Nora's Birthday

Nora decided she wanted to go bowling for her birthday this year, so we did that Sunday.  Bowling alleys have changed a lot since I was a kid.  For one thing you can program the bumpers to come up and down for individual bowlers, and for another you can take selfies for the individual players and scorecards.

As is our family tradition, we sang Nora Happy Birthday over a stack of pancakes for breakfast. On Sunday she and Kristin made cupcakes for Nora to share at school. For dinner she had her favorite meal of spaghetti and garlic bread.

Nora has been into photography lately, so we got her a camera as a present. In what proved to be poor timing, on Saturday when we saw Santa Nora asked him for a camera. We'll have to see how Santa adjusts.

Winter Concert

Tonight was Dr Howard's winter concert.  Nora's class got to sing two songs this year and she's been practicing for several weeks.  During the second song, Jingle Bells, audience participation is encouraged, so she's been belting that out all over the house.

This first song however, Nora's been reminding me that audience participation is not welcome, so she's only been practicing that one in her room with the door closed,.  (You've got to be sure Dad doesn't ruin her big moment.)

Anyway, she did an excellent job, and had a great time.  Good thing she kept that one secret.

Camping with Grandpa V

Right at the end of the summer Grandpa VanDuyne and I took the girls for 2 days of camping at Turkey Run - okay more like cabin-ing.  We did some cannoeing, hiking, swimming, pony-riding during the day.  In the evening we played board games and had a camp fire.

Misc Fall Update

First day of school pictures:





We went down to Benton, Illinois to watch the eclipse in the totality zone.  The pictures don't really do it justice.





We can't forget the street ballet show. The flight of the bumble bee was playing in the background, but my phone didn't get that.



We also took the girls (and the dog) to their first drive in movie.

Halloween 2017

So, it's not Halloween yet, but honestly I'm just going to post what I have now since I'm here.  First the annual Curtis Orchard shot.




Then some pictures from the church's Halloween night with Professor Trelawny, a Ravenclaw and a Hufflepuff.

Daddy Daughter Dates

I've been taking the girls out for one-on-one dates on the weekends I'm not in West Lafayette.  We've been having a good time.

For the first one I took Abby to a Mexican restaurant.  It didn't have a fabulous start.  While I was reading the menu she shot her straw wrapper at me.  I didn't see it coming and it hit me right in the eye, somehow managing to tear my contact in half.  So five minutes in to our first date I'm in the bathroom trying to flush a random piece of contact out of my eye, while Abby's feeling pretty bad about the whole thing.  We had some fried ice cream later though so all's well that ends well.  The drive home was interesting





Two weeks later Nora and I went to a 3d printing lab for a workshop on making fidget spinners.  The whole time Nora was convinced I was doing it wrong.  Every time the instructor would take a break and ask if anyone needed help Nora would shout out, "Ours is wrong, we need help!"  And every time the instructor would tell us we were fine.  We we finally went to print it though it wouldn't work though.  Whenever Nora tells the story she neglects to mention that none of the 20 printers were working that day, not just ours.  We had fun anyway.




We've done some other things, including a bike ride and a picnic.  Hopefully we're building some good memories.

Long Lost Blog Post

We're long overdue for a blog update so here are some highlights from the last 6 months.

We started school, and brought home a dog.

We made our annual trek to the pumpkin patch, and the girls were a bride, troll, and pop-star for Halloween.

For Nora's birthday we went skating.

And we celebrated Christmas.

Maybe my 2017 resolution should be for more regular updates.