprietors. They were cheerful and attentive, and when asked they affably explained their ingredients and production methods.

People were very impressed by their customer service, packaging and by the quality of what they were offering. And they were kind and encouraging.

First teas

Tea packaging proceeds. Two herbal blends have been bagged and labelled. She's going to start out with just these two, plus "pot-sized teabags"of green sencha / wild-ginger intended for iced tea.

She's decided to sell six teabags or 20 g of loose tea for $2.50. The origami paper was her idea and I think it looks lovely.

Candy shop

Sophie has been busy making candy. From left to right:

Root beer, mint, anise, maple, tangerine and lemon.

Next up: butter rum, raspberry and cinnamon.

She's also making lollipops which are turning out very nicely. She can do three large lollipops from each batch of candy, leaving the quantity shown in the lemon drop jar for lozenges. Each batch takes about 45 minutes from start to finish, including clean-up.

More market research

Now it's Fiona's turn. She has been persistent in her desire to create teas to sell at the market this summer. So far she's working on two blends.

The first is a tropical chai featuring organic black assam tea, red pepper flakes, toasted coconut, cardamom and cinnamon. Don't snicker: it's inspired by a boutique tea blend we love and Fiona's version 2.0, with the cinnamon toned down, is remarkably good.

The second is well on its way to being a winner. It's a Kootenay herbal blend based on wild ginger and rose hips. It needs some citrusy overtones, and so far she's used lemon peel; ultimately the hope would be to use organic lemon balm from our garden, but with the snow just barely gone it isn't exactly ready for harvest yet. I think it might also benefit from a hint of our peppermint, but we'll see. The wild ginger was fresh-picked in the forest today, but we went through the bother of drying it to test out how it would retain its flavour and release it in the tea. It works really well with the rose hips.

Sophie's Sweets

The Friday Market in town will be starting up again soon, and Sophie has identified a market niche that she wishes to fill. She has been busily researching candy-making and doing various experiments. She decided that although kids would probably buy a few lurid-coloured lollipops at a dollar apiece, there's likely a broader market to be tapped into if she appeals to adults meandering around appreciating the quaintness of the market and the simplicity of its mostly natural products.

So her plan is to focus on old-fashioned hard candy, using simple and mostly natural ingredients: sugar, corn syrup, natural flavours where possible and a bit of vegetable-based colouring where warranted.

She's made three test batches so far. The first proved definitively that our candy thermometer is not accurate unless deeply immersed in large-volume recipes: some heavily carmelized (i.e. somewhat burnt) peppermint candies were the result. The laser thermometer has been perfect. The root beer flavouring produced a divine result, and though the maple she tried today was a little too subtle (add more next time!) it otherwise worked nicely. We've tried a few approaches to shaping the candy. So far the best method, in that the syrup remains workable long enough for a 12-year-old to complete production, is to drizzle it in powdered sugar, let cool slightly, then roll, twist and snip the cooling candy into individual pillow-shaped candies. The final product has a nice, rustic look to it that fits with her marketing plan.

Today she and I have been talking about and experimenting with packaging and presentation options. Kraft paper gives a nice look, I think. Wetted down it can be easily tied over old jar lids. The matching labels look lovely. The smaller 8 oz. jar shown in the photo is about the right size for a large gift jar and holds about 170 gm of candy. She'll also need smaller jars: we hope to recycle 4 oz. baby food jars. We have a pump'n'seal thingummy that does a great job of evacuating air from jars and sealing out the moisture that makes the candies get sticky and soft over time. So far the jars we've sealed have kept their candy nice and dry even in our warm humid kitchen.

Fiona's plan is to blend loose-leaf herbal teas and exotic chai blends to sell at the market. She is hoping to grow a lot of herbs and before too long we will be heading into the forest in search of wild ginger to harvest.

Festival Week at School

Last week Sophie and Fiona went to school. It was the week of the Arts and Writers Festival at the local public school, the one that umbrellas us as homeschoolers under their DL program. So they were invited to join the school classes for the week. We looked over the line-up of offerings and the girls were keen. There was felting, and pottery, and puppetry, and an aboriginal story-telling event, and an art workshop. Monday and Tuesday were fully-scheduled days. Wednesday and Thursday the festival comprised just an hour or two. Wednesday evening was the Coffee House, an exhibit of artwork and roster of music and puppetry performances and readings of creative writing. Tuesday afternoon and evening included two local performances by Corazón, one at the school and one at the hall, which we all attended of course. Soccer practice and violin lessons had to squeezed in there somehow too. It would give us a taste of the time constraints school would place upon us if they were attending full-time, though as Sophie pointed out, we we would be trying to fit school into a pre-existing homeschooling life, which would make it more of a juggle.

This was the first almost-full-time taste of school for both girls. Way back in 2004 Erin gave school a try for a couple of days in order to find out if it was something she'd like to consider for herself full-time the following year. I quietly spent a couple of days worrying that she might be keen on enrolling, but it turned out she wasn't. With Fiona and Sophie attending last week I wasn't at all worried that they'd decide they wanted to attend school. I don't really worry about that sort of thing any more. But I was curious what they would think about the whole experience.

