Parentheticals

We started milking Olive this week. Mike goes out and gets about a quart of milk every morning before work. We think that's pretty good for not separating the mom and baby at all. Usually when the baby is about two weeks old, you can separate them at night and get more milk in the morning, but a quart a day is a good start. We haven't figured out a good way to separate them in our shed yet. Monday we went to the new Butterfly Biosphere at Thanksgiving Point. It was lots of fun. The girls took pictures of butterflies for their photography class. Everyone enjoyed finding Blue Morpho butterflies. Everyone also liked the climbing play area. It was a good field trip.    We stayed home and did normal school on Tuesday to let Alison recover, and on Wednesday we went to the Museum of Ancient Life. The kids love the sand and water table where you can use the water to bury and uncover toy dinosaurs, and the quarry where you can dig for dinosaur bones. Sara made some awesome sketch...

Sunday night, after putting the kids to bed, we became criminals. To explain further, Alison and Mike heard a strange mewling noise in the backyard. The noise that we now recognize as the cry of a baby goat! Mike went out and found that Clarabelle was caring for one baby and her other baby was hidden in the shadows crying. He brought the second baby inside and he wrapped it in rags and wiped it clean with warm water while Alison searched the house for a flashlight and batteries. Then he took the baby back out with a light, and Clarabelle saw it and started caring for it too. With the light, he also noticed that Olive had one baby goat by her. All three babies were very cute. We were worried about them staying warm, since the temperature was around freezing that night, so Mike took out some rags for the babies to cuddle in and closed up the shed to keep the heat in. All the babies survived just fine until morning. Hooray! Monday we played outside and looked at the cute goats, which ...

On Monday we built a blanket fort for our family night activity. The kids loved sitting in it. While we did that Mike started reading the Hobbit to the family too. We have been playing Pokemon Go a lot recently. The kids like to catch the pokemon, and are willing to walk around so that we can play. This week we tried to catch a ditto, but we didn't catch it. We also tried to defeat a raid boss, but we couldn't win because we were not powerful enough. They still enjoy the game a lot. We also just found a story that we had written down a while back: Mike stands up, and walks away from his seat to get something. Timmy quickly sits down in his seat. Mike: I stood up for a minute, and Timmy usurped me Timmy: I'm gonna surp you again next time Gideon: Get away Daddy from Timmies surpies! Sara shoves timmy off the seat Sara: I de-usurped him Mike sits down, and timmy jumps on him and yanks his hat off Timmy: I surped him again by taking his hat Rea and Sara have a st...

Sunday we had a game day with Caitlin, Sal, and the Fords. We played Secrets, Lords and Ladies, and Spyfall. Lords and Ladies was very fun. The other two were god as well, but the couples teams and disparity of the different parts of the game made for a fun game. We tied for first and lost the tie. Monday we had family night with ice cream after a huge team clean. Tuesday we had T-bone steaks for dinner because Alison was feeling like she needed meat. Wednesday we packed for SaltCon & had Timmy's date night (cookies and a wild Kratts) Thursday we went to SaltCon. We got a bunch of games in the Math trade, played a bunch of games including Azul (which was Alison's favorite game of the convention), and the kids checked out a bunch of games too. We also swam in the pool. Friday we had a free "fancy" breakfast at the hotel. We played Root (which was Mike's favorite game of the convention - it was like Redwall as a board game). We went swimming, and then ...