Gobble Gobble

KITCHEN CAPERS: Though we didn't host a Thanksgiving dinner, we still cooked up a storm. We made a cheesecake, some Chex Mix, deviled eggs, assembled a couple of relish trays, made rolls and corn muffins and a really awesome green bean casserole and last, but not least, made some ridiculous turkey cupcakes.

The process involved making a dozen regular sized and mini sized cupcakes from scratch. Those were frosted with homemade chocolate frosting, The turkey's face was a candy corn stuck in the middle of the mini cupcake for its beak. A small strip of red fruit leather was its wattle, and I cut mini marshmallows in half for its eyes.

The tail feathers were candy corn "glued" (with royal icing) on a thing ginger cookie. Then it all had to be gingerly stacked on the big, base cupcake.
DINNER TIME: We loaded the turkeys and other stuff into the car and headed over to Columbia City, to the home of the kids' yoga buddy.

There was lots of free play time for the kids, and there were several "formal" games played, too (Apples to Apples, a couple of varieties of 'go fish,' Jenga, Round Up, and Toss Your Cookies to name a few). They also read a number of books.
The hosts had posted a paper tree on their dining room wall and guests got to write things they were thankful for on leaves and fruit that were hung on the tree. CJ's one and only contribution was "water." :) Essential to life, that's a good thing to be thankful for, I'd say!
Annabelle probably filled out a dozen leaves. Two of her "thankful for" things were 'ponys' and 'fireys' (fairys). :)

ANOTHER TRADITION: When we got back home the kids (and Kirby) settled onto the couch with pillows and blankets and watched "Charlie Brown Thanksgiving."

CJ just looooves the part where Lucy pulls the football out when Charlie Brown is trying to kick it. High comedy, indeed!

When the gang of Peanuts was gathered 'round the ping pong table 'feasting' on toast, popcorn, pretzels and jelly beans, CJ remarked, "That guy invited himself!"

Christian and I both laughed and explained to CJ "that guy" is a girl, Peppermint Patty.

Turkey Eve

I'M TOO SEXY FOR THIS SHIRT: Ceej and Bee had a protracted, wide ranging free-play session this morning. I just love listening to their dialogue and negotiations of the storyline.

At one point CJ came over to me and held up an Iron Man action figure sans removable armor and said, "Look, it's sexy Iron Man."

ROFL!

From his pre-dawn uppance to tuck-in-bed at night, CJ asks us for the definition of countless words. (One of these days I need to make a list of his inquiries.) A couple of days ago he asked us what 'sexy' means. We tried to explain. I guess some portion/version of that stuck, based on his declaration about Iron Man.

A few minutes later, Annabelle had to show me that one of the Pokemon characters had inherited Iron Man's shirt. ...

THANKSGIVING DYNAMICS: I found a great logic game online related to Thanksgiving.
The challenge is to seat everyone in the proper place at the table based on their like or dislike of certain foods and specific people. I scored 9,750 the first time I tried it. CJ had about half that his first time through, but beat my score by a bit on his second try.

I was in the shower when Annabelle came up to tell me she scored 1,500. I told her that wasn't very good and I knew she could do better and that I'd help her when I came downstairs.

Yeah, well when I came down, the score read 10,500! She'd told me the wrong number! I told her that was a terrific score and that I was proud of her. :)

CANDLE CRAFT: I had a couple of pint sized boxes sitting atop the recycling, some cranberries on the counter and freezing weather outside. Together, they were the perfect ingredients for a Thanksgiving table decoration.

We cleaned the carton and filled it with water. Then we dropped a couple of handfuls of cranberries in. Next, we wrapped a votive candle's bottom in foil and set it carefully amidst the cranberries. Then, we put it outside to let it freeze. On Thanksgiving we'll remove the carton and hopefully have a pretty (though temporary) candle holder.EVOLUTION OF KONG: This evening CJ and I read a story online about Donkey Kong's evolution. DK's had an interesting number of incarnations. He's been the good guy and the bad guy. CJ is looking forward to his newest title - Donkey Kong Country Returns.

MEASURING UP: We continued our new chapter dealing with units of measurement. Today's focus was estimating using meters and centimeters. Questions were like, 'Is a flagpole 5 meters high or 5 centimeters high?' CJ was really struggling with that. He just doesn't quite have his head wrapped around it yet. We started the session by measuring the kids, who are each a bit over 1 meter tall. But CJ wasn't using that knowledge to make inferences about other objects. I'm sure the switch will flip for him soon.

Frigid

ICE, ICE BABY: Today brought clear blue skies and c-c-c-old temperatures. The high today was 25° F.

The combination of snow and super cold has resulted in hardcore ice on many/most area roads. The news today was full of commuter horror stories from last night, including accounts of it taking 10 hours or more to get from south Seattle to Tacoma via I-5. Normally, that would be a 30-minute endeavor.

