Birthday, Christmas

In brief, traveling backwards in time: M had a birthday party with his friends, for the first time ever. It was a big pain and took a lot of time to prepare, but the kids all had a great time! It was a Lego Power Miners party. Lego should be paying me for advertising. Power Miners are on the hunt for crystals, but have to watch out for rock monsters. Here the kids are tossing dynamite beanbags at a rock monster.
Although I didn't intend it that way, Nathan ended up running the party games, while I chatted with the moms and took care of E.
M did have a party on the actual day, also. He asked for chocolate cake with green icing.

The famous Christmas morning entrance. They were much more excited than they look, I promise.

still alive!

Hi, everyone! My apologies for the long hiatus. I'll be posting pictures soon, but let me just say that we're all doing well. With chicken pox for all the kiddies and a long Christmas break, we've been a bit busy. Christmas was great -- I made piles of enchiladas, which really hit the spot and may be a new holiday tradition at our house. We had just the right number of presents under the tree, enough to be exciting but not so much that we started wondering about our consumption habits. Best presents included: E's new baby doll which she loves and has already lost an arm (I'll repair it soon, but it is pretty funny to see her play with the loose arm), V's slinky and Barbie jeep, M's legos and cool Sudoku kids game. We are currently buried under more than a foot of snow. I am very grateful for 4 wheel drive, and also that I don't live in Minnesota. This is by far the most snow we've seen in our 5 years here, and the temperature isn't expected to go above freezing anytime soon. The kids had a snowman making contest at school yesterday, in their house teams. That's right, the school has houses just like in Harry Potter and they recently extended the program so that even the little ones have a house. You know you wish you'd had one too.

Nathan's birthday

Now, for an even older event. Nathan had a birthday in November, too! We had all the traditional festivities, plus some bunny-shaped balloons.
For his sixth birthday (see the candles above -- 6 plus one to grow on), I gave Nathan tickets to the Pet Shop Boys concert last night. They're his favorite band, so it was quite serendipitous that they were coming into town at the right time. The show was great, lots of clever games with a bunch of white cubes on the stage. They projected movies onto the cubes, and arranged them in different configuration. Dancers threw them at each other during a song about a relationship gone wrong. They also wore cubes on their heads for much of the show. Quite cleverly, 2 of the 4 dancers/backup singers didn't show their faces until toward the end of the show. When revealed, they were twins with punk white-blond hair. They got a big cheer. The lead singer, Neil Tennant, sounded great. Seriously, I don't know how you can sound the same after so long. Their first hits were in '85 or '86, something like that. In fact, it was a great evening, with the downside of it being terribly cold! The arena is apparently a hockey arena, and wood was just thrown over the ice. Brrr. We were fine due to our winter gear, but I'd have worn warmer socks if I'd known!

E's first birthday

Yes, I'm a bit late posting. But, hey, I'm doing it now, right? Our busy little girl is a whole year old, and she had a lovely birthday party with the family. She was a bit sick at the time, so please ignore the red eyes. She's all better now.Cake! Mommy, Daddy, and the big sibs liked it. E did not. The icing made her fingers sticky, she tried to shake it off, and that was pretty much the end of it.
M and V helped with all the preparations. They were much more excited about the birthday party than E. I let them decorate her cake with a little help. Yes, that's a LOT of icing.
E's first experience with ribbon. We haven't put up the Christmas tree yet, or put out any presents, but I anticipate a lot of baby fun when we do.
This is probably the favorite toy, one of those classics. Animals pop up when you push the buttons or levers. The Tinky Winky in the background is pretty great too. He says stuff when you shake him, or even honks sometimes.
Bonus shot -- when traveling with the kids, I love to get candy/toy combinations. I visited the novelty candy section at ToysRUs this summer and found this gem -- the gummies glow! It was on clearance, possibly because no one else wants to eat something that glows, but I think it's pretty awesome. The tweezers have a red light that activates when you squeeze them, so they work with any clear gummy candy.

Let someone else pick

When Nathan and I were dating, we were both working full-time -- well, Nathan was working double-time or something like that, but normal full-time for him -- and we often had the same conversation on date night.

N: Where do you want to go for dinner?

M: I don't care. Where do you want to go?

N: I don't care either.

M: I don't want to decide. It's your turn to pick.

