For family game time, Joshua chose a LEGO challenge. This time we needed to secretly write a challenge for someone else and then we had an hour to build it.
Ben: received a challenge from Amanda to create a book with a moving page and a short story. (He narrates the story in the video.)
Amanda: received a challenge from Isaac to make a piece of fruit with an accessory. I made a raspberry with Grey Bear. It took Isaac a while to figure out what the fruit was, partially because he was expected a life-size fruit. Everyone figured out Grey Bear easily, but the raspberry was harder. That being said, I thought the raspberry was a decent build.
Isaac: received a challenge from Joshua to make balloons. He made a normal balloon, a pac-man balloon, and was working on a unicorn balloon. A fun part of this build is that the little kid with a normal sized balloon is staring in awe at the large red balloon.
Joshua: received a challenge from Ben to make an alien invasion. The detail that he got in this build is really cool. The minifigs really bring the story to life.
I broke my mixer today, but I wasn't very sad about it. I've wanted a better one for quite a while, but couldn't justify it. I ended up with a Cuisinart brand.
I was telling this to Ben and called it a "Cuisine-art". He said, "I don't think that's how you say it." So it turns out is is "Cueeze-in-art" where the Cueeze rhymes with squeeze. Apparently, I am not the only one to be offended by the pronunciation of this name.
The last area we wanted to get to early was the emotion area. (We should have also prioritized racing, but at this point it was getting busy everywhere.) Here you build a creature, give it an emotion, and have it scanned in the machine. Then it dances in its emotion for a minute and the previous creature comes out to dance too. Your emotion gets passed on to the previous creature. This worked really well and Joshua especially loved making the creatures, but it took a bit to get the creature scanned. I'm sure there is a bunch of processing it needs to do to make it dance, but that part was "the worst" part of the area.
After making several, I realized there was a flower making spot right next to it. I like flowers, so I went here. The weirdest part was they had several pieces with a bar on them, but no pieces with a clip to clip onto the bar. It was awkward until I realized this, and then I just worked with the limitation. I made a lot of flowers. It wasn't my favorite area, but it was up there.
We took a brief break and then found ourselves in the red zone. Yesterday this is where we made the ducks. Today we decided to make penguins! We would make one penguin at each station and would have ten minutes per penguin. Surprisingly, we stuck to the ten minutes pretty well. When we do this at home it is often, "ten more minutes!" The results were pretty fun. They all are obviously penguins, but some are definitely better and worse than others.
Yellow bricks, from left to right, Joshua, Isaac, Amanda, Ben
All color bricks, from left to right: Ben, Amanda, Joshua, Isaac. (The yellow ones match the people, but they were moved since the previous picture.)
All colors and shapes, from left to right: Ben, Amanda, Joshua, Isaac. I think Isaac ended up mostly doing another brick penguin, although he was using the all shapes area. I think Joshua won with the most recognizable (probably for all three), but he even had time to make an iceberg for the last one and that added a lot of context.
Although my last penguin wasn't the best, I really did like its stomach.
Although no one was super excited about it, we took pictures in the Duplo pool. When will the next time we find this many Duplo? However, it is super uncomfortable to get in and out.
It wasn't quite lunch time, so we all went on a tour of the outside of the building. By this time we had seen several other members of yesterday's tour, which was a ton of fun. It's really fun making connections with people when you don't really need to worry about seeing them long term. (To be fair, it's often fun to see them long term too, but there's not as much pressure if it is just a short interaction.) It wasn't raining this time, so we were able to enjoy the mini-playgrounds a bit more.
We went up the yellow side.
Then we got some pictures at the top.
It was surprisingly bright for having so many clouds. The kids were told to close their eyes and smile.
And then down the blue side! There were several playground areas not shown, either because I just didn't get pictures or they were a little bit too busy.
I really like this action shot.
Well, I guess this day will have a part 3, if not a part 4! We just made it to lunch time!
A few weeks ago, my wrist hurt a fair amount...I couldn't use it to push myself up from a sitting position. It got mostly better until this afternoon, when it started hurting again. I don't know what triggered it, but it is rather annoying.
Isaac made this stop motion shortly after we got back from our vacation.
In other news, it was a rather boring day. Especially for Joshua. While he disagrees with me, I think he purposefully chose to be bored instead of cleaning the kitchen. I finally gave him a small bribe to get him to finish up the dishwasher. It was a pretty cool day, which was surprising after such a hot days recently. The air quality was also fine, so we had the sliders open all day.
Ben and I went out for dinner, which was lovely and the highlight of my day.
We picked blueberries yesterday. One child was not excited at all, but then the picking was pretty good so they kept wanting five more minutes.
(He looks taller than me, but isn't yet. I think he's a little bit forward to change the perspective.)
(How tall Isaac is getting is very obvious, but Joshua has grown a bunch taller too.)
Today was pretty normal, really. Isaac and I went rock climbing. Isaac finished some painting on his clay projects. We did some work. We played a game in the evening.
Every room in the house is a mess right now and it's driving me a bit nuts. That being said, there are a bunch of active projects and the mess makes sense.
Ben, Isaac, and I played a quick game of Can't Stop this evening. It really was fast, because I won 3-0-0. The rule in our house is that the winner has to put the game away. When I lose I often feel better because of this rule and when I win I'm still happy because I won.
Anyway.
Because I won so well, Isaac was trying to figure out a new rule that basically said if you skunk everyone else you should also have to clean up the game by yourself. The conversation went something like this.
Isaac: "If you win, you win." *Thinking*
Ben and I look at each other and burst out laughing. "Oh phew. If you win then you win."
This set Isaac off into spurts of laughter, but he made a valiant attempt to continue.
Isaac: "If the players have zero points, then they don't have any points."
Ben and I again: "Thanks for the clarification. This is enlightening."
Isaac, barely able to talk at this point: "No, if all the players who didn't win have zero points then the player who won..."
Ben: "The winner has one point. I don't think you understand the game."
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