• First let me say – sun or snow – will one of you pa-lease make an appearance and bring some light into our dreary January. 

    So the beloved penguin backpack is not so beloved anymore. Snif. A lot of the kids at school have messanger style bags and Bea has been asking for one. So the same book that had the penguin backpack pattern also had this pattern. I hope she likes it.

  • Another weekend adventure for Brian and Bea. This time to a nearby town called Kusnacht and some ruins.

  • We made a marble run:

    We were inspired by this:

  • Bea’s first year of school has been hard, very hard. It has all felt so heavy and I’ve felt unable to deal with it so many times. So when we get a good and encouraging note from her teacher it makes us all want to dance.

    We’re not out of the woods yet, but today was a good day.

  • This is the first year in quite a while that I haven’t gotten a Stendig calandar. But since I’m not taking photos of a baby on one this year I thought I would save some money and just print out some calendar pages for our wall. This has lead to a lot of talk about the months.

    And another bit of color that we created this week – new play dough. Oh how I love playing with warm play dough – and kneeding in the color is sooo satisfying. Bea and I set up a cookie shop.

    Hope you’re having a colorful week too!

  • Technorama – what a cheesy name for a nice science museum. We went on Sunday – we were desparate to do something fun and avoid the rainy weather. 

    There were lots of buttons to push:

    Big bubble making:

    Bea’s favorite part were these complex marble run type things. Wooden balls went through chutes and you had to pull levers or tilt things or push knobs or even ride a teeter totter to get them to go up and around. They were all made entirely of wood. Hard to get a good picture but here they are:

    KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

    Good fun for a yucky day:

  • I made a shirt for Claire from an old shirt of Brian’s. The pattern was Burda 9503 and it gave me trouble. I couldn’t figure out what the pattern was telling me to do for the cuffs so after ripping out what seemed like a million stitches I just cut them off and hemmed them. It turned out fine in the end. I love making things for the girls out of Brian’s old clothes.

    Before:

    After:

  • So we can do a parody of this video (see below):

    *not really – sorry grandmas

  • The trees at our little park along the lake are pruned heavily each year. I think they are Planetrees. I should have paid better attention when my Dad-in-law was here. Anyway they pruned the trees today and the branches were discarded all over the ground – waiting to be collected tomorrow. Bea had a great time pretending to be a bird in a nest. The branches were really beautiful, green, straight, strong. I wanted to haul a bunch home and make I don’t know what with them. But then I thought better of it. 

  • This probably isn’t very amusing to anyone but her Mummy. But here she is having a snack of crackers with nutella on top – our Chocolatey Claire.