Parentheticals

Gideon has been sleeping at night better, but not taking good naps. Alison needs to figure out a different time to exercise if he's going to only sleep for 20 minutes at a time during the day. Timmy got a robot car from the DI and is very happy about it. He has not been very obedient this week, although usually when we stand up to implement consequences he suddenly obeys, while wailing. But still sometimes not, and then he goes to bed and screams. Sara has been incredibly helpful and obedient this week. Apparently there's a balance, because she's just leaving a year of a not-very-helpful phase, and now Timmy's starting. But now we have two very helpful kids to run errands and clean up, which is amazing. Rea is growing up. She really enjoys being with friends and is figuring out social things. She is very responsible. She also has amazing biking skills. It rained a ridiculous amount this week. In about 10 years in Utah, we've never seen rain like this. It...

For the first half of the week, the kids were still a little sick. They'd have little half-day fevers, or sleep for long periods. We've gotten good naps out of them all week, which has been nice. By Thursday, they seemed better, so Friday Alison took the kids to a library puppet show and then to play group at the park. Everyone is looking forward to good weather and good health and lots of fun for the upcoming week. Monday an electrician was supposed to come install a outdoor plug for the electric car, but we got a call from the company saying that the electrician was in the ER and they had to reschedule. The kids were still pretty unwell and it was a lazy day. Mike took the car to work and charged it up; he likes it as a commuter car (although it only has a range of about 60 miles so anywhere but necessary nearby driving is out) and is looking forward to no gas and no oil changes. Late Monday night our foreign exchange student arrived. She is about 40 and is here getting a...

Monday Alison felt sick - she had a temperature and wanted to lay around all day. Mike offered to stay home and take care of her, but she said that she would be fine. Rea did a great job keeping the other big kids happy and fed, and Gideon loved being able to snuggle with Mommy all day long. Monday about 11:00 we got an offer to host a foreign exchange student from China. One of Mike's co-workers knows a guy at a college whose job it is to set up places for them to stay. We all discussed the offer, and decided to give it a go. The kids are very excited. 柳青(Liu Qing) is a 40 year old grad student who wants to learn English as part of her medical education. She will live in the spare room for at least a month (if both parties are still having fun after that, then it can continue on a month to month basis up to until she gets her degree). She is arriving on Monday. It has been a very busy week, getting ready for her. Tuesday Alison was feeling better, but still lethargic. As ...

This week for FHE we talked about what we learned at General Conference. Wednesday we went to Wheeler Farm for Timmy's date night. The kids loved seeing the animals, and playing on the play structures. Thursday Mike went to the BGDG meeting, and the kids and Alison watched a movie. On Friday we went to the new sushi place for a date. It has really good prices, and the sushi was also pretty good, so we are excited that they opened the place up. We also got a large quantity of cooking oil, which we ordered from a website which had qite reasonable prices. At the rate that we use oil for Mike's bread making, it was a good thing to get. Saturday Mike spent some time getting Storybook weaver up and running on Alison's computer. Alison remembers playing it all of the time as a kid, and it seems that the kids quite like it already. Mike made a story for Timmy, and this is a page of it: Saturday night we had the church easter egg hunt, and made toothpick-marshmallow ge...

Andy's family visited us this week! Rea has been telling everyone for weeks that her "cousins from Tajikistan" were coming; Alison would usually explain that her brother works for the State Department, and most of the time that Tajikistan was part of the former USSR, in response to blank looks. Alison took a week of vacation from all her Primary President responsibilities (good thing we had Conference this weekend!), playgroup, homeschool, grocery shopping, and everything else in order to have fun with Andy and Amanda and their kids. They went out to eat a lot, visited Temple Square and toured the Conference Center, and went to the Natural History Museum of Utah to see the dinosaur skeletons. It was incredibly fun, but exhausting. The big cousins all shared a room and stayed up way too late, and the adults liked to stay up and talk too. Alison also realized that there's a reason she only does a selected group of habitual things while Mike is at work: carting four ki...