Burns Night Supper

 January 25th is the birthday of the Scottish poet Robert Burns and it is celebrated by literary societies throughout the world with a Burns Night Supper. This always seemed like a fun tradition and this was definitely the year when we had time to try it. I printed out the Selkirk Grace and Ode to a Haggis, which are apparently required to be read at any Burns Night and Kevin and I tried our hands at Scottish food, which all came out well.  We both really liked the soup, the kids were lukewarm, but liked the bread and potatoes. The dessert was, in British style, much less sweet than we are used to, but it was still tasty. We all recited at least one Burns poem and then listened to some bagpipe music on the Echo.

New Year's Play 2021

 A little delayed, but the Lamy-Peterson clan came to celebrate Steph's birthday weekend instead of New Year's Eve (in order to allow enough time to quarantine). We had a great weekend of hanging out and gaming, and I took almost no pictures. But the kids did not want to let a year pass without their infamous new year's play, so they staged one on Sunday evening:

Opening scene - surprise! it's a murder mystery

Benji played the narrator and the victim's ghost

We were asked to vote on the killer. We were wrong (we should have known, it's always Abby)

Inauguration Day 2021

 It was with a great sense of relief that we gathered together for lunch last Wednesday and watched the inauguration. It was a busy day, and the events started early, so not all of us saw both swearings-in, but we all got to hear President Biden's speech and the events that followed. In celebration, we baked a patriotic cake for after-dinner dessert and ate it with ice cream, because that is President Biden's favorite:

Growing Crystals

 We tried this based on an experiment we found online (Kevin says the Chemistry checks out). But, a watched crystal never grows:

Air Frying Fun

 We challenged ourselves to get the air fryer back out and try to do something fun with it. For our first attempt, we made cinnamon rolls (and they were good!):

Mario All-Stars

 Benji got this game for Christmas and has been obsessed with it. I love that one of the components is the original mario brothers that we used to play on the Nintendo 64:

Gammy's 74th Birthday

 We gave her a few choices of what we could do and ended up deciding on a fancy cocktail, cheese and chocolate pairing night. We all decided it would be fun to dress up fancy, so I insisted we take a few pictures while Kevin went to pick Gammy up:

We also laid the first course before she got here (old fashioneds, with manchego and dark sea salt chocolate, and mocktails for the kids). We had 5 courses in total, followed by carvel cake:

Three generation photo

Dog Walking

 Gammy hurt her back last week, so Benji and I have been walking her dogs. Benji likes them and has taken this on enthusiastically:

16 1/2

 Half birthday cupcakes from Vivi's (Sweethaus's current incarnation):

Downtown Mall Walk

 We've been blessed with mild weekend weather and last Sunday we thought we should get out of the house. After a little back-and-forth about various hikes, we decided to walk down the John Warner Parkway and visit the Downtown Mall since it had been forever since we'd been there. We wanted to check out which stores had closed and what modifications businesses had made. There were a few shuttered businesses, although no surprises among them, and some interesting new additions. And this awesome portrait display in front of SilverChair:

Elvis's Birthday

 It was last Friday, so we decided to celebrate at lunch with Elvis songs on the Echo and fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches with chips for lunch:

Benji was a big fan. He asked for half of my sandwich after he finished his own

Three Kings Day Celebration

 One of our bucket list items this month was to observe Three Kings Day. We decided to try out the Mexican traditions, so we had tamales for dinner, followed by Rosco de Reyes (Three Kings Cake), which we baked from scratch throughout the day (it requires two days and two proofs, so it was a long process):

After the second rise (before baking)

Final product

Ragged Mountain Reservoir (partial hike)

 We had a beautiful Saturday last week and decided to take advantage with a hike. We decided the 7 miles around the reservoir would be a lot, but we did a 3 mile out and back, which was the right length to enjoy the beautiful (65 degree) January weather:

New Year's Day Escape Room

 For several weeks, the kids have been working to put together another escape room. They were finally ready to roll it out on New Year's Day, which was convenient since I put do an escape room on the January Bucket List (we also have boxed escape rooms we can do). They did a good job with the clues and Kevin and I managed to escape with 9 minutes to spare:

The kids started with instructions to us via video link (the instructions were to do an interpretive dance with a giant burrito if we needed a clue)

We found a key that let us open the first lock and find these clues

We needed a UV light to solve the next part

More codes, more locks

Picture clues

We made it!

Benji shared their planning sheet with us after we'd finished

New Year's Eve 2020

 We had no plans for New Year's Eve, but the day before I decided we should try to make it fun. We took out our usual NYE garland that we hang with games to play with the Lamy-Petersons and filled it with activities that the four of us could do on our own. It turned out to be a fun night, the activities stretched the perfect length of time (with just 25 minutes left over to sneak in an episode of Modern Family before the ball dropped) and we welcomed 2021 together:

Benji was surprisingly super engaged with this collage making

Ruth's collage

Kevin's collage

Abby's collage

Benji's collage

We made these cool New Year's Eve fortune tellers

Happy New Year!