EM wanted to celebrate her birthday with a build-a-bear party. So she invited some of her friends to join her.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Teddy Bear Picnic
EM wanted to celebrate her birthday with a build-a-bear party. So she invited some of her friends to join her.
O Tannenbaum!
Christmas Tree hunting
Found the right one and loaded
Decorating the Christmas tree
A Beautiful Christmas TreeThanksgiving and Indianapolis
Nowadays, like the New Year's Bowl season, all holidays have been extended to include Pre-holiday and post-holiday events.
So for us Thanksgiving Day festivals began with a Thanksgiving Eve pie night over at some friends of my sister RS. There were a wide selection of pies available, but surprisingly, no pumpkin pie. (Perhaps this is because at the same event last year, over half the pies were pumpkin!). Of course AMD had made my favorite, blueberry pie, but there were other excellent entries as well. Part of pie night was an impromptu concert by JP and one of my sister's friends who was also a clarinetist.
Thanksgiving Day dawned cold, but not as cold as the previous week, brightening the prospect for a good Turkey Bowl. As is well documented in one of the books I read last year, "Mayflower", the original Thanksgiving festival included a series of games. Although the details were vague, as far as I could tell the most important of these games was one where 11 native tribesman squared off against 11 settlers using a stuffed turkey as a ball. Thus in honor of this tradition, no Thanksgiving Day would be complete without a game of touch football. For the folks in Indy, this first involved a game of ultimate frisbee, where our side was roundly defeated.
However, when the game switched to our traditional game, the scoring went much more in our favor. (Here we could use complex offensive schemes to neutralize our opponents speed and quickness.) However, JP switched to the other side, and twice managed to get wide open from a defender twice his size and slightly faster (don't ask me how!) and scored two key touchdowns.
Meanwhile, AMD was back at the ranch preparing a fabulous dinner with the able assistance of my sister. So around 3 pm, we all dug in and feasted.
The evening brought opportunities to play the European version of the Train Game and to watch the Titans demolish the Lions.
The following morning/afternoon, we settled on a hike at Eagle Creek park to walk off our previous day's gluttony. We found that skipping rocks on the frozen parts of the lake made a spectacular sound, which unfortunately we were unable to record for your amusement. We had intended to do geo-caching along the hike, but RS2's GPS unit was on the fritz. We attempted to use our car's GPS for this purpose, but while we found that we could get our GPS to display coordinates in a particular information screen, it wouldn't update in real time. Additionally it took us awhile to realize that the its decimal system was different than the decimal system that the Geocache site and that most hand-held GPS use, so that we would have to do the math to convert each time. So we failed to find a single geo-cache.
Friday night brought the Pacers game, Saturday morning brought a game of Exactica, won by me! (for the first time I actually bid correctly every single round) and then a wild game of true colors, where we discovered interesting nuances in our perceptions of each other.
Finally, it was time to head back home. The trip was uneventful and we made it in time for a final post-Thanksgiving pie night to round out the festivities.
[I hope to post pictures of all this, if I can discover where they are!]
So for us Thanksgiving Day festivals began with a Thanksgiving Eve pie night over at some friends of my sister RS. There were a wide selection of pies available, but surprisingly, no pumpkin pie. (Perhaps this is because at the same event last year, over half the pies were pumpkin!). Of course AMD had made my favorite, blueberry pie, but there were other excellent entries as well. Part of pie night was an impromptu concert by JP and one of my sister's friends who was also a clarinetist.
Thanksgiving Day dawned cold, but not as cold as the previous week, brightening the prospect for a good Turkey Bowl. As is well documented in one of the books I read last year, "Mayflower", the original Thanksgiving festival included a series of games. Although the details were vague, as far as I could tell the most important of these games was one where 11 native tribesman squared off against 11 settlers using a stuffed turkey as a ball. Thus in honor of this tradition, no Thanksgiving Day would be complete without a game of touch football. For the folks in Indy, this first involved a game of ultimate frisbee, where our side was roundly defeated.
However, when the game switched to our traditional game, the scoring went much more in our favor. (Here we could use complex offensive schemes to neutralize our opponents speed and quickness.) However, JP switched to the other side, and twice managed to get wide open from a defender twice his size and slightly faster (don't ask me how!) and scored two key touchdowns.
Meanwhile, AMD was back at the ranch preparing a fabulous dinner with the able assistance of my sister. So around 3 pm, we all dug in and feasted.
The evening brought opportunities to play the European version of the Train Game and to watch the Titans demolish the Lions.
The following morning/afternoon, we settled on a hike at Eagle Creek park to walk off our previous day's gluttony. We found that skipping rocks on the frozen parts of the lake made a spectacular sound, which unfortunately we were unable to record for your amusement. We had intended to do geo-caching along the hike, but RS2's GPS unit was on the fritz. We attempted to use our car's GPS for this purpose, but while we found that we could get our GPS to display coordinates in a particular information screen, it wouldn't update in real time. Additionally it took us awhile to realize that the its decimal system was different than the decimal system that the Geocache site and that most hand-held GPS use, so that we would have to do the math to convert each time. So we failed to find a single geo-cache.
Friday night brought the Pacers game, Saturday morning brought a game of Exactica, won by me! (for the first time I actually bid correctly every single round) and then a wild game of true colors, where we discovered interesting nuances in our perceptions of each other.
Finally, it was time to head back home. The trip was uneventful and we made it in time for a final post-Thanksgiving pie night to round out the festivities.
[I hope to post pictures of all this, if I can discover where they are!]
Indianapolis Museum of Art
AM and the kids came up to Indy on the Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving. Having already been to the Children's Museum, because the Indy Zoo didn't have a reciprocal agreement with our Memphis zoo pass, and because the NCAA Hall of Champions was closed because of previous fire, we finally decided on the IMA as a family outing.
Main galleries including a collection of British art (primarily post-impressionist) and pottery, American paintings, a large African folk art and statuary, and Chinese art.
Some interesting features:
Although I suppose its obvious from the fact that we use the phrase "the good China" to mean porcelain plates, etc... I was unaware that for a very long time, ALL porcelain came exclusively from China because Europeans did not know how to make it. Porcelain was considered as valuable as spices or gold. It was quite the engineering feat when Europeans finally figure out how to use native soils and materials to replicate the Chinese methods.
There was a small exhibit of Chinese pillows. They were all stone. Hmm...makes one wonder what really constitutes good sleeping accouterments.
One exhibit featured ten sketches Edward Hopper made prior to his painting "The Lobby". Of interest was how the characters and the physical arrangement of the lobby evolved through the sketches, allowing some insight into what he was seeking to represent in the final painting
AM got into trouble for taking this picture, apparently because of the light display in the background. It is posted here so her troubles don't go to waste.