Truck

John's mom brought him his "merote" control truck, much to Fina's delight. She was sure that we'd need to buy a new battery, but we charged up the battery and it ran (although we had to buy 2 9v in addition to the rechargeable one it takes, because it was made in the 90s). John loved having a little minion around to retrieve it when he got it stuck in snow banks.

Apparently his sisters were never as amenable to such activities. Go figure.

Fina didn't mind (too much) that John is a remote control hog, she loved chasing it around.

Although I wasn't quite sure who was chasing who.

And eventually he did let her have a go at it. She came inside just glowing because she got to play with daddy.

Also today in the mail John's uncle sent us this super boring home video that John's grandpa (the one who writes the Christmas letters) shot one time when he was visiting. It's pretty much no talking but just slowly panning around the yard. Occasionally you can catch snippets of conversation in the background, but mostly it's just the sound of the wind blowing. At the end he filmed the kids a little bit, but apparently John was being a little shit head that day and kept running and hiding from the camera. There's one glorious scene where John's dad demonstrates how he chops logs with his really dull chainsaw and John makes an appearance when his dad drops a log and he runs in to pick it up for him and it looks like his head narrowly misses the chainsaw. The movie would be hilarious if you cut out most of the boring bits, although it might lose something because you wouldn't know that it was the "good parts".