10 Questions About…

Aine has taken up Irish Dancing this year. I’m sure we’ll have some video to show for the effort this spring when they have their big show – but in the meantime… We went to a Christmas party sponsored by the dance company. Other famous guests – Santa!

We did a lot of our holiday celebrating the week before Christmas this year. It started with our annual Christmas open house. We took no pictures – but we did make a lot of food. As always we left everything until the very last minute – but all of my family is so great about helping. The Saturday before the party the girls and I go to Grandma’s for a marathon cookie bake. Our big lesson this year – don’t try to use healthy peanut butter for cookies. Dad and I went to Sam’s to get good things like shrimp trays. I try to hide one every year – but it never works out. So we share.

We opened presents mid-week. Everyone was very happy with their haul. Presents included a big princess tent, betta fish and Flip Camera.

We went on our annual sojourn to the Children’s Theatre. We saw A Christmas Story. It was a family favorite. Actually it’s always fun to see who likes which plays. Katie’s favorite was Frog and Toad. Patrick liked the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Many of us still go with Wizard of Oz.

The adults had an amazing dinner at Luci’s. Sadly Mom was sick – clearly sick if Luci’s was out. I’m trying to remember what we had – it was a 5 course meal. And if that wasn’t enough we also got an extra dinner of scallops just because we all wanted to try them. If you haven’t eaten at Luci’ you should try it. They have a 3-course meal that you just can’t beat. And much to our delight, there’s a special rate on Thursdays. We had hoped to go earlier in the week but snow helped us decide on Thursday.

One last thing I remember from our whirlwind week was the Mall of America amusement park. Due to a some excessive holiday spending and a bargain they were running we got some very economical free-ride bracelets. The kids had fun. There is a huge difference between the rides that O’Donnell’s think are fun and the rides the Lynch’s like. In fairness they have season passes to Dix Flag so they have been desensitized.

So Lily and I have taken on a new challenge. We are the neighborhood correspondents for the Twin Cities Daily Planet. That means we interview people in Mac Groveland for the online newspaper. We started with our neighbor Pete Greenheck up at the Nativity Christmas Tree Lot. We’re still working on our second interview. Got an idea? Let us know!

At Nativity (the girls’ school) they don’t have an all-school Christmas pageant, which is kind of nice. Rather a couple of the grades have different events. The first grade did a reenactment of the of the Nativity. Aine was an angel – so that wasn’t too much of a stretch for her.

I’m back. I’m going to catch up the blog because we did something fun today and I want to post about it – but I can’t until we’re up to date. So we might be heavy on pictures for December.

We got a lot of now in December. This picture was taken after the 18 inch snowfall early in the month.

Patrick and I had a great dinner at Luci Ancora – our favorite Italian restaurant. They had a wine dinner with St Innocent, Patrick’s favorite winery. We go to the wine dinners often – usually we sit by ourselves. This time they sat us with a few other folks. So that was different – Patrick was not so thrilled at first – but after a glass of wine, or two it was kind of fun!

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