Nina's first non-family sleepover...

... was a smashing success! She stayed over at her friend Hannah's house along with another girl Ava. According to Hannah's mom, the girls didn't fall asleep until almost 1 am! But they had a blast, and no middle-of-the-night phone call to go get her either.

Today we met her at the Gray Wildlife Park, where we had cupcakes with the birthday girl and some more party guests, then saw the animals. There happened to be a Norwegian festival going on, put on by a local "Sons of Norway" chapter, so we got to try some neat Norwegian food too. Turns out Norwegian the language is Germanic, so it was fun for the girls to see some of the similarities. Like, their traditional flower paintings are called "rosemalen," which means "flower painting." The German word for painting is mahlen, and is pronounced the same. Also the traditional dresses are very similar to  dirndls (but way more expensive! A nice dirndl starts at about 300 Euros and can go who knows how high, but a nice bunad starts at about three thousand dollars. Holy moly!) But they do the same thing with their bunads that Austrians do with a nice dirndl--they have a huge seam allowance, plus laces, so you can pretty much wear the same one your whole life.

We stopped at Dairy Queen on our way home, have you been to one of those lately? It's now our fast food place of choice. For $4.79, you can get a kid's meal including: a choice of 5 entrees, choice of fries, salad, or something else... I stopped reading at fries, choice of beverage including a smoothie, AND a choice of dilly bar, DQ sandwich, or cone. Wow. I got myself a kids' meal and could barely finish it even though I was starving. Well, I also helped Maggie and Nina finish their ice cream, but still. It was a ton of food. I went with the turkey wrap for my entree. Delicious. Happy meal, you have some catching up to do!

Now we're exhausted. Maggie is writing a book called "The Truth of Dead," which I don't know, I'll probably be discussing with the school psychologist on Monday. Nina is drawing cheerful pictures of our smiling family.