Dan and Becky helped to make Dan's birthday cake. To do this simply start with a tidy kitchen, basic cake making ingredients (chocolate, sugar, flour, eggs, chocolate, sugar, sweets, sugar, butter and chocolate) and two willing helpers.
Split the ingredients in two, one half goes in the bowl, the other half spread liberally onto the clothes of the helpers and all available surfaces. Add some patience, jiggle for a few hours, lose patience and all grip on reality before pulling it all together for a final burst of creativity. 
The finished result has, as you can see, enough sugar to allow a medium sized group of children to be enough of a critical mass to cause a chain reaction of running and screaming. Sadly the only effective control rods for this particular reaction appeared to be the promise of more sweets so we played pass the parcel - a phrase we had to repeat a number of times because the American parents though it sounds 'awfully posh' and they don't have this as a party game in the states.
On an unrelated note, Andy promised Margaret and Martin some pictures on Becky in Bunches.
Rubbish Job
We have sliding doors that separate the bedrooms from the rest of the house and a few months back I slid the door so far into the wall that the little wheels on top of the door fell off the runner and try as we might we couldn't get it back on. This is the point at which we discovered that American houses are built in a particular order, which like time's arrow is non-reversible. The only way to fix the problem was to cut away a hole in the back of a bathroom cabinet and then spend about an hour wedged into a space no wider than a size zero model's ankle trying to get the door rehung and to make sure it didn't happen again. Here are some pictures of my trauma for your DIY schadenfreude.
Believe it or don't I managed to fit through this gap.
Going on the trip meant I missed my next snowboarding lesson, but seeing as how I am such a cruel boss and made the entiure project team work until 10pm on Monday I left early on Friday and went to have a practice by myself. Typically I soon got bored of the practice slopes and had a few goes on a proper hill reached by the chairlift (which I found exciting seeing as how I'd never been skiing before). As I never made it down without at least a couple of spectacular wipeouts each time, today I feel like I'm held together by duct tape.
Today both Andy and Dan had ice skating lessons. This is about the only time when Andy has been pleased to go backwards - as she finally was able to do backwards skating - the trick apparently is not to lean forwards. Dan is getting faster and faster and now has a 50% chance of falling when he hits the sideboards. After lunch we headed out to explore somewhere new, in this case the Carver State Park which about 20 minutes away. This makes it seem like we just had lunch and headed out - the reality of the process is more convoluted and involves ensuring the children have been to the loo, then a good deal of searching for items such as the children's gloves, which, although not large, should not be so hard to locate as they are. Then of course the rounding up of the children, and all the cold weather gear, snacks, directions etc. So much time is required for these steps that the kids need the loo once again and you feel it would be as easy to go away for a week as a couple of hours.
Still we finally make it out for an afternoon of freezing the children. Its actually not cold (about 0) but there is a wind and we take them on a short hike which they're not really up for. To make it easier for them we hire a pull along sledge (for a dollar) which I can't unfortunately be trusted to pull at any sensible speed and end up spilling the kids a number of times more often than they find funny. Still they do eventually defrost and we've been out in the sunshine which was great.
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