Fun with The Works

As an end-of-the-summer gift, Nonna got us a Groupon for The Works, a handmade mini-science museum in Edina. This morning we went and spent many hours there. The kids even ran into a few friends. Although they enjoyed the zoetrope, pneumatic bike, binary machine, giant zipper, pulleys and a foaming lab experiment, their favorite things to do were building and racing K-nex cars and the foam bricks. Literally hours and hours of building walls and knocking them down, over and over. Huge fun!!

There are lots of photos on Flickr.

Grillin' with Grands

It's way too late in the evening to think of anything clever but I wanted to share the latest photo (taken by Uncle Neil) of the kids. Here are Pat and Donna with their four grandchildren. We had a great visit last weekend. Good food, good company.

Yep, we're still here

General apologies for the huge gaps between posts. This fall seems to be busier than most. Here are a few cute stories we missed sharing. Hopefully I can add some pictures tonight.

This morning in the car, Colleen was singing a song for her preschool Christmas show, over and over. Robert was annoyed and "asked" her to stop. I reminded him that just a couple weeks ago he was singing his Thanksgiving songs (pictured at performance) and how it annoyed Elizabeth at the time. I asked him if he remembered what I said to her. He said with a scowl, "That I was definitely allowed to practice singing. I hate it when you're right, Mom."

Colleen was complaining about the sun being in her eyes in the car. I said that we could bring her sunglasses next time. She said, "My sunglasses don't work. The sun is boiling my blood! Do something!" Evidently her old sunglasses didn't cover enough of her eyes and would let the sun through. So the next time we were at Target we found these huge bug-eye sunglasses. Now the sun doesn't boil her eyes anymore.

Besides working extremely hard at school and earning terrific grades to prove it, the past few weeks for Elizabeth have been about The Birthday. Twelve years old last Tuesday. Colleen told everyone at preschool - "yesterday she was eleven and today she is twelve." Her birth"day" was actually drawn out over a couple of weeks, starting with Nonna taking her and a friend, Jack, to a wonderful performance of The Wizard of Oz at Hopkins High School. She had a blast; there were actual flying monkeys. Then two books from Mom and Dad that she just couldn't wait 5 days until her birthday to read so she got them early. Then her actual birthday with a package from Nanny (beautiful Guardian Angel that now hangs over her bed) and cupcakes with the special-made cinnamon butter cream frosting. Then from the St. Paul Colemans she got "awesome" Smencils and cold hard cash to go toward her new desk chair (note to self: get E to Ikea!). I confess that I succumbed to the ease of using the Thanksgiving gathering for the official "Happy Birthday!" where she (and others I hope) enjoyed her favorite Pineapple Mallow Pie (thank you to Betty Crocker and to Nonna for the loan of Betty Crocker) and got the coveted Star Trek reboot DVD from Uncle Ryan. She and Robert watched it 3 times the next day. With all the extras and commentary, they watched it practically all day.

We took advantage of our Friday off to clear some more boxes from the living and dining room so more and more it looks like we live her permanently. It's a great feeling to get the number of boxes down to regular storage, not moving boxes. Our garage is ridiculously large and my next big project is to organize the storage in there.

On an unrelated note - hey, where's the snow? The weather is very un-Minnesota-like at the moment and we're getting nervous about Christmas. Robert asked me after Thanksgiving, "Is it possible that we won't have a white Christmas?!"

Sleepy girl

Ever made 60 pounds of sausage?

Yeah, I hadn't either, not until yesterday. I'd been in the house when such projects were being undertaken, but one of the things about being gone for 18 years was missing sausage day. But just take five Colemans, 60 pounds of pork shoulder butt ($1.45 a pound, I believe), a bunch of spices, some ancient equipment and sausage, and voila, six hours later, you have authentic Italian sausage.

And sore shoulders. Not the pig's.

It started with cutting up pork, 10 pounds at a time, trimming the fat and cutting the meat into pieces small enough to fit into the grinder. (Neil demonstrates, above.)

The pork gets ground into chunks. Not exactly ground beef, mind you, but small enough to fit into the sausage casing, of course. I did a lot of the grinding and was more or less cutting pork the rest of the time, so I don't have pictures of that grinding process.

The ground pork is mixed with the spices, which you can see Mom doing in the sink. The spices were measured out and chopped up in the blender, then mixed by hand. With one batch, we got to the bottom of the bowl and saw a lot of spices at the bottom, which prompted us to pull as much pork as we could back out of the packing mechanism and respice it.

If you get that batch, lucky you, very hot.

Very important: Each of the batches must have a small part grilled up and tested for proper spiciness. As a teenager, that was my favorite part of the process, and about the only part I participated in.

The grinder attachment is then removed and a funnel attached. The sausage casing is ... let's say threaded onto the end of the funnel, using a technique that you might be familiar with if you took health class in a public school, and pushed out into the casing.

It's then parceled out into one-pound increments, wrapped in plastic wrap, then foil, and sent to the freezer, where it sits for anywhere from weeks to months to years before being consumed.

Let's be honest, that's a lot of pork, and nobody needs that much fat, right? Each of the kids got four pounds to take home, and since none of us has anyone else to share them with, it should last for a while.

Plus, it'll only get spicier the longer it stays in the freezer.

Oh yeah, and then Neil cooked dinner. But he'll do his own PR. He doesn't need my help.

Where were the kids through all this? Blissfully ignorant and entertained: Nanny sent Legos, 40 various people with their attachments, from rakes to ray guns. Hours upon hours upon hours of fun.

