Lego Designer Set #4883: Gear Grinders - More

Continuing...

The sixth car. P. 17-19. I don't really know what this is, some kind of commando minivan?



Seventh. The first of the "medium difficulty" cars. P. 22-26. Roadster.





And the eighth, uh, vehicle - a tractor. P. 26-32.





Three more medium difficulty cars, then we get to the hard stuff...

Lego Creator Set #4939: Cool Cars 2 and 3

Catching up on some of the Lego building Julien and I've been doing. Here's the second car from the Cool Cars set, Some kind of racey-thing...



And the last of the three, a semi truck cab.

Lego Creator Set #4939: Cool Cars

While Julien was building up his cars, I started on a different set. I refined the photography a bit, too, as you can see...









This was the first of three cars from this set. We'll see if I can get the rest of them built, too..

Lego Designer Set #4883: Gear Grinders

Julien's been building his way through the instruction booklet of one of his Lego sets, and wanted to share some pictures. Here's the first car, p. 4-6:



The second car, a little sportier model. p. 7-9:



Third, a four-wheeler - p. 10-12:



Fourth, a simple little speedster, p. 13-14:



And fifth, a sporty SUV with ski racks (?), p. 14-16:



More to come, I'm sure, as he builds up some more...

Last week

Had a pretty eventful week last week. I took Monday-Thursday off work to hang out with Julien, who didn't have any kind of summer program going on. Monday we Basically played with birthday stuff - lots of Legos, and a tin can robot. Tuesday we went to the water park and got sunburned despite slathering with sunscreen. Wednesday we hit some golf balls at the driving range and putted for awhile,

and Thursday we saw a movie (Space Chimps - Julien seemed to like it, but I wasn't so impressed. Spoiled by Pixar and Dreamworks for the animated movies these days...) Thurday night Julien slept over at some friends house, and went up to Lake Tahoe on Friday with them. So, yeah - pretty busy week for the Jooge.


Eventful day yesterday, too - Saturday morning errands included buying a new TV, since our 6-year old model decided to die last week. Ended up with a 37" LCD that sure makes DVDs and the Wii look awesome. Of course, our antennae reception is still pretty bad, but we don't really watch network TV too much. Just golf on weekends...

Midday took us to Sid's first birthday party - wonderful food, as always at the Tiar's house. Sid enjoyed a cupcake, and Lola and Sofia had some cake, too...





In the late afternoon, we spontaneously decided to head up for a hike at Tahoe Meadows. Seperate post about that...

Lego Birthday Cake

I read a bunch of geek parent and baking blogs, and had seen this meme go by a few times, so I was excited to try it out. I started with a double batch of fudge cake (from Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook) baked in two loaf pans. Froze them for a couple of days for ease of working, then leveled them and got ready to go:



Set them up on a tray and started frosting. Red first:



Then blue, then stacked the yellow one on top:



Then figured out how to make the studs on top - marshmallows, cut in half and "finger-frosted" worked perfect.



Then it was just some more studs, and some filling in and smoothing:


(Don't know why that one won't rotate...)

I think it was enjoyed...

Julien's 7th birthday party

We couldn't really decide what to do for Julien's birthday this year - he isn't super excited about any one thing, likes to do a little of everything - and we ended up with the idea of a Lego themed birthday. Invited a few friends, and prepared for a great time. There was trampolining:



Water balloon hijinks:


(Water balloon filling the hard way...)


(Sweet sibling-rivalry revenge)

And dress-up.



Had some great food - a hamburger bar and a couple kinds of salads, with Lego jello for the kids. Moved inside and opened some presents:





And finally, the Lego cake. That'll be another post by itself...



Fun times had by all.