What Has Brian Been Doing?

I haven't posted about this until now because it's been a secret all year. Last winter I started designing wooden trains to give to my kids, my nephews, and Kathy.  During the winter I looked at many pictures of wooden toy trains online. The tricky part, was to build interlocking cars.  I came up with a design for that and built 6 cars.  I had Joel and Rachel play with the cars (which were just flat bed cars) and found out a very important thing. 2 years olds try to push trains from the rear!  So I realized that I needed to make pull toys.  I tied a string to the front and wa-la! Joel could pull them around the house. I also figured out that it takes a long time to build each car so I decided that 3 cars per train would be adequate.  I started working on the engine and put some scrap pieces on one of the cars and brought it into work.  I got lots of opinions about what I could do so I made some adjustments and the following Monday I brought in an improved design. I think I talked to the people at work for 2 o3 different times before I settled on a design. I think it was April by then.  One of the trickiest parts was the smaller dome shaped piece right next to the smoke stack. I ended up needing to build a router table in order to get that done, and building the router table was a project in its self!  I finally got most everything cut out by summer time but found that sanding took a long time.  Anyway, I eventually got them all done and delivered. Here are some pictures of them.

The cargo cars turned out fairly nice. It took quite a while to cut all those rabbits, but the joints were nice and strong.

I really liked how the passenger cars turned out.  My first try on their design was simple, but I liked it so much I didn't try anything fancier.

After I had most of the trains built I found out that my nephew Titus does not play with vehicles much.  So I bought a scroll saw, which I had been wanting for a long time, and cut out animals to go in his train set.

I never had all 22 cars I built assembled at the same time, but I did get four trains together and strung them together for a gigantic train!

Bjorks go to the Snow!

Today we went to the snow and it was lots of fun. We go to a park right by Boreal and we can just walk along in the woods and sled where ever there is a gentle hill.  This time, the snow was a lot firmer everywhere and everyone could walk around easily so it was really nice.

We found a nice gentle hill to sled down.

 

Rachel was a pro and could do it all by herself.

Joel liked being able to walk around by himself in the snow.

That's our snow man. No one else was building them because the snow would not stick, but I made a good one anyway.

The trick to getting the snow balls was to carve them out of existing packed snow.  It took a long time but I succeeded!

New Rooms for the Kids!

Rebekah and I got to go on a date yesterday. We went out to lunch, and we went shopping. We bought Joel his very own big boy bed with a 10 year warranty so it should last a good long time.  I didn't want to take apart the crib so I suggested that we move the kids around instead.

Rachel is now in the front bedroom upstairs and she sure seems to like it.  It's got three windows in it and today Rebekah put up some new wall stickers.

Joel is now in Rachel's old room with his new big boy bed. He sure does like sleeping in it!   On it you can notice the nice new Cars quilt that Grandma made him for Christmas.  Joel's room also got some neat construction wall stickers.