Parentheticals

Christmas went well this year generally speaking. Two of Rea's presents arrived late, however, all the other presents arrived on time and everyone seems to have enjoyed their presents.  Rea liked her dragon and dragon book ends that she got for her bookshelf. They change color and look super cool. Sara got a lemon and a bunch of dolls, which she really likes.  Tim has been enjoying Pokemon Scarlet which he got for the switch. Gideon got a cool dragon Lego set that he really enjoys Elsa got a costume doll, which she really likes.  Alison likes her milk steamer that she got for making fancy drinks Mike thinks he will like his 4x4 grid of programmable buttons that he is building from a kid 5 he got (but he hasn't gotten it working yet)  We have been celebrating the 12 days of Christmas for watched the hog father and other movies, made fudge, delivered fudge, read Christmas books with the Poulsons, and had a sleep over.  We planned to see the lights downtown, but ba...

Written and illustrated by Tim.  So we all got sick today and yesterday and the day before that. But I wasn't sick I was jumping, or for most of the time I wasn't sick. Gideon barfed twice, Booie barfed twice, Gideon's frogs barfed zero. It made it so we couldn't go to the great sleepover that we had planned. Gideon got baptized. My job was to look at him and see if he went fully under and if Dad messed up on the words. Most of the time we were sitting around listening to music and listening to talks, and then we got to see him get baptized. It was very great, and he got the gift of the holy ghost. We had ice cream at the end and then we played cows and Bob. When it was time to leave we hid from the adults.  We had open about five presents this week three of them were intentional: first we opened a gnome and we named him Logan, because that is the thing that you do. Then we open the greatest Christmas Pageant ever, and then we opened a muffin tin. And then we opened up ...

On Monday we saw the Muppets Christmas Carol. They were showing it at the library, and we had never seen it on a big screen before, so it was super fun.  On one day we all got a big piece of paper and drew pictures together. We had giant underground spiders, castles, bats, lakes of lava, monsters, giants, and many other things. Mike also forgot to change his address on eBay, so he ordered some presents to the house, and the forwarding request was expired, so some of them went back to the sender. We eventually got them all fixed, but it was sort of annoying. Wednesday they had a young women's white elephant, and it was also fun  On Saturday we went to Richfield to attend the funeral of Great Grandma Poulson. It was a long drive, however, the kids are pretty good at driving, so we did well. A lot of people attended, and it was a good funeral. We picked some walnuts from Great Grandma's house while we were there too, which was fun. Timmy says that it wasn't even as bad as he t...

Last Sunday evening we went to the Stake Christmas Concert at our stake center, which was good. One of Grandma Sheila and Grandpa Mike's friends got us a puzzle Advent calendar. The kids have enjoyed opening up every little puzzle and completing them on the day they can open them up. They also like to go back and re-complete all of the prior days some times. The puzzles have been very popular, so it was a very nice gift. Dave and the other leader were going to not be able to make it to Activity dudes, so it was up to Mike to organize and execute it all alone. He got Brother Waters to agree to come to the activity so that there would be 2 adults present. He then invented plans for a Christmas tree pickle ornament out of felt and stuffing. The kids sewed it up and had a fun time. Mike spent pretty much the whole time threading needles and tying threads off. All in all it was successful. At the same time the girls went to see the Christmas lights. The temple grounds were under constru...

We missed writing blog post for 2 weeks, so we are going to attempt to remember what happened during those weeks.  Two weeks ago it snowed and the kids had a lot of fun time making snowmen and snow forts and playing in the snow and throwing snowballs. The snow only lasted a few days, however, we still were able to enjoy it quite a bit. After the snow had melted, and we decided to go on a walk one day because the kids were being grumpy. We took them to the local church because there isn't any local playground and they climbed on a big metal railing that is on the side of the sidewalk and played on that like it was monkey bars. After that got boring we climbed up the trees and played in the leaves and we threw windfall apples at the dog. Rocket is not traditionally the type of dog that likes to chase balls, however, he was having a lot of fun chasing the apples so maybe the problem is that the normal balls that we throw are too big? We have thrown him some windfall apples at other ti...

We missed writing last week apparently so, last week we did Halloween and probably did some other stuff too but I don't remember any of it. Elsa walked pretty good and kept up with us so we didn't have to split the group. Alison wanted Mike to stay home because he was feeling a little bit sick however since the group stay together we were okay. Sara performed the Thriller with her class at the elementary school Halloween party. She's been practicing very hard, and she did a fabulous job. Alison and the younger kids went to watch her (Rea was at her coop and Mike was at a service project at the cannery). We were very impressed! This week we celebrated Gideon's birthday. Gideon just turned eight, and we are very excited about that. Gideon got some cool Squirtles and other toys. Rea sewed him an amazing Squirtle plushy; Elsa absolutely loves it and carries it around and has it do school with her. Gideon is mostly very nice about this. He also got a stuffed frog with a Chri...