Our good friend Eva stopped by for a night out and had some extra time to catch up with the kids. They loved hanging out with her, and Mika has been growing the turtle family that she and Eva started building together. Good times!

My dad sent fantastic pictures from their garden and nearby meadows, so that the kids can experience Winter in Hamburg remotely. Mika’s comment when she saw the German titmouse blue tit (Blaumeise)? “He has a helmet like a Star Wars Storm Trooper!” My dad’s reply? “Good thing he wasn’t armed!”

Although Mika is making huge progress spelling sight words correctly these days, “children” is not on her list of words to know. I have noticed a few times that she’s spelled it “chilgrin”, phonetically following the wrong pronunciation she had as a toddler. To help her get over the mispronunciation, i asked her to say “children” out loud. Which she did, perfectly clear and correct. Then i asked her to spell “children”. Her answer? “K-I-D-S!”

Although i wasn’t going to broadcast every lost tooth going forward, Mika insisted on taking a photo of this particular one. The resulting gap looks freakishly large for a single tooth missing, and she’s very proud of it. Two more teeth are wiggling already, and her first permanent incisor is sneaking in at the bottom. Nuf said ;-)

Today, Tobin drew a “silly monster” – complete with 3 eyes and a mouth full of teeth. He informed me that his monster could eat sharks, and people too (beware!).

Mika often writes Tobin’s titles on his pictures, this time along with her own silly monster. Tobin, ever efficient, insists on signing his name with a lower case “b” (just one bubble to draw, as he points out).

On their last day of winter break, Kai brought his mom and sister over for a nice, long play date before he has to fly back home. All four kids got along so well, and Mika took extra sweet care of little Sango. The kids helped make oatmeal cookies from scratch, just like the ones we had made with Tobin’s class.

… and a Happy New Year to all our friends and family!

Featured in the order they fell asleep on New Year’s Eve: Tobin (11:00 pm), Elsie (11:45 pm), Mika (12:05 am), Violet (12:30 am). Apart from scattered kids all over the living room, the adults had plenty of time to themselves as well.

Almost two years after playing hooky on a (pre)school day, Mika and Gaang went sledding in Prospect Park again. Same sleds, but a few notable differences: both of them are now 6 years old and sporting gaps in their teeth – and we brought a different baby brother along. Sahn, who was merely a bump last time, happily played on the side lines of the hill. Tobin spent the day with Sung, but here’s a movie of the park ranger’s snow removal activities we captured just for him:

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It’s been four days since the blizzard, and our block has yet to see a plow (!)
Nearby Hicks Street has been plowed a couple of times and Degraw got cleared with a massive front loader. The good news? Our local snow summit on the corner of Hicks and Degraw has tripled in volume, and grown into a legitimate sledding slope. It’s a bit muddy on the street side, but still brightly white in the back, where kids can safely play. Mika romped around all afternoon, until the sun went down…

Now that the blizzard has passed, we’re left with blue skies and tons of white stuff to play with. Mika’s favorite activity was flying off the jumping ramp she built with Sung. Her stunts were too intimidating for Tobin – he preferred building a snow penguin or playing with his digger. We bumped into a bunch of school mates and borrowed their fancy snowball maker … a hugely useful invention for small kids with mittens. Even by the end of today, many secondary streets in Brooklyn had yet to see a plow (let alone our block and other ‘tertiary’ streets or dead ends). As you can see in the last picture, abandoned vehicles were still stuck in the middle of roads, creating unnecessary obstacles for the city workers.

The kids had been envious of the winter weather in Europe these past weeks. Especially Mika had wanted snow so badly … that she got her wish granted! And then some. We probably got the same amount of snow that my parents had to shovel over a couple of storms dumped on us in a single night. Strong winds turned parked cars into outer-worldly sculptures, and a single pass of a snow plow on Hicks Street piled up an instant sledding hill – which came in handy, since there was no way for us to reach a proper park today.

Lots of mellow Winter activities today, while waiting for the blizzard to kick in. Towards bedtime, the kids could see a little accumulation, but whiteout conditions only set in after they had fallen asleep. By 11:00 pm (and less than half way through the storm system), we had already 10-15 inches of snow, with drifts of more than 3 feet. The kids will be thrilled tomorrow morning … if we can get out the door.

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