Parentheticals

On Monday afternoon, Sara begged Alison for some peanut butter.  We give them each a straight spoonful of peanut butter at bedtime to help their stomachs stay full through the night, so this wasn't too unusual.  Alison thought that would be OK and got out the peanut butter and two spoons so she could give one to each girl.  She scooped Sara a spoonful and handed it to her, and then Rea called her to come outside to see the daffodils.  Alison stepped out to admire the flowers.  When she got back in, Sara had pushed a chair over and climbed up.  She had a spoon in each hand and peanut butter all over her face.  When she heard the door open, she looked over with a big smile, stretched her arms out wide, and said, "So much peanut butter!"  So cute! The girls have really been enjoying our new kitchen recently. Every so often they ask me to take pictures of them standing in front of the stove. I am not so sure as to why they like this, but it is fun...

Alison has been sick for the last few days. We have been buying a lot of orange juice, and taking it fairly easy. We had our monthly ward game night planned for Friday, but we didn't go since we didn't want to infect anyone in their family. Saturday morning we filled some more of our front yard grow boxes with post-compost dirt. It is very nearly done. Hopefully we will have enough time to finish it up before we need to plant the leaves. On Saturday (while everyone was napping) I went to the Indian grocery store and bought the ingredients for Paneer Masala. Paneer is an Indian cheese that doesn't melt. This means that you can fry it or grill it or anything and it just keeps the same shape. It is used a lot like tofu in dishes. By itself it doesn't taste like much, but when put in super tasty curry it tastes like super tasty curry, and that is great. Once I arrived home from my trip to the Indian market Andrea was awake and everyone else was still napping. In ord...

Rea has been calling people silly names this week "Sara is a bumble bee!" and Sara always responds with "not a (whatever)! big girl!" Sara has been going through that "language explosion" that they all hit at some time. It is fun to hear her using full sentences. She seems to speak better to Rea than either of the adults. We had a game night on Friday (which wasn't a very effective game night, but ended up being a decently fun get together). By the time that we started playing games the kids were already fussy and needed to go to bed, so we didn't really get that much time at all. No one seemed to understand my book cooking game at the get together, but Sunday night we went to Craig's birthday and played a game with Katie and Josh (and they both understood it). I am really relieved because I was not really expecting the game to be a difficult game to understand. Rea is starting to read some books by her self. They are the simplest books t...

Alison wrote half this post. You guess which half :). Our kitchen remodel is finally done!  It took a little over two weeks and just under $500, and it looks absolutely amazing.  Alison is so happy.  With the new white and silver color scheme, even the grey tile floor, which used to look dark and dingy, looks good.  Alison wants to put a few finishing touches of decorations on the walls, but other than that, we're done for a while.  In a couple of years, we do want to replace the counters with something higher quality, but that can wait.  It's perfect for right now. Rea said that she didn't like white cabinets like we have in our kitchen right now, and that they look worse than they did when they did before we redid them. She also was calling the silvery backsplash that we put up stink bugs (and poop bugs) and saying that they smelled terrible. I am not entirely sure what that was about. She thought it was hilarious. We had to spend Saturday af...

I had a new idea: write a collection of fairy tales/fables in which I break one convention of fairy tales in each story. I think that it will be called 'Twenty Broken Fables'. I might actually write it as a nano novel this next November. The first step, however, is to come up with 20 conventions to break. Speaking of conventions, I will be attending SaltCon again this year. I think that I will go without plans to present a game to the masses, however I will probably go with some prototype copies of my games to hand out in hopes of getting some blind playtesting. This last week Sara has been recovering from her last sickness. It seems like she is sick all the time now. The doctor said that she probably just caught a few different sicknesses in a row, and that she looked fine, so no course of action was recommended. We got her cranberry juice in case it was a urinary tract infection (and because I love cranberry juice). On Friday Mom and Dad watched the girls so that we cou...