52/52

We made it to week 52 of the 'blog-a-week' project! (Of course, we only started at week 49, but who's counting?) Christmas and New Years celebrations were the big events this past week, of course, but here are some other miscellaneous happenings from the final week of 2013.

One night during dinner, Anders suggested that we put on head lamps and animal masks and walk through our forest after dinner. We were a bit surprised by the suggestion, but why not? By the time we got outside and Anders saw how truly dark it was in the forest, he was less interested in exploring. But we did wander around the yard looking for flowers and looking at the stars.

Goat, Chicken, and Bunny

One of our Christmas gifts this year was a Nest 'Learning' Thermostat. We have had issues with our furnace in the past, and as a result there has always been some stress associated with traveling in winter, in case something were to happen when we were gone. With Nest, we can check on the temperature of the house from our phone (or the web). I installed it myself in roughly the 30 minutes indicated, only to discover the following day that our current wiring setup doesn't keep the internal battery charged. Looks like I'm not quite done with this project yet.

Anybody out there want to help me run a Common wire into our furnace?

Anders got some good East Coast Grandma time in during her visit. He has now decided that he wishes he knew how to knit.

A few days before Christmas, we went to dinner in Hood River at Three Rivers Grill. The restaurant puts white paper down on the table on top of the tablecloth and provides crayons to children. Grandma Lee suggested to Anders that he could draw a place setting on the paper while we were waiting for our dinner. Well, Anders took it a step further and drew the place setting at all of our seats.

Counter-clockwise from the name: Fork, Plate with Food, Spoon, Knife with Napkin, Milk with Straw, Milk (first try: "it didn't turn out very good"), and Napkin (first try)

He wrote the name of the person at each place. The most interesting part to me is that he wrote some of the names while sitting on the opposite side of the table. And he wrote them upside down and PERFECTLY MIRRORED. He asked us how to spell Grandma, then would pause and think before writing each letter upside down. This photo was from his perspective.

Thankfully, no one at our table was named REDRUM

I think we're going to have each drawing laminated as a placemat. Then we can use them until he leaves for college.

- Mike, Corinne, and Anders