Fortunately, there was nowhere we HAD to be (music was canceled this week for Thanksgiving holiday and yoga was canceled due to the weather). We spent the majority of the morning indoors. One of the things we did to pass time was making some pine cone turkeys.

We'd collected the pine cones a couple of weeks ago at the kids' school in Shoreline. We collected some leaves a couple of weeks ago on a jaunt near Discovery Park. Finally, we combined them (along with some googly eyes, pipe cleaners and a little construction paper) to craft cute little turkeys.
CJ's is the one with the bigger eyes.

After turkey time, we headed upstairs (where it's a bit warmer). We've been doing our math upstairs for a couple of weeks now. This morning we started a new chapter in math - it's about units of measurement. It's a welcome break from the straight up addition and subtraction.

DORA DETRACTORS I've mentioned on these pages how the kids (now 6 and 7) seem to think they're sooo beyond Dora the Explorer (their BFF from the not too distant past). Last night out of nowhere, I recalled a Saturday Night Live cartoon where they made fun of Dora. I showed it to the kids. They think it's HYSTERICAL. It was the first thing CJ asked about today, before he was even vertical. "Can I watch 'Maraka'?!"

POWDER: Around noonish I thought it time to venture to the great outdoors. The kids had a rather tame snowball fight and then Rick joined us for some tame runs on slight slopes at Bayview Park.

Once Christian got home from work, he took the kids for a much longer, more adventurous sledding session. Here's some live action footage!

There's more rough footage here, on YouTube.

Snow Globe

UP ON THE ROOFTOP: Upon upping this morning, we saw that we had become part of a winter wonderland overnight. Except that, um, well it's not winter yet. It's not even Thanksgiving yet. ...There was just a dusting at 6 this a.m., but by midday, there were a couple of inches on the grounds.

THE CRANBERRIES: Still in PJs and wrapped in blankets, this morning the kids took a trip to a cranberry bog in Wisconsin thanks to "Wisconsin Cranberries: Not So Wild Anymore," a video from the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers.

It was chock full o' facts about the history of cranberries in what's now the United States and made for school-aged kids, so it was really spot on in content and tone. We learned about how cranberries grow (in bogs, not on bushes), about their blossoms (they look like pink popcorn!), that they used to be called crane berries (after the bird), that they're a good source of vitamin C, about how their harvested (wooden hand rakes in days gone bye, and by machines now), and how you can tell fresh cranberries from not-so-fresh (a berry bounce test).

I took a few notes during the film and gave the kids a written quiz afterward . Annabelle had paid very close attention to the film. CJ, well let's just say apparently he wasn't quite as into it. ;)

From Wisconsin, we hopped to the Ocean Spray Web site's kids' pages, where we found a fun pair of animated cartoons, "Wade and Wonderberry." Wade was a speechless pair of hip waders; Wonderberry was a chatty cranberry who wears a cape and has political aspirations. Interesting. Not a lot of educational content in this video, but the kids enjoyed watching it.

THE WHITE STUFF: We spent about an hour outside today. We took Kirby for a walk in the ever-increasing snow, and the kids helped me knock snow off our tropical plants (which really don't like the white stuff).

Annabelle and CJ both spent some time trying to catch snowflakes on their tongues, and they had a very low key snowball 'fight'.

SAVE THE TURKEYS: We ended up enjoying two books today that were definitely in the pro-turkey-life camp.

One was "Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving," by Dav Pilkey of "Captain Underpants" fame. It was a cute story about schoolkids taking a field trip to a turkey farm. Once the host/farmer shows them an ax and explains what's soon going down, the kids figure out a way to appropriate the turkeys off the farm.

The second book we read was "Gracias the Thanksgiving Turkey" is about a Puerto Rican boy living in New York who is given a live turkey for the upcoming Thanksgiving feast. However, the turkey becomes a pet whom he raises with the help of his family and neighbors.
I liked the book because there was a lot of beginning Spanish vocabulary woven into the text (and I couldn't help but notice that CJ and Annabelle knew all of those words thanks to their old friend Dora the Explorer).

VIRTUAL PLAYDATE This afternoon the kids had an online penguin powwow with "Pingazane," their old preschool pal who moved to San Diego. It's fun watching the three of them run around Club Penguin. Granted, it's a poor substitute for hanging out at a park, but it *is* interactive (they can converse in real time and wave at each other and dance together, etc.) to some degree, and it is completely real time, which is great.

APPLES TO APPLES: This evening, Rick came by (in anticipation of watching the Huskies basketball game). Before tipoff he spent some time playing Apples to Apples Jr. with the kids. What a fun game, and great for vocabularly building.