Adrian likes to glue random things to other random things: pieces of a broken rubber band to a smooth stone, a toothpick to a tube of glue, two wooden sticks to a block of wood.

Ingrid has been finger knitting off and on for two years, on the same “rope”. She just keeps adding to it when she feels like it. The rope now measures many metres. The kids laid out on the floor – turns out it easily reaches from one end of the house to another, and then some.

Like perler beads but tiny.

Our 2nd year of making gingerbread houses. Ambitions were higher this year; no store-bought kits here any more! The kids and I designed our own houses and actually managed to assemble them all (which was not a given, considering how crooked some of the pieces were).

I don’t understand how people manage to assemble these houses with icing. We tried, and after 10 or 15 minutes it had still not set fully. So we scraped it all off and went back to last year’s method using melted sugar. Much faster and more robust.

I was so annoyed by the icing that I threw it all out, so we went back to store-bought icing for decorations. It doesn’t flow very well so it’s hard to get the lines nice and even. Next year I think it’ll be sugar for glueing but homemade icing for decoration.

Ingrid made me a clove orange. I hung it off my desk lamp. Much of the time it hangs there and is decorative and nice, but now and again something happens and it gives off a flood wave of scent.

Adrian and I played with Geomag.

I got the Geomag as a Christmas gift many years ago. Now it’s a toy that the whole family enjoys. When we play with it together, we often run out of pieces before we feel that we’re done with our constructions, so now we have bought even more pieces so we can build even bigger things.

Today’s Geomag construction started out as two space ships that had antennas so they could talk to each other. Then we added a “wire” between them for even better communication. Then that wire needed supports. Then I think the space ships became houses and we built an extra free-standing basement. Next we added remote controlled claws on long arms that we could use to catch bad guys, and more supports for the arms. And finally a Lego Spiderman came to operate one of the arms, and caught a Lego bad guy and put it in the basement which was now a prison, while a Lego king made himself at home in the largest part.

First day of autumn break. We bought and carved pumpkins.

For the kids, we found right-sized pumpkins at our local Konsum supermarket. Ridiculous Disney-branded pumpkins, all of identical size and shape… but they were the right size so what the heck.

I wanted a bigger pumpkin and found one at Hemköp. But when I started carving it at home, I realized that I’d gotten an eating pumpkin instead of a carving pumpkin. I guess whoever does the veggie purchasing at Hemköp was not aware that there is a difference, but there definitely is. This one had a very thin skin, almost fragile, that kept cracking as I was carving, and very thick flesh. In fact it had so much flesh that just the parts that I had to cut out were enough for a nice dinner (pasta with black beans and pumpkin sautéed with garlic).

Adrian designed a pumpkin but let Ingrid do the rest of the work – the carving was too hard and the cleaning out of the innards of the pumpkin was too icky. I was quite impressed that Ingrid managed to carve both Adrian’s and her own pumpkin.

Adrian asked for another plush fleecy monster from our monster sewing book (Sy monster). Rufus, Rufus Junior, Dinah and Quincy (of whom I have no photos) will soon be joined by Leo.

When I started working on Leo yesterday, Adrian joined me and also sewed a bit: little pieces of red polar fleece that he stitched together with green thread into a spiky jumble. Today he was more interested in cutting the fleece into shapes that he then cut into smaller shapes and then into even smaller shapes.

Ingrid and I made paper cube animals some while ago. I made a tiger, because tigers are orange (well sort of at least), look cool, and are easy to draw in a recognizable way.

Then Adrian wanted a dinosaur. It had to be a T-rex of course, and a red one, just like for his bed curtain. I couldn’t think of a way to make a cube look like a dinosaur so I had to deviate from the plan a bit.

Today I went to a parents’ meeting for Ingrid’s class, where – among other things – we got a chance to see the materials the kids are working with. The theme they are currently working with in various subjects is “Prehistoric time”. (This spring term it was “Space”.) For each major project like this, they make their own books where they paste in all sorts of drawings, worksheets etc. I had to laugh when I saw what Ingrid had drawn on the front cover of her book:

Ingrid and I decorated gift boxes, for gifts for our friends in Estonia. We’re leaving in just two days! Lots of packing tomorrow.