Isaac is 10

Double digits! Things are getting serious now!

Isaac was lucky enough to have his birthday land on the weekend this year. While that did mean he was more resistant to doing his chores than normal, it did mean that he got to spend a significant part of the day playing his new Kirby videogame. 

As requested, large pancake with his age in chocolate chips. Lucky he wanted chocolate chip pancakes for dinner as well so that made food prep for the day easy for me.

Sadly, the candles were too heavy for just one cupcake so he had to suffer his way through TWO cupcakes this evening. What a rough day for this kid!

More birthday fun to come next weekend with friend and family parties. 

Letter Jacket

I will not disclose on the blog how much this glorious item of clothing cost, but I will say that it took the combined resources of his WA family and might be his Christmas present for the rest of his life. 

Kidding. Okay, 90% kidding.

It took a long time to get here, but he is super happy to have it. 

If You Give Two Kids AI

Our Chromecast has an interesting feature: you can make your own screensaver images by giving AI verbal prompts. Ben and Isaac discovered this feature today. I am hoping that what people chose to create is not similar to a Rorschach test!!

Advent Calendars

I splurged this year and bought each of the kids their own toy advent calendars. Time crept up on me and so I nearly forgot to hand them out this evening. I had to text Josh to come over to get his. Hopefully these are a fun activity this month.

November on FB

Pro tip: change the time on the alarm clock of the child who uses it to wake up early to watch video game YouTube videos THE NIGHT BEFORE when the hour is "falling back" 🤦‍♀️

What a shit show

For many, the irony is they will get what they actually voted for.

For the rest of us, the tragedy is that we'll get what others actually voted for.

Mushroom Walk

What do you do after a sumptuous Thanksgiving meal and a day of eating the leftovers? Go walk in the woods, of course. And take your cranky kid who has spent waaayyyy too much time on screens. You can also turn that frown upside down if you yell a part of male anatomy as you are taking pictures of him. 

It also helps if you give him something to look for to distract him from his separation from electronics. Given the time of year, we looked for mushrooms. Some of our favorites:

Mushroom Hunters 2024

Thanksgiving

We've done this two years in a row now so I think it's officially a tradition! Isaac and I get some pre-meal wiggles out by taking a walk around the neighborhood and picking up trash. Now that I think about it, it's actually impressive that we've had two Thanksgivings in a row when it wasn't raining. Hopefully that keeps up in the future. 

It is always interesting to see what trash we find around. Among other things, this time we found two glow sticks and a ridiculous amount of broken glass. 

Cody and Doug (well, mostly Cody) cooked the meat this year. They bought a smoker and were excited to try it out. Like a good chefs, they did a trial run and smoked a turkey a few weeks ago. I usually try new recipes for holiday meals and then a significant number of them are inedible. However, the turkey they made was delicious and the brisket they made was amazing as well. 

They also brought mashed potatoes, stuffing, pumpkin pie, and sweet potato pie. I made a crustless spinach quiche, creamed spinach, crustless pumpkin pie, and chocolate cream pie. Needless to say, we have leftovers.

We took a break between the main meal and dessert to play a loud and long game of ImaginIff. We missed having Nana and Aunt Rachel here with us, but they'll be back for Christmas.