Gingerbread/NOLA

Once in a very great while, I site next to the kids while they are calm and quiet, and I have a chance to think over the fun we've had over the last few weeks or months. Tonight, I wondered how much I will remember from the past month. The answer popped into my head as quickly as the question. I will only remember what I photograph or write here. So, as much as I wouldn't enjoy reading someone else's parenting blog....

(But I have been meaning to tell you all a story about my friend's German neighbor and the phrase "monkey nuts" for a good six months. Let this be a tease. I'll try to get that story posted over the Christmas break.)

In preschool a couple of weeks ago,  Kolya's class made gingerbread men. When they went out to play, the teachers hid them, and they told the kids that the cookies came to life, ran around the classroom, and dared the kids to find them. The kids looked all over, inside and out, and they couldn't find the runaway gingers.

The teachers asked each of us to send a letter reporting a sighting of our kid's men. Paul did me the favor of penning this one for me to send in.

A couple of days later, the teachers hatched a plan to lure them back to school with a gingerbread house. Then plan was a success, and the kids got to eat their cookies.

On the other side of the sibling divide, Vanya doesn't want to eat sausage or chicken, because he put it together that it meant killing real live animals. You read that right. One won't eat an animal, while the other chows down on what he truly believes to be a live, sentient, intelligent being.

Ice sculpture?

In other family news this month, we took the kids down to New Orleans for a day and a night. We stayed in a hotel, checked out a Christmas store, had some good food, etc. Our best lunch was at Latitude 29, where the food and drinks were so good that if you picked up the whole place and dropped it into Des Moines, then suddenly Des Moines is a destination worth flying to for a weekend.

One thing they did with one of the cocktails is have the straw run through a block of ice shaped like a pestle (as in "mortar and..."). That was cool and all, until you let your kid stick it into his water, and then it melts into an ice cock and balls. So just keep that in mind when you visit.

After that, we went to the races, on a day that was decidedly different than the day when Peter, Paul, or Mary wrote, "Oh The Fairgrounds were crowded; and Stewball was there."

The Fairgrounds weren't at all crowded.

My mom showed up and looked for us, but somehow, she missed us in this massive crowd. She did notice a guy and a goofy red floppy hat, and just coincidentally, I was wearing a goofy red floppy hat, but she didn't look closely enough to determine that the guy in the goofy red floppy hat had (some four decades previously) sprung from her loins.

We closed out our night with a Cirque de Soliel/Louisiana Symphony combo at the Saenger, which I think we all enjoyed very much. I only mention it as an excuse to add this picture of Kolya, taking in the lobby of the grand theater for the first time. I'm compelled to add that I am very sober in this picture, despite appearances to the contrary.

I've got more pics from this trip, which I'll post soon. The ones here are clickable, if you want to see them a little bit bigger.