Parentheticals

Probably Tuesday, but perhaps Wednesday Mike was trying to encourage all of the kids to clean up so he began arbitrarily awarding out points using a point system which he called "Chucky Bucks." (Mike's plan was to let them spend the points to be thrown into the air, but they wanted to spend them on random things). The kids liked them so much that by the end of the night they had earned many Chucky bucks. Mike printed out the Chucky box as physical objects. here is an image of a Chucky buck in case you want to print them for your own children. The picture of the person on the Chucky buck is a character known in our family as old Uncle Andrew. he is the subject of many stories that Mike tells. a normal old Uncle Andrew's story involves old Uncle Andrew doing something weird in order to try to get donuts. Usually he gets in trouble and probably gets the narrator in trouble as well. It is a fun story for all of the family. On Friday we went to the ward Christmas party, wh...

This week we were in quarantine since we went to California last week. We will have one more week of quarantine till we are done. Alison still says that it was totally worth it, even if quarantine is hard. Elizabeth is having her first major language acquisition explosion. Every day she says two or three more words or phrases that she has never said before. It is really fun. On the other hand, She seems to be cutting more teeth, so two days out of the week she didn't sleep all night. That was pretty bad. Mike has finished his finals, and gotten his grades for his first semester of his master's program. He is also approaching finals in the class that he is teaching. His grades are As, so even with his annoying teacher he is still doing well (he has one teacher that likes to try and trick people into answering wrong on quizzes and things, and that makes it more difficult than necessary. He really likes his other teacher, however). We bought Christmas gifts this week. It was a bit...

This last week we went to California for the Poulson family Thanksgiving trip. Before the trip we quarantined ourselves for two weeks, during the trip we stayed away from anyone that was not in our group, and always wore masks when we were near people not in our group, and after the trip we plan on quarantining for an additional two weeks. With this minimum level of contact we didn't get sick at all during the trip (which is actually a first for our group, since usually someone gets sick during Thanksgiving), and we hope to prevent anyone from getting sick after the trip as well. There were far fewer people out there than usual, but the weather and beach was still fun. We played in the sand, and boogie boarded. We dug a giant pit, and built sand castles, and raked zen gardens. This year the three oldest girls (Rea, Sara, and Ellie) got along incredibly well, and Timmy, Kendrick, and William also got along very well (They played Pokemon practically the whole time), and Gideon and Æl...

We spent this week (and will spend the next) in self-quarantine before going to California for Thanksgiving. It's been challenging at times! But we also had some fun. Monday we woke up to snow! One day a week our school time is devoted to handicrafts and tales - normally we embroider or draw while I read aloud from King Arthur, Tales from the Odyssey, and whatever else we're reading. With the beautiful snow, I decided that snowcrafting was certainly a handicraft, so we headed outside. The boys and I built a snow fort, and the girls made a snow garden. It was a lot of fun! When we were tired, we came in and drank hot chocolate while I read aloud. It was awesome.  In the afternoon, we tried to do our Crowned with Virtue meetings over zoom. It didn't work so well. Only one of the two other girls got on, and Rea and Sara started by being super silly and ended by fighting. Oh, well. Tuesday we finished up our unit on medieval Japan. We must have done something else, but no one r...

This week baby Elizabeth slept better than she ever has before. She only woke up Michael two times during his core sleeps, and she was mostly happy for Alison on most of the nights as well. She is also sometimes eating meals with us like a toddler usually does, which is to say that she will pick one thing that she wants and eat a lot of it. This is significantly better eating than she usually does. Early this week we turned half of the Halloween candy that we collected from the children into Halloween candy cookies. We have approximately three dozen Halloween candy cookies frozen as balls and our freezer now. The weather has been good (up until today), so we have been playing outside a lot Mike's schooling is continuing to go well. He currently has A's in both of his classes. Mike's teaching is also going well, and he received some of the best ratings possible this last semester. He is also getting good ratings at work, and getting used to the newly reorganized team that he...

This past week we had Grandma Julie come over to live with us. she helped us to continue to get our house closer to being unpacked. The girls' closet is organized and working well, thanks to her, as well as the winter gear closet and the kitchen. It was wonderful having her! She stayed Sunday-Thursday, and we miss her a lot. We're glad that we'll be seeing her soon at Thanksgiving. Alison discovered that the delivery service for ugly fruits and vegetables (Misfit Market) is now available in Utah, so we signed up for it and got our first crate of ugly fruits and vegetables on Tuesday. The fruit and vegetables are organic and delicious, even if they are not sellable for various reasons. We asked the kids to contribute to this post, but only Gideon and Timmy wanted to. Gideon was very happy that they could make a house and play a game. He was a kid in the game and his mom and dad died and so he built a house by himself and then fire flooded it. And then he had to live in Timmy...