N: I don't want to decide either! Let's play paper-rock-scissors.

M: I don't even want to pick paper, rock or scissors.

I'm not sure about the paper-rock-scissors, but definitely not choosing the restaurant was the preferred option. I think we were so tired after a long week, that we just couldn't stand making one more decision. Not so much of a problem now; I've settled into the mom job, and I like to make ALL the decisions. Ha. That's only sort-of a joke.

But I have recently started a no-decision activity -- letting someone else pick my produce. There's a produce delivery service in town, and twice now I've bought a fruit box and vegetable box from them. I've also bought some things I actually chose myself ... the ready-to-eat haas avocados are worth using the service all by themselves. (If you have access to California avocados, be grateful.) Having someone else choose for me has actually been really good -- tonight we had eggplant parmesan, garlic bread and pomegranate for dinner. Not something I would normally throw together, but since I had to use up the eggplant, here you go. M got really excited about the pomegranate and talked all about how they are used in Jewish feasts. I think. He didn't have my full attention. Of course, I now have to use up the other 3 eggplants in the fridge. I left 2 weeks between orders, and all that was left in the fridge were 2 eggplants when the second shipment arrived. Hm. I'm thinking Indian food for the next eggplant dish ...

The picture is our favorite house in the neighborhood, at least when we have autumn colors. In an old house in Prague, all covered with vines ...

Halloween

There is a neighborhood here, next to the American-style school, where many kids go for classic trick-or-treating. It seriously is just like my childhood, except with 10x as many children. Our biggest attention-getter this year was V, as Princess Leia. Star Wars was a popular theme, we saw several Darth Vaders and one other Leia. V also got to go to a friend's "fancy dress" birthday party (that means costume party). Very exciting. I chatted with her little friend's teenage sisters for a minute when I dropped her off. They questioned V about Star Wars and I was a little embarrassed about the depth of her knowledge. What's sad is that she doesn't even like Star Wars that much -- as she says, "I only like the movie with the Ewoks." She did love her costume.
M says that we made the baby Chewbacca because she chews on everything. Too true. She was a little bundle of joy on the trick-or-treating outing, as long as we held her. She didn't want to ride in the stroller, contrary to her normal preference. We even let her collect some Halloween candy. The loot was pretty amazing this year. The variety! Russian-labeled crumbly milk stuff, sour patch kids, 8-inch marshmallow sticks, lollipops, chocolate eyeballs, lots of hard candy no one likes, caramelized biscuits, snickers, soft fruity candy from many countries, and some plastic vampire teeth. M got points for offering to share his first piece of candy with his dad, since he heard that Daddy likes KitKats.
Daddy carved the pumpkins, and Mommy made the Halloween cookies. I roasted the pumpkin seeds this year for the first time, and they turned out OK. Not sure if I'll bother next time.
M is definitely going to get the most use out of his costume, as he wears it almost every day. He told me he was a mixed up Star Wars character. Dressed in Jedi costume, but carrying a red light saber (because the red one is the coolest we have). He's also going to get the longest enjoyment out of the candy. V's is nearly gone already, which partially explains why it took her 2 hours to go to sleep last night. She's been playing word games lately, making everything start with V or B. My favorites are Vommy (that's me) and Flabby (not sure how it morphed that much, but it got a good laugh so Daddy may use this for a while). Ha.

what the kids said after school

Yesterday on the way to our swim club, I got an earful about Japan. M's been studying continents in school. This week they started Asia and his friend's parents came in to teach them about Japan. He told me about geography, population (Tokyo has as many people as the Czech Republic, did you know?), greetings, food, how to hold chopsticks. So that was yesterday. Very informative, and remarkably accurate. Today he started spouting off some Norwegian in the car, with a pretty great accent. "You are an airplane." "You are a pass gasser," or "You are a tooter."

Then at home, V gave me this line: "My tummy hurts because I ate too much healthy food." She's currently mad at me because I'm writing this -- she says it's not funny. It's apparently the only thing in life that's not funny, because she gets the giggles like crazy. A couple of friends were sitting with us at church on Sunday, helping out, and one was whispering to V, giving her a scarf to play with, etc. Every single thing we said made her giggle, which gave all of us a fit after a while. Some poor missionary was trying to slog through a talk in Czech at the time. We were rude (or wude if you speak V.)