Nora Evelyn

During our trip to San Francisco, Nora and Parker bonded over their shared love for Mickey Mouse, dinner, IKEA, and laughing. Behold:

This week was the University of Michigan’s ironically-named “Spring Break” and Nora had Monday off school to hang out with her daddy all day. We went to the fabulous greenhouse conservatory at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens (free for students and people under 4 — which am us!) and out for totally yummy ice cream. Here are some ice cream pictures.

Nora’s pal Jisoo recently celebrated her 4th birthday party at an indoor play and junk food consumption place called “Jungle Java”. They really need an adults-only version of this place; the little kids crawling around on the climbing gym are forever getting in my way.

Nora and Kacie (not pictured) got to put the toppings on their own pizzas at Aunt Christine’s (not pictured) birthday party. This is pretty exciting stuff.

It’s taken nearly 4 years and a fairly massive investment of time, affection, and research dollars, but we finally have the fully autonomous self-regulating automatic cheese grater* we’ve always wanted.

* note: cheese grater is not fully autonomous, particularly self-regulating, or remotely automatic.

We made christmas cookies yesterday. She helped with the addition of ingredients, cutting, decorating, and her assistance with the rolling was very easily repaired.

Having a second third birthday party means, of course, getting to have a second third birthday cake! This time around Nora requested a square purple cake with pink frosting*. We acquired some square cake pans and set to work. Here you see Nora teaching yellow baby about stand mixer safety and the finished product of our labors.

Since she’s 3 I really, really, wanted to make her square birthday cake into a cube (X³), but that would have been a ridiculous amount of cake and we’re all still full from Thanksgiving.

*the purple didn’t quite work out. It ended up being a two-layer square rosie-beige cake with pink frosting (and I may be biased but I think it was pretty yummy). :)

We gave Nora her first ever lolly on Tuesday. It was blue and, shortly after these pictures were taken, so was she. [not shown: Jen walking around the house with a washcloth wiping sticky blue substance off everything]

Here’s a great shot Uncle Eric got with his droid phone of Nora and her cousin Kacie enjoying the fruits of the whipped cream mixer’s labors. Happy American Thanksgiving!

Nora and I made some amazingly delicious soft pretzels a couple of weeks ago (not pictured because we ate them too quickly to photograph them). Here are some shots Jen caught of the kneading and shaping part of the process.