There are pics today.
At the Holiday Lights – Mark, Danita, Pat, Jul, Bryon, Liz
We (all six of us, Reeds and Eichenlaubs) started Tuesday with a trip to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum. Danita found a super-duper coupon that got us all in at half price. There were a huge number of amazing things to see, along with occasional surprises – an extra noise or a puff of air. Elizabeth got overloaded when she tried to climb through a tunnel, but otherwise it was a completely successful outing. That afternoon, Mark felt good enough to join us. We had some of Danita’s fabulous lasagna. We watched Kung Fu Panda 2 and did our gift exchange with Mark.
Trains in the park Greenhouse. (Click on this pic to see the greenhouse in the greenhouse.)
Wednesday the Reeds went to a children’s theater production of “Frog and Toad”. When they came back, we went to watch Kung Fu Panda 3. That’s when I learned that movie, which was promoted throughout the first two movies, will be released late in January. Amazon helped us save the day with Toy Story 3. In the evening, we went to a walk-through holiday lights exhibit at one of the county parks.
Moat Monster
We had all kinds of opportunities to play computer games in between adventures. Pat and I were talking about the old arcade games, which made me remember an old hand-held Frogger toy I got one year for Christmas. It still works, and it’s still fun to play. However, by Thursday all the adults were glad I didn’t find the game earlier. (The “splat” noise occurs frequently. It gets to be annoying after the first few thousand occurrences). All the games make noise. Frogger was just the most popular annoyance.
At the Train Garden (the kids are acting their age, again)
Wednesday was the “Second Christmas” celebration at Ed’s, with over 20 in attendance. But that wouldn’t be enough for us. We had planned to start the day by taking the kids to the theater to see “Good Dino”. This would give the Reed parents a couple of hours to go through the house, making sure all their stuff was packed up. Unfortunately, the movie flopped, and it couldn’t get even one screening when competing with Star Wars. “Alvin” was playing, but Danita really dislikes the chipmunks. So we went to the library and borrowed “Beethoven”, the old Disney classic about a St. Bernard dog. We took the kids over to our clubhouse theater for the screening. The movie was a great success.
For some reason, this model of the Baltimore Conservatory caught my eye. You can see the Bromo Seltzer tower on the left.
Our second adventure was a stop on the way to Ed’s house to see the Glen Ave firehouse train garden. Jul, Pat, and Mark chose to skip the train garden. We took the kids and left an hour earlier. There were few other people there, and we had a great time. They had a “Minecraft” area, where the kids tried to educate a hopelessly out-of-date older generation some of the fundamental “who’s who”. The Minion area was quite popular, in part because they had the Minion movie playing on an LCD panel representing an outdoor movie screen. To nobody’s surprise, Star Wars was back this year. They also had two building fires, a volcano, and much more.
Pat and Liz at Second Christmas
The Second Christmas at Ed’s was filled with people. Besides Bryon and Liz, there were 4 other children. Suzanne and Addie were there, and Toni’s sister brought her two kids. It took so long to do all the presents that we ended up taking an eating break in the middle. I think the star of the buffet was Danita’s 3-cheese macaroni casserole. Call me biased if you want. I noticed there wasn’t much left at the end of the evening. There was no way to get pictures of everybody. I’m just including a couple of shots.
Toni. In the background, you can see Toni’s parents. Bryon is on the far left with Suzanne and Addie looking on; Lynne is on the right.
Mark went home last night. The Reeds left about 5 AM this morning, Christmas is over. But the holidays aren’t. There’s plenty more to come …