trendfamily

Another family birthday, another fabulous cake by Sarah. 

This year she did a multi layered piñata cake filled with lovely candies. 

(Party pictures to follow in another post.)

     
   

  

If your 4 year old points to a fruit and asks to try it how can you say no?  I just couldn’t bring myself to deny that food curiosity. 

So we now find ourselves trying a Kewano melon. It is quite nice. Even gets a thumbs up from Colin. 

   
 

Colin and Shane (a neighborhood friend) were playing with letter and number robots and decided to line them up on the stairs. A great game!

  

A big thank you to Jim and Lucille for taking us all out for burgers for supper. 

   
    
 

Uncle Jim and Aunt Lucile stopped in for a visit on their way to their winter hang out.  

As always the kids (and we) are excited to see them. They always pick up fun kid activities during their many travels and share them with the kids. 

There are rulers, foam fingers, sticker books, and a superhero comic book about a plumber. An eclectic mix of goodies!

  

Laura’s birthday included flowers and cupcakes from Mommy, some playtime for MacDougall while she opened some lovely gifts and talked to family on the phone and computer, and getting a free bag of birthday cookies from Sweet Tomatoes at supper.

   
   

Colin is still a big fan of his gymnastics lessons. 

  

This is what a posh produce market looks like in Equatorial Guinea.  You buy your produce separately from all your other groceries.

These are some sizable leeks!
Plantains and papayas are plentiful.

  Those bottles are old liquor bottles, filled with “ground nuts” which are locally roasted peanuts.  Named ground nuts because they grow in the ground.  Quite tasty, although one does need to watch out for rocks.
In a similar vein, “ground beef” is pidgin for certain varieties of bush meat – rats and hyrax (rodents of unusual size) that can be purchased from the not-so-posh local vendors.  Imagine a roadside stand with a bunch of rats hanging by their tails.

Nothing says “fun birthday celebration” quite like bouncy castles and beating on Captain America with a stick!

It turns out my kids are fairly well skilled at smacking a piñata.