We celebrated New Year's Eve with sparking grape juice, tv shows and Netflix countdowns! Earlier in the day he partied hard at the local library, enjoying their noon-time countdown and crafts.

In the morning we went swimming. He's enjoying it more and more each time, although he is still not a fan of any water on his face.
In the afternoon we made some apple cheddar muffins, inspired after listening to Laurie Berkner's Song and Story Kitchen book.

We went out to the YMCA this morning so Quinn could burn off some energy.
He wasn't having any of the Y, however, so we went to Catch Air, where he ran around like crazy and had tons of fun.
When we came back home he wandered off to play with toys and I hid in the bedroom to play some video games.
And later he showed off adorable 3D printed Harry Potter glasses Chris made.

When I picked up a scarf I had started 5 years ago, Quinn immediately asked me to make him one. While I enjoy it, I don't tend to knit because it's painful from tendonitis and if I have to pick between knitting and gaming, I'll pick gaming 99.9% of the time (they're both repetitive motion activities).

Still, when your kid asks you to knit him something, you KNIT HIM SOMETHING. So he picked out the color from a stash of yarn I had and I set to knitting. I knit at home at night, I knit at lunch. I tried to take breaks and then I'd just enjoy the grove I was in and overdo it.
I made a fair number of mistakes, like forgetting you don't make a stockinette stitch unless there's a border or pattern to prevent curling, but he loves it anyway. He's been excited for me to finish and tried to get me to stop when it was just half as long as the finished product.
Now I can wait a few weeks or months and rest my arms before hopefully starting back in on this project from pre-kid.

We baked and decorated gingerbread cookies this evening. He had lots of fun helping at every stage of the process, especially taste testing the final products.

I don't know how, but this plant I received for Mother's Day is still alive.

The excitement continues! Christmas Day is finally here and that means toys! Quinn's first question upon seeing the presents was to ask if a ghost had brought all the gifts. It was such a hilarious statement, mashing up his love of Halloween and toys.
He had a ton of fun reading all of the labels (addressed to him of course) and tearing open packages left and right.
We spent lots of time playing with figures and assembling different LEGO creations. It's been a nice, relaxing Tuesday.

A kickstarter I backed in the summer arrived, just in time for Christmas! It's a bluetooth adapter that plugs into the USB-C port of the Nintendo Switch. I also snagged the additional accessories, such as the dock adapter and stand.

It paired very quickly with my headphones and I'm pretty impressed with the packaging. I'm going to enjoy listening to narrative at night now where before I've kept the sound so low I've been worried the games would wake the little one.

Quinn did not get enough sleep last night. When we arrived at my parents house he was just fussy and crying about everything.
 A "snowball" fight turned that around quickly. My parents have this adorable bucket of plush snowballs and Quinn loved them. 
 There was a lot of throwing them at Uncle Jeff. 
Later Uncle Jeff brought up his keyboard, which Quinn loved and danced to a ton.
 And convinced Uncle Jeff to give him a piggy back ride.
And "fly" him so Quinn could do dancing in the air.
The absolute best was the scavenger hunt Uncle Jeff created in the house for Quinn to find his Christmas presents. He understood every clue, ran all over the house, and was just so overjoyed at all of the fun. Uncles truly are the best.



It's day one of our holiday weekend with friends and family! Amy and Chris are in from Beijing so we spent several hours with them, catching up on things and having a good time. My parents were kind enough to host and let us use their house.
They brought Quinn an A-M-A-Z-I-N-G set of transforming letters that you can connect into large robots, not unlike Voltron. Quinn loved them!
We had a fantastic time at Grandma Karath's for dinner and presents. Quinn ran around screaming and loving everything, talking up a storm with her.
This dinosaur visiting everyone was truly his favorite and he fed the rescue dinosaur plants, had him visit a manger, and just go all over the place.
There were so many things with lights, sounds, and wrapping. He had so much fun!

This is such a bizarre little toy and Quinn just loves it.

This is a very cute way to wrap candy, and was a very nice gift at work! Tasty!

I woke up in the middle of the night and the moon was so bright it was shining through the blinds. It was oddly distracting when trying to go back to sleep, even though it doesn't look like much here.

I started knitting Quinn a scarf last night. He selected the color and asked me to do it after he saw me trying to finish something up from 5 years ago. So looks like my own scarf is on hold until this one is complete, which is slow going when you have tendonitis.

Almost a year ago Chris 3D printed this Tardis model for me so I could make a snow globe. I'd seen this Adafruit tutorial and I wanted to make something Dr. Who-themed.

The idea of painting it was something I didn't want to do. Chris had primed it white for me but I really dragged my feet on doing anything else.
I finally started to do something with it this month, nearly a year later. So first I painted it with some acrylic model paint.
Then the next weekend I glued it to the base with E6000 and coated the model in Envirotex.
I'd had these supplies lying around for a year so I finally cracked open a gallon jug of distilled water and got pouring. The glitter and glycerine added made it look like a snow globe for sure. I used 1tsp of glycerine and just under that for the glitter.
I tried for awhile on and off the past year to figure out a way to get a Tardis sound on a Circuit Playground Express. I'm sure there is an easy way to do it, but I just don't know about reading sheet music or programming to get it quite right. I tried a few different tones and nothing quite sounded correct. I opted for no sound, and I can always update the programming at a later date if I do figure it out.

I ended up using MakeCode, which is pretty easy and fast to use. 

I placed a small lipo battery under the microcontroller and used double-sided tape to stick it to the bottom cap of the snow globe. 
The lightup is pretty basic, but it glow all colors of the rainbow when you shake it. With the envirotex coating the plug, there was still some leaking out of the globe so I followed the advice of the Adafruit tutorial and coated the out edge of the plug with E6000 glue.
I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out. I especially like that

This is a movie Quinn has been looking forward to seeing. Chris really wanted to see it as well since it was getting very reviews.
He sat through 98% of the movie, only really getting ancy in the last 10 minutes, for which he mostly stood. The nice thing with this theater is that he can stand and not bother anyone, since we can get a spot in the back away from everyone and the aisles are large for the reclining chairs.

He spent a lot of time dancing during the credits. He really liked the credits music, as you can see here.

We spent part of the day at Meijer gardens. Every year they do a whole exhibit of different tree decorations for different cultures that celebrate Christmas (or other religions that have holidays around this time of year).
 There were lots of fun things for us to see.
Their train exhibit was perhaps the most exciting for the 3 year old. He chased it from room to room.

This morning I felt pretty ill. I had been throwing up and in general just felt rundown. So I took the day off and tried to rest.

Except you can't really rest when there is a 3 year old in the house, can you?

So in between naps we did some crafts. Painting, gingerbread house, and finished up two new ornaments for his tree (gingerbread and pine tree).

It was a long and exhausting day.

Today was our winter holiday party. When I arrived home Quinn immediately wanted to see what my gift was (it was a battery charger). The lack of "toyness" on some things that come into the house doesn't slow him down at all. He will find a way to turn anything into a fun toy.

I don't miss using 131 for my commute. It was a parking lot this morning.

Came home to this elaborate hotwheels track.

Adabox 010 arrived today. I looked for the fasted little sample project they had so the little one and I could play. They had a very fun Christmas soundboard project. We've been having lots of fun with it!