10 Questions About…

The Anita, Darla, the girls and I headed into Dublin for the day on Sunday. The weather was great. We had a fun time. We visited Grafton Street and saw the buskers, which for some reason had a very religious bent this weekend. We took some picture at the Molly Malone statue at the bottom of Grafton Street.

We did a quickie tour of Trinity, had dinner at Bewley’s and did the world’s quickest tour of the city center before heading back home.

The girls have 2 videos for their Grandpa on his birthday:

And Aine solo:

I wanted to send a quick thanks to Siobhan Dugan for featuring us (and the blog) in the most recent Minnesota Irish Fair Newsletter.

Also I wanted to thank folks for nominating us for the Irish Blog Awards in the following categories:

• Best Blog
• Best Personal Blog
• Best Newcomer

And one follow up: several people have wondered if Patrick got me the red leather jacket I wanted from the Blackrock Market. He didn’t. This is the second time he has been busted not reading the blog.

Here are a couple of pictures from the girls trimming the Christmas Tree. 

Today we went into town with the girls. We went to the National Museum to see the bog people. As the girls said, it was creepy and cool.

A bog is kind of like quicksand or swampland. According to Wikipedia, “A bog is a wetland type that accumulates acidic peat, a deposit of dead plant material.” The interesting thing about the bog is that it preserves anything that goes into. So sometimes when people are digging in the bog they run into super old thing – like people who have been dead for thousands of year.

It’s amazing how well they are preserved. You can’t take pictures in the museum, but it you’re interested, you can find pictures on Wikipedia. Again, it was creepy and cool. Now we just need to find a reason to visit a bog while we’re here as that would be cool too.

After the museum we went to the National Gallery. They were having a storytelling hour for kids, which Aine and Lily enjoyed.

After that we went to good old Eddy Rocket’s for dinner.

I’m still in St Paul. So this message is for the kids. Grandpa & Grandma got us a great early Christmas gift. Lily, you are particulalry going to love it. The following is a hint: (Click on the arrow below – might need to do it twice – to see the video)

This is a test to see if Patrick reads the blog. I’m in St Paul. I have been here since last Monday and I am here until this Monday. I came home for the Blandin Broadband conference. I have gotten a ton of work done since I’ve been here and I’ve been able to see a lot of people. I have eaten at Chipotle twice – actually I think I have had just about every meal at a restaurant.

Today I met my friend Jan at Dunn Brother’s downtown Minneapolis. While there I ran into Joe Dowling. I said hello and introduced myself. He gave his regards to Patrick and Tony Roche.

Patrick is doing his PhD on the Irish roots of the Guthrie Theater and Dowling is one of the major players in that work.

Our classroom has it’s own library every fortnight (aka 2 weeks) we have 2 new librarins,they are in charge of the library for that peirod of time,they get to make up a competion so far we’v had dressing up,and darwing bookmarks.The librarins are the judes.I haven’t been a librain (yet) but I have won I won 2nd place I won a braclet!

Hi i’m Lily one of the newest authors of this blog (I must confess that I already wrote a post called:Just me and Mom).My mom’s name is Ann.I know that most of you already know me but not everyone(yet).I usaly play with Alva and Laura.I know that you all know I moved to Ireland.My teacher’s name is Ms.Phelan.I go to a all girl school.A author came to visit our class her name is Margrit Cruickshank she wrote over 30 books, my teacher was like freacking out over making our class and how it looks. I thought it looked so,so,so clean but a bit bare because she wanted us to take everything off our tables.