Pizza in the making

Noah made sure his homemade calzone did not burn - placing himself squarely in front of the oven, watching patiently as it baked to perfection.

School

Bob and Noah are reviewing geography, using Noah's hand drawn map on the whiteboard. So proud of Noah for persevering in the daily practice of drawing.

Salad Chef or Ninja Noah?

Noah found a new way to chop the vegetables for the salad the other night. Throw them on the blade of our sharpest knife. He had fun, and the vegetables got chopped. It was a bit messy, but that is why we have brooms, right?  Especially, since he happily cleaned up after his salad makings.   Look closely and you may see the orange pepper floating in air...

Winter is Here

Winter arrived, the temperature dropped, the wind picked up, and the snow fell. Noah and Mama pulled out the winter gear and shoveled the snow for P.E.

Weather Forecast Rain for the Weekend, it must be Boys Scout Camping Weekend

Bob and the boys headed out for the first Boy Scouts Camping for the year. The proposed activity was sledding, but it turned into mud sloshing as it was raining. Fortunately, it is cabin camping this time. This was the first camp out in a very long time that neither boys had to prepare any food, it made packing up easy!

Box Man

Noah has always had a thing for boxes, cubbies, and holes. He loves to crawl in and hide. I cannot venture a guess for how often this blog has been graced by a partially disguised Noah. Here is the first one for this year! Although he is growing up, he is still a big kid at heart. How long will he be nimble enough to 'fold up' inside a small space? Only time will tell....

Christmas in January

Since we spent Christmas in Sweden, and we did indeed have some luggage restrictions, we decided to not bring gifts for ourselves with us on our trip, but rather celebrate when we got home. Our Brown Box tree had held up beautifully while we were away and the call of the boxes made unpacking and putting away bags, sorting and doing laundry, and clearing out backpacks and toiletry kits a swift business- once chores were complete it was time for Christmas.

It is sort of nice to have the tree disappear with the gifts, no needles to care for, no decorations that can break, and no need to crawl under the tree to water it. After our box bonanza, we enjoyed a quite Christmas dinner, albeit brief as the mysterious bug that had followed us caught up with Bob and he excused himself for bed. Is this a good enough excuse for not having any photos from our dinner?

Bob donned the Santa hat, the rest of us pulled out our redish sweaters

These flowers from our landlord did pretty well on our front porch for 10 days!

Here is to Carry on Bags

The boys each brought a roll-aboard bag to Sweden, not because they had so many clothes to bring, but so that they could safely transport back their Swedish candy loot. An oversight at Arlanda, singled out our bags for extra screening and the agent muttered, "ever heard of 7 kilos for your carry on?" I simply smiled and set out to rectify the mistake, and off we were with our airline approved size albeit maybe not airline approved weight of carry-ons.

Happy New Year

Iceland is known for its fascination with fireworks. The displays began early in the afternoon and continued long after the New Year had arrived. Maybe they were celebrating on Russian time, since the fireworks did not cease until early next morning.
The snow storm did not seem to stop anyone from going outside and blowing up boxes full of explosions. The boys had a ball running around setting off fuses and watching the sky light up in a million colors. Even fireworks have been adapted to the nordic climate and many used larger boxes filled with different fireworks linked together, so once the first fuse was lit, there was a chain reaction. This meant less running around in the cold, and more time enjoying.
Some anecdotal data on the amount of fireworks used in Iceland was in the excess of 600 tons - at least nobody will forget New Years Eve 2015.