Fiona joined the Grade 3/4's for the week. With her January birthday she's "old" for Grade 2 and a much better match socially and intellectually for the 3/4 class than the K/1/2 group, and fortunately the teachers knew her well enough to recognize that. She got along famously with the group and had a lovely time, especially enjoying the puppetry and pottery. She would love to attend something like that every week but recognized that normal school is not like the Festival week. She said "If I ever did school it would definitely just be for the socializing." While in the past I've tried to keep my kids out of most grade-levelled curriculum materials, in some ways it is nice that Fiona is aware that she's doing Grade 6 science and math content: she realizes that a regular school classroom would not allow her the flexibility to pursue these areas of passion at a level that challenges her.

Sophie and her best bud (also unschooled) joined the Grade 5/6/7's for the Festival week. They had fun together, typically working side by side and pairing up for collaborative projects. I'm not sure Sophie would have enjoyed it as much without her friend there. The social dynamic in the older portion of that classroom has a strong peer-oriented girl culture running through it, and Sophie doesn't resonate terribly well with those kids. Still, she had a good experience with the activities, though not compelling enough to pine for even the social and enrichment-activity-related perks of school.

The coffee house was long, crowded and tiring after a number of long days, but it was a nice way to cap off the week. And I admit that it is nice to feel a bit more connected to the community of other families and children. Fiona followed up with a playdate on the weekend with a new friend, and I saw a lot of nice people I don't see very often.

Falling Sand

Way back in 2006 Noah discovered Owen Piette's "Falling Sand Game." These silly little desktop diversions were quite the rage at the time. You sprinkle virtual coloured sand in a little window on your desktop and it falls, slowly or quickly, depending on which colour you choose. Lovely zen-like patterns form in the heaps at the bottom of the window.

WXSand, Piette's version, was the first open source game that Noah started tinkering with. The script containing the definitions of the various types of sand was infinitely modifiable. We went on a lovely computer-free vacation to Texada Island that fall and the whole time we were there, tide pooling and kayaking and playing family games Noah's little 9-year-old brain was turning as he amassed ideas for new elements he intended to code for WXSand.

Fast forward to this year. Noah has been attending Community Gaming Night, a biweekly open session at one of the community halls where several computers and a gaming console or two are set up and kids, teens and adults are welcome to drop in and play and learn and socialize. I practically had to drag Noah to the first session last fall (he's still incredibly resistant to new things) but he quickly became Gaming Night's biggest fan and a major motive force. The organizer has increasingly put him in charge of portions of the evening. He's now choosing most of the games for the children's portion (the first three hours, devoted to games suitable for all ages) and providing input for the teen/adult session that follows. He's been granted admin privileges on the computers and does much of the installing and configuring.

And because he's providing software for the younger set, recently he has been pulling out some of the really old games he enjoyed when he was 8 through 12. They're mostly available for free now, which is great for a community program running on a shoestring budget. They run on old machines. And some of them are remarkably unique and clever, considering the limited computing power they require.

For old times' sake he pulled out WX Sand a couple of weeks ago. And he decided it would be fun to do some scripting for it again. He discovered that he's many times more efficient and effective at coding than he was back then and is much more adept at devising logical workarounds for conceptual problems (like, trying to use a game devised as a pretty diversion made up of falling pixels into a simulation of a steam engine, or an electrical circuit).

He had such fun creating funky new elements to perform weird functions in the game that I suggested he take the script in to show our liaison teacher at our monthly meeting where we report on what the kids have been busy learning. According to the DL course structure that we set up for Noah this year, he's enrolled in high school courses in the InfoTech subject area. I figured it would be useful evidence of learning, and Noah agreed. He loaded up is thumb drive with the game and his home-made script, and headed into the school.

You need to understand that our DL teacher is a science and math guy. So this was right up his alley. Using code and mathematical parameters to simulate physical and chemical reactions between various substances? Couldn't have been more his kind of thing! Noah loaded the program and the script and started explaining, demonstrating, tweaking code on the fly, commenting on his approach and logical problem-solving strategies, highlighting, using metaphors and simplifications to describe for his DL teacher how and why he had used certain approaches. They huddled together, talking and trying things out. The teacher was clearly very impressed.

Finally, after about twenty minutes, it was lunch time and they sat back to kind of wrap things up.

"Do you want a copy of the coding I did?" Noah asked, unsure as we all are about how much hard evidence of learning this new DL program is required to amass.

"Actually," the DL teacher confessed, smirking conspiratorially ... "I'd kind of like a copy of the whole game."

And so Noah loaded WXSand and his vastly appended script file of physics elements on the school laptop. I am pretty sure this has nothing whatsoever to do with Evidence of Learning. I think it has to do with one pretty nifty DL teacher whose gaming and scientific interests were genuinely piqued by what Noah had showed him.

Milky swirls

Fiona is enjoying learning how to use iMovie and iStopMotion. We made this one together. A couple of her other projects are on her blog.

