Meerkat baby goes berserk!

Gideon became a meerkat this week. He can crawl around, stand up on his two legs (without any support), and then squat back down to crawling all by himself. He seems to be closer to walking than he was before, and his balance is getting much better.

This week Sara, Rea, and Timmy all drew all over their faces. It took quite a lot of scrubbing to get it all off. Perhaps this will be a learning experience for them.

They also carved some pumpkins. We are not sure what they were supposed to look like, but they are pretty scary.

On Thursday Rea invited some friends over for a Halloween party. It was supposed to be a costume party, but no-one showed up in costumes since they all cam straight from school. They cut corn tortillas in the shape of pumpkins and coated them with orange oil, and toasted them into chips. Rea was very excited about this recipe. Other than that they mostly played outside. It was Alison's type of party.

Alison and Mike have been dreaming of making an onsen for a while. We went to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore on Friday to see what they sell, and that got us thinking about the onsen again. We drew up plans that would require 100 cinder blocks to make a rectangular pool that would be able to fit our whole family in it. We would dig it into the ground and line it with stone tiles to make it look nice. There are other steps to making it, but those are the first.

While at the ReStore, an employee gave all of our kids some plush monkey toys. They are very happy about them - they even insisted that we wrote about them in this blog.

Saturday morning we went online and checked to see if anyone was selling cinder-blocks, and for how much they were selling them, and we found that a guy in Salt Lake was giving them away for free. We were only able to fit 75 into the van, so we still need 25 more for the onsen, but it was a nice thing to get for free.

We did an organized simplicity cleaning of the parents bedroom on Saturday afternoon. It was pretty easy since we had done one so recently. Mike threw out a bunch of old documents as part of it, so we had a fire last night.

As we sat around the fire, we tried the kids out on a rules-light RPG. Each person got to make up a character that had one of two traits, and then we all told a story about the characters together. When a character was doing anything that had a chance of failure, we rolled a die to see what the outcome would be. The kids really liked it, and we will probably (with some modifications) do it again some time.

We have been thinking about hosting a Haloween RPG session again - perhaps we would play a small game with the kids first, and then play an adult game after. Since the first try to get our kids playing an RPG went pretty well, we are thinking that it could be a fun thing to try out.

Alison is still adapting to her new sleep schedule. During the end of the week she was doing pretty well, so it seems like she is getting used to it. She is going to keep trying it for another week at least.