... Gingerbread Battle 2026

 

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book work, school and taekwondo, Christmas Dragons, Jugbands, 

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kidpak, finished tree, Hawkeye, Star in the Night, nap, Thanksgiving meal at lunch, nice weather, updates coming soon...

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Baby Party

What is Chrismas all about?  That's how this post card above starts, and it's the latest one I've gotten from the virtual march through the story, "Nightmare Before Christmas."  Usually by this point I've moved on from "The Nightmare Before Christmas," as I sort of categorize it as a Halloween movie.  But there's a large group that put it in the Christmas movie category too, and I get that too.  It's of course a bridge between the two, so I'm good with this late walk through the story.  I think the counter says twenty-seven miles thus far, so I'm keeping a good pace.  The idea is at least two miles a day, but more frequently it's getting to the 5K mark, so I'm feeling good about that.  There's this 1 mile run coming up on Green Street next month, and I'm thinking about actually signing up for that.  Time to start training, right?

Anyway, Maddie was at a baby's birthday party - part of Nate's family.  She had a great time there this morning/afternoon, and shared some pictures here below:

 

One of the highlights of her day was a UNO game with "NO MERCY" feature that sounded pretty over-the-top, but fun!

Mom and I were getting the house all nice and festive.  We were doing a Christmas movie marathon while working on this fourth tree - almost done with it!  Tomorrow we should wrap that one up.  The living room tree has a lot of ornaments on it, so it takes a good deal of time to it finished up.

I was doing some more work on the January book.  It should be really good, and I'm excited that the characters of Lilly, Ole, and Jamie Lynne are going to be in it.  

These are LEGO mini-figures from long ago, and mascots for our series "Master Builders."  Lilly was created by Maddie at LEGO Land in Florida, and Ole was picked up with a set just before we did that series.  Jamie Lynne is the alien that Maddie named after a friend, an alien that famously went with us to LEGO Land in Florida because the staff there trades LEGO figures if you want and so we had this extra one for trading that we brought along.  But Maddie never really wanted to trade this one, and it survived the entire day.  So we kept it, and it became one of the three mascot LEGO mini-figures for the series.  

The awesome thing about technology is that you can take a picture of these, convert them to graphics, and then pose them however you want for booklets and graphics.  

Anyway, it was a beautiful day outside - I was working out there on the booklet, which will be about fifty pages or so.  A lot going on there, but it should be really good.

We read tonight in "Hogfather," and after that it was time for prayers, and some sleep!