On Monday we had a guy from a window place come over to give us an estimate for replacing all the old windows. It was over 10k and Mike had already scheduled another meeting with another company, so we didn't accept it at that time. By Tuesday we had received offers from 7 people to buy our house. They went from 1k under the asking price to 15k above it with most in the 5-10k above range.  The one that offered 15k over also sent a letter and seemed pretty excited to buy the place, so we went with him. However, he had an inspection on Wednesday, and the inspector told him that some weeds were growing in the crawlspace, and it freaked him out so much that he backed out of the deal.  Mike went down there to fix the problem that night, and with the help of the teenage Dalyai boy, had all the tree roots removed in two hours. There has never been normal weeds growing in our crawlspace, however those trees of heaven aggressively sucker, and they constantly attempt to colonize the cra...

Previously on parentheticals blog - we had already moved the bare minimum of stuff and furniture into this house so that we could survive. We then discovered that our car was broken in such a way that we shouldn't drive it and our mechanic was unable to get to our car before Wednesday of last week. As all of this was going on all of the kids were coming down with symptoms of some sort of sickness. Timmy ended up having symptoms that could theoretically have been covid so we had to keep the whole family quarantined until we were able to get Timmy's test results back. For the first half of last week we pretty much had to stay home the entire time and tried to eat whatever random stuff we happened to have in our freezer. Wednesday we went back to Sandy to drop the car off at the mechanic. We took the entire family back to the old house and spent the day boxing up every single thing in the entire house. we ran out of boxes, however we were able to make it through by using garbage b...

 Monday and Tuesday we did all of the kid's school for the week to get ready to move. We went to sign the papers Wednesday afternoon, and the check engine light came back on again, even though we just got it fixed. We ignored it and went to the closing, which went fine, and then asked the agent if we could get the keys. He said that he had an appointment in Park City, and so he texted the sellers' agent to see if we could get them. The house that Amy is moving into had an excess washer and dryer that they were willing to give to us, so we moved them out of the house so that we could get at them once we got our moving truck. Getting the washer out of the basement was difficult, and unhooking the dryer required borrowing a tool from Amy, but we got it eventually. By then, it was almost 7pm, and everyone was very hungry. The kids had gone through the coupons from the mail and created a meal plan for us from Wendy's, which fortunately turned out to be very near our new home. We...

Rea's favorite thing this week was learning that Grandma and Grandpa are going to come and help us move. She thinks that will be very fun. Her least favorite was going to our ward for the last time, because she likes our church a lot. She bore a beautiful testimony about how Heavenly Father helps us with trials like moving, which made Alison, who bore her testimony right after, cry all through her testimony. It was hard to say goodbye. We hadn't planned to start attending church yet, but we decided to do one last week for the goodbyes; it was very sad but good. Sara's favorite part of last week was talking about and planning for moving. Her least favorite was Team Clean. The plan we've created for moving is as follows: Wednesday afternoon we close, so after we get the keys we're going to grab our sleeping bags and toothbrushes and pick up fast food at a drive through. We'll go to the new house, eat a picnic on the floor, explore the yard and the neighborhood, an...

Mike is doing midterms for his master's program, as well as doing week one of his BYU-I class he teaches. He's doing a good job keeping up with all of it. At BYU-I, he's teaching a new kind of class, and they're paying him an extra $400 to be a "class representative" and $300 for teaching something new. He normally makes $900 per class per semester, so he's getting almost twice as much as usual for one class (which is all he wants to teach while also going to school and keeping his day job).  Alison is still teaching her program to two groups (one is 9 weeks into the program and one is 3 weeks into the program). It's going well; she's getting things automated and feeling like she's doing a good job on the coaching calls. She's cut back everything else she does in her business to a minimum until after the move. It's nice to have that freedom. We finally got a plumber to check the main sewer pipe at our new house, and it has roots growing...

On Monday we went to a splash pad with the Rogers and Grandma and Grandpa. We talked about moving and little toy trucks. It sounds like the Poulsons won't move into our neighborhood with us, which is unfortunate, however we are still happy to be moving in with Amy, and also probably convincing Grandpa Mike and Grandma Sheila to move in to the same neighborhood as well. On Tuesday we went to ballet, and Mike went shopping and did some work for his calling (it is rare for him to do anything other than the one hour after church on Sunday) On Wednesday Mike had a dentist appointment, and we also had Amy's realtor come over and look over our house. She said that we could probably get about 300k for our house without much work, and in this market that it was rare for big changes to the house to pay for themselves, so we should just clean it up and then list it without much work. Thursday we walked to the school playground and played around for a while. It was actually really nice wea...