Sophie at the wheel

Sophie has been coming to Nelson with us on Tuesdays for the past month. The older kids have Corazón rehearsal on Tuesdays, so I end up driving four teens to rehearsal and back. Fiona likes to come along for the pleasure of being out and about. I do the grocery shopping and run errands. Sophie usually likes to stay home and enjoy afternoons alone or with her friend Ali. But recently she's been taking some pottery classes at Kootenay School of the Arts, so she's been coming along on Tuesdays.

Sophie really likes working with clay. She'd done a series of kids' clay classes four years ago and had always wanted to do more. She'd particularly hoped for a chance to learn to use a pottery wheel. The course for 8- through 13-year-olds at KSA seemed perfect. With a dozen or more pottery wheels on site, they promised to let the kids try out using them. The 8 - 13 age range proved sticky, though, since it included both Sophie and Fiona. And while Sophie had decided this class was definitely her thing, Fiona naturally wanted to be part of it too -- Fiona is always keen to try anything! This is the one little corner of sibling rivalry in our family right now: Sophie really wants her out-of-home activities to be ventures in independence and a life apart from family. Having a little sister, even a precocious cheerful one whom you love, tagging along kind of ruins that feeling.

How fortunate, then, that it turned out the set of classes was being offered twice: once in January/February and once in March. Sophie took the first session. Fiona's classes start next week.

Sophie's instructor was very impressed with her work, but we hadn't really seen what she was turning out until today. Here are the finished products:

I'd really like to see her continue with this interest. She obviously loves it. I think her pieces are awesome! The question is how we can support her in it, short of spending thousands of dollars on wheel and kiln. We have a couple of ideas. Time will tell.

Bed stars

My little one has turned 8. What an amazing person she is. So affable, curious, capable, thoughtful, resilient, incisive. Easy. And bright. Wow.

I made her a couple of gifts. One was a hardcover journal modelled after the books in her favourite TV series ever, the 21st-century re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica. That was fun to make. I hadn't made a book with a case binding in years and I had to look up a few of the details. I was pleased with how it turned out. Erin's reaction was priceless. (She's the other huge BSG fan in the family.) She saw the book, her eyes lit up with recognition, she blurted out "Hey, that's a ... Why didn't I ... hmm..." and then drifted off into good-humoured but envious silence. Yup, kiddo, this one's for Fiona. You got your mom-made BSG military fatigue shirt set for your birthday a couple of weeks ago, don't complain. She didn't. She laughed as hard as the rest of us at her reaction.

What Fiona loved best was the stars. She sleeps in the lower berth of a bunk bed in the room she and Sophie share. She stares up at the slats beneath Sophie's mattress and told me a while ago that she wished she had a picture of the sky to put up there. I decided it should be a night sky. I bought a huge black sheet of foam core board and got out at star chart and a bottle of glow-in-the-dark paint. (Every creative family should have a bottle of phosphorescent paint. It's what we used to make Fiona's butterfly costume glow in the dark last Hallowe'en, and it's been fun in a few other applications too over the years. I don't know where you buy it; our bottle is so old I've forgotten where we got it.)

I put the stars on as dots of glow-in-the-dark paint. I didn't go for mathematical accuracy. I tried to reproduce most of the major northern hemisphere constellations in recognizable shapes and in the correct general orientation, but scale isn't accurate, nor are their relative positions totally proper. Fiona likes looking for constellations, so I labelled the constellations using a silver-grey pencil crayon. With a flashlight pointed at the board you can spotlight a group of stars and see the configuration and name of their constellation. With the flashlight off you see just the "stars" and you can practice picking out the constellations. The photo doesn't do it justice: it only shows half the area and it's blurry due to the 30-second time-exposure. It's quite lovely to look at. (I can say that because it's not my design. I just copied what's writ across the heavens.)

It was a successful birthday. She was so excited all morning that she had to resort to jumping jacks and practicing her violin to contain some of the energy she had. She had chosen to have an afternoon tea party at her grandma's house as part of the celebration. This entailed a lot of snow-blowing and shovelling to release the van from its tomb of snow. It has been impossible to get up and down our laneway for more than a week, so the poor van has been parked up at the highway, not used much and bombarded with the sprayed snow of the plows and with the relentlessly falling-from-the-sky stuff too. There was a good 40 cm of depth covering it, and more than that on the ground around it. After we'd got rid of all that, it was left sitting on a sheet of ice and a bit of icy snow and it took a fair bit of sanding, digging and pushing (by the three older kids) to get it unstuck and able to move forward. Finally we made it to grandma's. We drank tea, ate pumpkin gingersnap cheesecake (adorned by marzipan pumpkins made by Sophie and Fiona) and she opened gifts. It was nice to get out. We've been at home a lot since the driveway got un-navigable. We then returned home for a dinner of Shepherd's Pie -- one pan with meat for the three omivores and one vegetarian version for the three vegetarians. And now it's time for bed, and a view of bed stars.

Companion cube

Fiona and I had a lot of fun making this for Noah. We made a five-sided box from mat board and cut a hole for the kleenex. Then we used foam sheets to make the shapes to cover it with.

If you aren't familiar with the Portal computer game, the term "companion cube" will mean nothing to you, but maybe you can appreciate our creativity anyway.