Our Mother Bear

Nonna was on TV last week!

That's her, with her name spelled right, and everything. Mom has been volunteering with the Mother Bear Project for several years now, and unfortunately I haven't done nearly enough reporting on this to know the whole story. Knowing that she's a regular reader of the blog, though, hopefully she'll take the time to tell us more.

You can watch the video of the piece that ran on WCCO last week, and read an accompanying story that quotes her one extra time.

Meanwhile, Cate has been knitting as well, as has Elizabeth. Cate just put the finishing touches on a bear for Robert that didn't take her much time at all, while Elizabeth has been knitting leaves, mice, skyscrapers ... interesting stuff.

Merry Christmas from the Colemans

All in all, it was a pretty good Christmas round these parts. We're all here, all doing well.

Last night we had dinner at my cousin Chris' house, with many, many people we'd never met and a handful of people we had. The kids had fun playing with their Miller cousins, and everyone marveled at the cookies that Cate made. She's been baking up a storm the past few weeks, first for a choir bake sale and secondly for, well, this. I've had trouble keeping away from them, to be honest. Stupid cookies!

Elizabeth was up late with Cate finishing up a project -- a gift for Amelia, their favorite cousin -- even after I got home from Midnight Mass. Of course, Midnight Mass was at 10 p.m. We didn't have anything that required assembly this year, but a lot of gifts to wrap, and I had a lot of those on my plate this year. So for those of you who got inexpertly wrapped presents ... uhh, sorry.

This morning nobody came into the bedroom before 7 a.m. and we actually didn't unwrap a thing before 9. (Thanks, Cate, for the extra hour or so of sleep.) Presents were opened in shifts today: the ones we exchanged with the kids and from Cate's mom and our friends were opened before we all went to church this morning, and the ones with the rest of the family weren't opened until after dinner.

Oh, dinner. Wow. Dinner was a Neil creation, primarily, with the rest of us contributing items or hands. But he roasted the beef tenderloin with a nice dijon mustard sauce and also grilled scallops for the non-beef set. I'll have you know Cate tried a scallop and liked it enough that she ate another as well (remember seafood is still new to her), though we were not able to convince Elizabeth to expand her palate as well.

Elizabeth reports, not surprisingly, that opening presents was her favorite part of the day. (She's just woken up and can't get back to sleep, so I solicited her input.) She likes the new fleece blanket that Nonna made. Each of the kids got one, and in fact, the other two are sleeping underneath them as I write.

Surprised Elizabeth didn't mention the Wii, but then again, she's a down-to-earth kind of girl. And the Wii was the last thing they opened. We can thank Cate's mom and sister for that one. I actually am interested to see what one of these darned contraptions is all about, but have barely used one. We'll get it set up.

Mama, she's comin' home

Colleen has not been great at listening to Nonna today, and I'm seeing more of it first-hand since I'm working from home. The kids don't have school today so I offered to be here as a backup goalie, so to speak.

I was talking to Colleen about listening and reminded her that especially when Mom's not here, she needs to listen to Nonna. And I also made sure she knew that Mom is coming back from Pennsylvania tomorrow. I work a late shift to cover the elections, so ...

"That means you and I can go to the airport to pick her up!"

She gives a strange look. "That would be weird."

It was my turn to be puzzled. Then the light bulb went on.

"Oh, Colleen, we don't actually go and lift Mommy. We just drive the car to the airport and she comes home with us."

That seemed to be the explanation she was looking for.

The glasses are found!

Mom called me this morning to report that she found Elizabeth's glasses. In the car, where I suggested :) but buried deep in a seat. Sounds familiar.

In the process, she related to me a story from her childhood where a friend of hers named Elizabeth lost a pair of glasses in their car in Chicago. Years later, when Nanny and Pa were selling the car, they pulled the seats out to clean it and found the glasses.

Thankfully this only took a couple of weeks and didn't last all the way to sale. The car is brand-new.

Something new

Colleen is embarking on this great adventure of which she really has no concept. She has spent just one night away from Cate in three-plus years, hasn't been to Minnesota since before she could walk and has barely seen my parents. But she will be doing all three in fairly short order as Cate takes all three to Minneapolis the week before we move.

It's with that in mind that I have been putting Colleen to bed every night this week. Not that I've never put her to bed before, of course, since Cate has worked basically every Sunday and Thursday night for the past year and I've put all three to bed myself. But if Cate's home, Colleen gets her for bedtime, because she refuses to be put to sleep by me.

So this week it's been sink or swim so that Colleen can get used to anyone other than Cate at bedtime. And although there were some issues the first night because she could hear Cate talking to Robert in the next room, lately it's gone fairly well. I've often had sleep success with Colleen like I wrote about with Robert earlier this year. I can leave the room with Colleen partially awake and she will finish the job.

She still sometimes gets up at night before midnight, wandering out looking for Mom. But it's not actually Cate she's looking for, just someone to give her some company. It's very easy -- a sip of water, a hug, some soothing words and back to bed. If she's awake enough, she'll even walk back to her room herself.

Easy as pie. Good luck, Mom and Dad.

Happy Birthday

It's birthday time around the Coleman household, with Mom's birthday today and Colleen and Uncle Ryan's birthday tomorrow.

It's been a busy weekend here, with a flurry of activity yesterday morning for Cate leading to nap time in the afternoon and daddy time for the kids. So, not much fancy going on in this post, except for this special greeting from us to the birthday folks.