Ewok

I've been a little busy lately, so delinquent with new postings. I'm working on updates about James, but in the meantime, enjoy these.

Julie's latest cake creation, to add to her catalogue of achievements. Megan wanted an ewok cake—you know, those little furry creatures from "Return of the Jedi." Any guy who came of age in the '80s will be simultaneously relieved and a little bummed to know Megan didn't choose the Princess Leia in gold bikini of that film.

But I digress. Julie made this one up entirely herself—no template from the internet to work from, just the photo of the ewok you see on the left there. Megan was thrilled. Also, the chocolate icing was quite tasty. 

Puzzle

We finally got our videocamera  back with the sound fixed, so I'm hoping to post more video of what James likes to play. Unfortunately, my laptop isn't compatible with our older firewire, so I have to rely on using Julie's computer, which presents, um, some difficulties. But here's a little bit of James working on his shape puzzle.

His favorite is the rectangle, which he'll do over and over and over again, but he's getting better at the other shapes too. Please pardon Megan's grab for video attention in the middle—she found one of her creations in the recycling and was protesting.

Origami

Luke came home from school yesterday talking about the origami book his class apparently discovered at choice time yesterday. Who knows if this will become one of his obsessions, or whether it's a one-day thing, but when we were talking about it last night, it reminded me of Robert Lang (who Mark worked with at some point in California), the subject of this New Yorker profile about "the physicist who dropped everything for paper folding,"  and the artist who did the scorpion at the top of this post.

Luke and I looked at Lang's origami website (click here), which has photos of unbelievable origami and for some of them even includes links to the mind-boggling crease pattern instructions. (You can access the ones for the scorpion here.) Luke was suitably impressed—though in typical Luke fashion, he's also convinced that he can make up his own way of doing origami, since the book was so popular that kids had to wait to take turns to look at it and go over the instructions.