A bunch of balloons, left over from the kids birthday parties, have been gathering dust behind our sofa. I fished them all yesterday, intending to pop them all and put them in the bin. As soon as they were out in the open, Adrian noticed them. Today he focused on stuffing them in a box. (An excellent box, by the way, durable and with a transparent window.)

Not allowing the laws of physics to hinder him, he tried to squeeze in balloons that were larger than the available space. I am not sure whether he expected the balloons to compress or the box to expand. Quite a number of them popped in the process.

Then he got help from Ingrid.

Since he started with the larger balloons and worked his way down in size, he actually got to a point where he could fit three balloons in the box.

And a Littlest Pet Shop figure, too. The balloons were apparently not balloons but soda and Coke for the “pet shops”. Here he/she is, on top of the Coke. I’m not sure whether he looks trapped, or all happy about being locked up with an ocean of Coke.

We flew home from Malmö today.

Bromma airport is not very far from where we live. The approach path passes quite nearby and we can see all the aircraft fly past. We live just far enough so the noise doesn’t bother us; a few blocks closer to the airport and it’s much noisier.

And since we can see the aircraft, the aircraft can see us as well. We didn’t quite fly over our house, but nearly. There’s my house! There’s the kids’ school! All there. I wished I could shout to the pilot to slow down so I can take pictures. Now I couldn’t, so the pictures look like crap, but it was fun anyway.

It reminded me of the balloon flight Eric and I took over London. (That was before I started blogging so I never wrote about it or posted any photos.) That flight also passed almost straight over our home as well as our workplaces, and I remember that same feeling of wanting to slow down to really get a good look at our home from above.

Balloons fly over Spånga, too. On several occasions they’ve passed so close by, and so low down, that we’ve waved to the passengers. I wonder how predictable the flight path is – if a fly-by of our home was highly probable, it would be fun to do it.

The Giant Lamp of Malmö.

Our team flew to Malmö yesterday to join our developers in the Malmö office for a julbord. We had some time off in the afternoon and since we had been sitting most of the day (first in a taxi, then on a plane, then in another taxi, and finally in meetings) some of us went walking. Among other sights we saw this giant lamp in the middle of Lilla torg.

Something Adrian made at preschool.

We continued making Christmas. Today: gingerbread cookies. We have our own recipe for gingerbread cookie dough, which Eric has tweaked and optimized over the years, so the cookies we make are by now excellently suited to our taste. They are much spicier than store-bought ones.

For a kid, just making cookies is fun enough. Now that has become rather routine, so I come up with extra tweaks to make it more interesting. For example, I like to challenge myself to waste as little dough as possible. Not that it is really wasted, because we roll it out again and again, but do that enough times and the dough becomes too dry and floury.

(Of course an easy way to get the least scraps would be to tile the entire dough with either triangles or crescent moons, but that would be no fun at all, not to bake and not to eat.)

I work inwards from the edges of the rolled dough, choosing the shape that fits best and leaves the least scraps, and then filling in any gaps with smaller shapes.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise when the curve of the Christmas tree turned out to be a perfect fit for the curve of the pig’s belly.

A simple Christmas wreath for the front door.

Adrian putting on his favourite pyjamas. He loves them because they are fleecy and warm, and wears them every night now during the cold season.

Unfortunately he only has one.

There is a significant chance that there will be fleece pyjamas under the Christmas tree this year.

Ingrid got a craft-a-day calendar this year. We hung all 24 bags in the living room window on a long piece of string.

Today was a “study day” at preschool so Adrian was at home. Among other things, we made stories with Story cubes.

We made a gingerbread house this weekend. Well, we actually cheated a bit and bought a kit with house pieces. Eric assembled it, and the kids and I decorated it with candy.

Adrian liked red things, but also added some eggs.

Ingrid did a geometrical design on her side of the house.

I myself went for a more delicate design.