Taking the Scenic Route

Set her up with an easel, and this is what she does.  Don’t get the beaver kite, but it did make me smile.

hee hee

Zane spent a good chunk of time on the computer, then showed me the list he made.  It is to turn the wi-fi/internet on his DSi.  He wanted it on, but didn’t know how to do it, so he looked it up online.  Apparently, the place he found, assumed you didn’t have a computer at home and started with “go to the library”.  He was insisting that we go to the library until I convinced him that we could do it from home, but to wait for Dad to come home and he would help him.  This is the note he made:

And Zach helping him go through it to get it hooked up.

He was feeling very happy when it was on.

‎”This is America, where a white Catholic male Republican judge was murdered on his way to greet a Democratic Jewish woman member of Congress, who was his friend. Her life was saved initially by a 20-year old Mexican-American gay college student, and eventually by a Korean-American combat surgeon, all eulogized by our African American President.” Mark Shields, PBS (Happy MLK Day) -Sydney

Eilysh gave Zora the Cabbage Patch Touching Tunes Kids game for her Birthday.  It was a vintage game they had found at a second hand store.   There were a bunch of different games with the one system, and it featured a thing where you had to each touch a spot on the playing field, and touch the other person for the tune to play.  Zora loved it.  (not a game I want to play a lot, but she loved it, and that is what is important).  It was a cute game, good for the preschool set.  This one kept getting stuck on the “Happy Birthday” song, which delighted Zora, but made the grown-ups want to use a hammer on the thing after a while. lol.

a picture I found of the whole thing online:

Trying out one of the Christmas gifts from Dawn.  Mario-themed Yahtzee.  The kids both loved it.  I do understand the comments I saw online after playing it.  The pictures start rubbing off in the first playing, so I am going to have to take some clear fingernail polish to cover all the sides of the die before we play it again.  I also took some foam and lined the box so it wasn’t as loud.  That seemed to work really well.  Then, after trying it once, we discovered that the little score card was too tiny for Zane’s ability to write, so for this time, I scanned it in and enlarged it.  Later, after discovering some misprints that unnerved Zane, I remade the scorecard on my computer and printed it out in a full page version.  Seems like a lot of work, but worth it for a game that we all enjoy.

The new scorecard in .pdf, for anybody who ran into the same issues:

MarioBrosYahtzeeScorecard

Zane took the game very seriously.

After playing a few rounds, Zora got more interested in drawing pictures than playing the game. lol.

The first birthday in many, many years that we celebrated on the actual day.

We met my parents and Steve & Nora at Il Vincino, my favorite spot, for my birthday dinner.  It was, as usual, awesome.

During the day I kept noticing Zane taking pictures of himself with his mouth weird and doing other odd things.  I couldn’t figure out what he was doing.  While we were at the restaurant he kept working, finally producing these hilarious masterpieces with his DSi.  Cool!

Zora made a “house” in the space between the sofa and loveseat and my desk.  Throughout the day she keeps dragging things into her house…stuffies, play food, play dishes, pillows, blankets…I am not sure how much stuff she is going to manage to stuff into that small space, but she is certainly getting a lot in there.     She worked all day to get it ready for Eilysh’s visit in the evening.

Zane recently discovered that his DSi takes photos and is showing it to Alex and Cody.