Parentheticals

This week Clarabelle was clearly in heat, so we arranged to take her over to the stud. Unfortunately, the only time the stud's owner could do it was in the middle of the afternoon, and it ended up being Alison's worst day of morning sickness ever, so Mike had to leave work and do it. We decided that now his boss can add to the lists of "strangest reasons my employees have asked for time off." Clarabelle was gone for a few days and Lala was very noisy without her. Alison felt better the other days and took the kids to the library and to her mom's house, so they were happy. Alison was even well enough to pick up the goat on Thursday. It was a good thing she felt good that day, because the owner of the stud was over an hour late. Luckily another woman showed us her baby goats and the baby pigs, so the kids had fun. The goats are glad to be home together. Thursday we were packing to leave for a trip and we noticed that a robin was building a nest in our ornamental...

Over the course of the week we finished up changing Micronesia to be Norse themed. We have learned more about Norse mythology than we knew before. They sure had a lot of war gods. This week for breakfast in addition to pancakes we had muffins. The kids liked them, however they were really messy, since their muffin etiquette is far worse than their pancake etiquette. Specifically, they would carry their muffins all around the house and leave them all over the place. On Monday Alison and the kids all went to the park and stayed for 6 hours. Alison was exhausted after it was over, however the girls had a fun time. They all got sunburned, but that didn't last very long. Probably it was just the fact that they are all so white after a winter. Rea wants you all to know that after they got sunburned she broke the bottle of aloe, so we have to get a new bottle. She will be paying for it herself, since she threw the bottle. Rea has also been reading a lot of Calvin and Hobbes recent...

This week Timmy started saying 2+ word sentences (things like "Dada home - happy!", and "Pet Meow!" (which meant "I want to pet the cat")). It is pretty good. Hopefully he gets a better vocabulary of verbs so that the sentences can make more sense. At work we have been hiring more people since Scott and Nate both left our team. We made one offer this week, (and the guy accepted it). It seems that we are going to make another offer on Monday morning (when our HR guy gets back). We have been reading Harry Potter 2 this week. The kids love playing Harry Potter all the time (Rea is Harry, I am Ron, Sara is a magic princess named Rose, Mom is Hermione, and Timmy is either George, Ginny, or Prof. Snape). Whenever I make pancakes I am in remedial potions class and Snape is making make potions. Speaking of pancakes, on Thursday I decided to make pancakes for breakfast, and I gave them to the kids and Alison. When I came home from work she reported that she w...

I got a new debit card, and this time they set the PIN for me to a random number. I didn't want to memorize it, however I have been reading Mind Performance Hacks  recently, so I decided to try out the  Dominic system . This is easier said than done, since the first step is to make 100 character/action combos up so that you can easily memorize any number of digits. Here  is my current list of characters and actions. It is still a work in progress. I did, however, memorize the number while I was working up my list :). This week Alison has been feeling much less sick from her cold, but her morning sickness* has been pretty bad. She spent a lot of time feeling nauseous. We spent most of the time trying to keep up. It is fortunate that we made all of those freezer meals a few months ago because all of the cleaning + all of the cooking is a huge thing. Times like these make me appreciate all of the work that Alison does every day even more than I already did. Rea ha...

Last week Alison got a nasty cold. That made it a rather difficult week, which is terribly unfortunate on Easter week. But we did manage to do some of our traditions. We talked about the Triumphal Entry (and played a game of it), though we forgot to do the Cleansing of the Temple. We had our traditional Seder meal with lamb and matzoh and haroseth and bitter herbs. Rea asked the traditional Four Questions that the child is supposed to ask about the symbolic foods, and we drank lots of cups of grape juice and talked about the Passover and the escape from Egypt. It's always a little long for the kids but interesting, and it helps us better understand the symbolism of the sacrament. Next year Alison is considering watching the movie "Prince of Egypt" the night before the Passover meal, to emphasize the continuity of the story. On Thursday a neighboring stake put on a production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat."  We watched the middle school...