I'm not dead yet

 This week Sara has been particularly flirtatious. She definately notices us when we are holding her and talking to her, and she loves to smile and coo at whoever is holding her. She has also started to have a 'fussy o-clock' (Just like Andrea at her age). The only thing that helps her during that time is (as Heather aptly named it) "blanket prison". When she is fussy, but not too fussy she likes to stand up (she is strong enough to support herself (though she has no sense of balance, so she needs to be steadied)).

Andrea continues to show her independance from us, and is getting to be more of a hand full daily. This sunday was the primary program, and Andrea decided that she needed to be up on the stand. She walked over to the point just below where the sunbeams were and started trying to jump up. She is good at jumping, but she would have had to jump 4 feet just to get ahold of the edge of the partition. She wouldn't come back of her own accord, so I had to take her out of the chapel.

She is also starting to enjoy the 'Magic Tree House' books (which I remember Daniel liking as a kid.) She takes two cardboard figurines from the game 'chutes and ladders' and pretends that they are Jack and Annie (and tells all sorts of stories about them). She loves playing with dinosaurs right now as well.

Andrea has also been showing more empathy at times. She will attempt to comfort Me or Alison if we get hurt (like if I bump my leg on the table or something), and she will at times spontaneously give Sara hugs and kisses.

I finally decided that I had positvely identified the mushrooms that we found on our walk a week ago as field mushrooms (which are edible). The thing that made me sure of them was the spore print (which took almost 24 hours of waiting to get). I also found some white mushrooms in the lawn of the next house over (which I have tentatively identified as destroying angels after failing to get a spore print on them.) Guess which of the mushrooms pictured here are destroying angels, and which ones are field mushrooms.

Since I identified the mushrooms, I ate some of the edible ones and destroyed the poisonous ones, and so far I have had no ill side effects.

We made a Feta this last weekend. things seemed to go well - I suppose that we will know for sure once it is done (in a week from now), and we get to eat our first tastes of it.

At work I played a couple of lunch games of 'Bang', which is a fun game. While I highly recommend it as a great pass time, I don't recommend it to play with people who are poor sports (or who mind losing a game and then the game continuing on for 15 more minutes). Sadly I never got to play as Chuck Wengam.

We had another baptism this week. Our ward is on a roll. We now have to have a regular Gospel Essentials class (instead of an on demand one like we had in the past).

After having played a few 2 player games of Polynesia with the amount of cards that I was expecting to print in the base game I have come to the conclusion that there are too few cards in the base game. I am thinking of increasing the number of cards in all of the decks (by a little bit - perhaps 18 cards). Hopefully that will help the decks not run out so fast.

This weekend we are celebrating our anniversary. The grand parents have agreed to watch the kids, and Sheila and Scott have agreed to watch the goats. We have yet to teach them how to milk the goats, but they will probably come over some time this week.