 Gideon says: We had a fun time with grandma and grandpa. We had watermelon and we went to silver lake. We climbed up the wall-rocks. I liked the rolls and I liked reading with grandpa. I liked going there. Here are some pictures of our trip to silver lake: As aside note we saw a mating pair of moose while up there. Timmy says: This week we first learned that we were going to move and we went to a shiny park. Sara didn't want to add anything to the blog post except that she wants mint chocolate moose tracks. Rea says: It was cool that when grandma and grandpa game over they went start gazing and saw the big dipper and the north star. Then Dad came out and they had to go to Aunt Becky's house. Mike says: Since baby Elizabeth always has a hard time sleeping through the night, and we have never figured out why, we have decided to try different things to see if we could get her to sleep through the night. This week we started trying to give her milk mixed with chocolate flavored pr...

We looked at a house in the Plastows's neighborhood, and we think that if we move into it it will suit our needs very well. We are preparing an offer on it.  Rea says: It was pretty nice. It had three bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs. Downstairs it had a kitchen and a front room and it had half a level with a big fireplace and it was a big room and it would be a play room, and also it had a bedroom downstairs that would be a Montessori room. and it had a garden with pumpkins and tomatoes and zucchini and yellow squash and peppers and chard. And it also had three big box elder trees and it had a nice yard. Also, we are going to put an offer on it. Sara says that we went berry picking and that we picked plums and crab apples and black berries. She adds that dad made an amazing plumble out of the plums. Timmy says that we saw a movie with the Plastows and the grandparents. It was about animals that were fighting, and they were fighting against an evil lizard and it was called the w...

We have no excuses. We just failed to write blog posts for a while. Here are the things that have happened in the interim: Mike's birthday was August 5th. He got a baker's lame (for his bread making hobby), a cutter for making card game cards, some video games to play with the kids, and another controller for the NES classic - so that we can play 2 player SNES games on it. The architect that we are talking to responded to our emails with a quote, and now we know what approximately our add on will cost. We are now looking around at different options for houses in the area. We are limiting our hunting to a max of $450k, because if we sold our house and bought one at that price it would be about monetarily equivalent to the cost of the add on. We haven't found anything particularly worth it yet. Mike sold his electric car. It was a nice car, but since he no longer goes anywhere, we don't really need it. Mike also got a new calling (in addition to his current one). He is no...

This last week was pretty eventful - especially Thursday. The beginning of the week was pretty normal - killer hot, but otherwise not particularly remarkable. On Thursday morning Alison's phone stopped working, and upon opening it up, Mike discovered that the battery was bulging. Apparently we accidentally bought the exploding kind of phone for her, but it was a dud. Mike has lent her his phone, and with her sim card in his phone, we have tried to make things work out for the remainder of the week. We bought a new battery for the phone, but it will take a few days to get here, so until mid next week Mike will be without a phone. Later on in the day when she took the kids to the Dalyias house, Alison noticed that a bunch of lights on the car dash had all started lighting up at the same time. She drove the car home, and told Mike about it.She determined that it might be the alternator through google, and Mike called the mechanic Friday morning to see if we could bring it in right awa...

On Saturday we went out in the morning to dimple dell to pick currants. There were four different varieties of currents that we we were able to pick: the first was golden currants the second was wild currants the third was red currants and the last was jellyfish currents (which were named by the kids, and were a colorless variety of red currants.) This week for dinner Gideon really wanted to have corn on the cob, so we bought a bunch of corn on the cob and then after we ate it for dinner Gideon was very happy, and since we are currently planning meals for this upcoming week he planned corn on the cob again. Giddy had a fun dream last night: his dream started with us in a tent. The tent was full of hammocks instead of sleeping bags. There was corn in the shower. And then we hiked in a cave. Finally, Gideon says that he popped out of his dream back into real life. Rea has been writing a book over the last little while, and she is pleased to report that the book is nearly done. Baby Eliza...

What an exciting week! To kick it off, we were at Dimple Dell and discussing how, if we have to move to get a second bathroom, a house near Dimple Dell would be nice. So while the baby was nursing and everyone else was playing, Alison looked at houses on her phone. And she totally found her dream house! It has a xeriscaped front yard, mature fruit trees and grapes in the solidly fenced backyard, beautiful huge windows in the living room, a large kitchen/dining room, a second living room, three bedrooms, bathrooms, and a half-aboveground (so natural light) basement. We drove by it and everyone was excited; even Rea, who has flatly refused to move, said that she would move there. As soon as we got home, we contacted the realtor, only to find that it was already under contract. That was really disappointing! But after a day, we started thinking about using the house as inspiration to add on to our house. We've started to draw up plans to make a huge lighted front room with a basement ...