A Legendary Date

On Tuesday we attended Olivia's baptism. It was beautiful. We are so happy that she's part of our family. We are planning Rea's baptism for 10am on November 3rd, so everyone who schedules things six months in advance can be prepared. Rea found and tried on Alison's dress from her baptism and it fits, so she's considering wearing it for her baptism. Alison tried on her wedding dress while Rea tried on the baptism dress. It no longer fits :), but it was fun.

Alison has decided that we don't get enough movement in our lives, so we're adding some more activities. She found a website that will use a YouTube video as an alarm, so each evening a kid picks something to be our Morning Movement first thing the next day. So far we've done dinosaur dances and ninja dances. It's a good way to wake up. Sara loves it, Timmy enjoys it, and Alison feels much more awake afterwards. Rea seems put-upon, but she's participating a bit. We're also trying to add some games after dinner every night, but that is not becoming habit as fast.

One night, we danced to the music of the Nutcracker around our front room. It's one of our favorite exercises, but this time, Alison slid along the floor and got a half-inch-long splinter in her foot. It took two days, soaking in Epsom salts, and slicing into the foot with an Xacto knife to get all of it out, but she can walk normally now.

Friday night, the kids watched Moana while Mike and Alison played one of their new games for a date. Even Gideon stayed out of the way (he was napping) and they got to play it through twice. It was a game called "Legendary," a cooperative deck-builder. Its theme is Marvel superheroes, and both Mike and Alison are prejudiced against anything with a commercial theme, because most of them trade on the theme and don't bother being high quality. But Alison loves cooperative games and deck building games and this was on the best-of lists of both, so we traded for it in the math trade. We're glad we did. It was a very fun game, and we're excited to play with different options in the decks.

This week Alison was officially accepted to be a VIPKID teacher, teaching English online to kids in China. It's an independent contractor system, so Alison had to put up a profile on the website and wait for parents to hire her. She just got her profile up yesterday, so she's hoping to start getting some bookings soon. It usually takes a few weeks.

On Sunday, the weather was beautiful, so after Church and callings were done, we rode to the school playground on our bikes. Sara fussed and fussed about getting the bucket bike, but finally gave in and had a decent attitude. But Alison is thinking of selling the bucket bike and switching to a bike seat for Gideon and a double trail-a-bike for Sara and Timmy. Maybe Sara would like it better, and at least she and Timmy could get some exercise and practice so that they could move to their own bikes sooner. The school playground was full of kids and we had a good time there.