We spent Thanksgiving with Eric's parents in Wisconsin and had a nice, low key time. That was good considering the kids went into it with 2 colds and an ear infection between them and came out with 2 colds, an ear infection and a virus. We spent the following week recovering.
Amalia and Mama before her first Thanksgiving dinner (to attend, not eat).
Amalia met Great Aunt Robyn.
Gareth got in some good play time with Grandpa.
Uncle Josh helped make the meal (see the yummy brined turkey in the back).
Amalia had duck.
A lovely meal.
A little post-turkey Beatles Rock Band. Gareth had this guitar (unplugged) and was playing bass (so he informed us). He played watching the screen for about 20 minutes straight. He's a serious rock band guy.
The day before Thanksgiving we got to tour a business that works on train cars. It was in a giant old tractor factory in Milwaukee and Gareth just wanted to run up and down the train tracks. The business restores, repairs and creates fantastic passenger/train cars. They did Obama's car that he road in across country.
Here's the outside of the car we toured. It is a fully restored 1912 train car for repopulating fish populations. (There were tanks for ice that they'd put buckets of fish in to carry and some places for the crew.) They do metal, wood, paint (almost everything) in shop, hiring out to local artisans for what they couldn't do. They were in the final phase of a 2 year project that cost something like a million dollars (can't remember exact details, was too busy making sure a 2 year-old didn't ruin the ridiculously expensive car). It was being redone for a museum and we got to go inside (no one will get to when it's in the museum). It was really neat.
I let her play with the spoon afterwards to try to get her to suck on it and swallow a bit of the cereal.
