Yum!

Tuesday was Sara's date night. First she asked for ice cream, but when Alison pointed out that she had been complaining about being cold all day, she decided to change for hot chocolate. We have a local fancy drink place called Straws where we get "hot ice cream" for the kids when they want it. Sara chose mint chocolate cocoa, which tasted just like mint chocolate chip ice cream. The kids enjoyed it a lot (Sara brought it home and shared).

Alison is maybe feeling a little better, but not much. The kids still got to watch a lot of movies this week, although we're getting rid of the multiple-movies-a-day days. Rea and Sara want it to be noted that they watched 'Lady and the Tramp' this week.

Rea baked brownies all by herself for us. She is getting very self-reliant with Alison's indisposition. She asked permission, got out the box of brownies, read the directions, mixed them, greased a pan, and poured them in. Alison just put them in and out of the oven. It was very fun and successful.

Our front yard is making a little progress. Our neighbor put in a few of the panels of the fence he's been planning to put up for three years, and it's looking nice. We covered the rest of the lawn with mulch that we wanted to turn into planting beds. We planted seeds in the beds, too, so hopefully it will look pretty soon.

This week we went to hunt more morels. They are still coming up, but we have never found a lot of them on any of our trips this year. Between all of the trips together we got about 100 morels so far, but it has been a fairly time intensive process. Yesterday we got 9 more morels in the same place that we found all of the morels on our first trip. We ate the ones that we found yesterday for dinner, and they were pretty tasty. Morels are one of my favorite mushrooms.

We also found some cup fungus which we didn't identify. Probably it is poisonous, so we are not going to do much more to it.

On Friday night our ward had an Ice Cream Social. The kids had a wonderful time. They had all sorts of old-fashioned games, like hopscotch and a beanbag toss and hula hoops and a "cakewalk" where the prizes were just little plastic toys. They also had and a maypole and Twister. Rea especially liked learning hopscotch and Timmy loved tossing the beanbags. Then we made fancy ice cream sundaes with all sorts of lovely toppings. Yum! After the ice cream they had square dancing, but we had to leave early to go to our Financial Fitness class. It was a very fun evening.

Alison's calling as Senior Primary Singing Time Chorister has changed to just Singing Time Chorister; we recombined the Junior and Senior Primaries into one, and the Junior chorister is moving this week, so now she gets to do all the singing time every week. She's really hoping that her morning sickness has let up enough to let her do a good job.

Mike also bought tickets to Google IO Extended this week. He is excited to see what new things google has come up with.

Finally, we made dandelion syrup this weekend. It ended up looking like dark honey, and tasting a lot like the honey that we got from grandpa Craig's bees, so perhaps they got a lot of their source material from dandelions. The recipe that we followed was:

pluck 1 quart of dandelion petals, discarding all of the green parts of the dandelion. add 1 quart of water and bring to a boil. Set aside for a day, strain out petals and compress to get extra dandelion broth out of them. Add 4 cups sugar, 1 small cubed lemon  and dandelion broth to a crock pot and cook on low overnight. Can the results or consume soon.