One

This is Esther's first big bite of birthday cake.

The verdict: cake is good.

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Big Branch

Here's the big branch that broke off our tree and fell into our neighbor's yard the day before we got home from Christmas vacation. Amazingly, it only cracked the storm window on the corner of her house.

Family photo

We were messing around with Photobooth on the Mac and got this photo. It was a filter that shrank everything toward the center of the photo, so we got a tiny-headed baby Emily! She laughed and laughed as we were playing with it.

Here's a more normal shot:

Our little Christmas tree

Proud Grandpa

Grandpa with Emily and Lexi.

Greg, Kari, and Lexi last weekend.

Pie

So I made an apple-cranberry pie last week. My first pie ever, inspired by our surplus of apples and a recipe in the Cook's Illustrated magazine.

I guess I didn't take any photos of the interior of the pie, but it was mostly apple with a thin layer of cranberries near the bottom. The crust turned out perfectly, flaky and non-tough, and the apples were good too. Sadly, though, it wasn't just an apple pie. The addition of the cranberries did it no favors. They were just a little too tart still, and kind of overpowered the apple-pie-ness of the dessert. So the pie hung out for a while before it was finally finished off.

Lesson learned. Stick to apples in an apple pie.