Mother's Day Morels

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Utah went to "Orange" social distancing this week. After studying and pondering the directives for DAYS (because they were so contradictory), we finally figured them out: "Stay home, unless you want to spend money, in which case, try to stay 6 feet apart, but go ahead."

Since we have literally engineered our life so that none of the things that bring us joy involve spending money, we can either just stay home forever (Alison isn't anticipating getting out of orange before next Christmas), change the way we live, or stretch the guidelines a bit. We've started socializing with one other family outdoors, reminding the kids to stay 6 feet apart. They try hard :). And once every week or two we'll get together with another family. However, Alison's best friend's mom just died, so we have been babysitting her kids several times this week; we feel that's far more important than the guidelines. 

The kids have lost a lot of social skills in two months of isolation. There were lots of fights and tears when we were babysitting. And the kids were absolutely exhausted and needed extra sleep afterwards. 

On days we weren't babysitting, we went mushroom hunting at Dimple Dell. We were afraid we had inadvertently missed the morels, with the busyness of Alison's launch, but when we went on Friday we found eight! We got Cafe Zupas salads for dinner (to celebrate the launch) and Mike and Alison put butter-fried morels on top of their Avocado Chicken Chop salad - it was AMAZING! We went hunting again Sunday morning and found another nine, which are garnishing the traditional Mother's Day quiche tonight.

Mike and the kids made muffins and bacon for Alison's breakfast in bed, which was lovely. They also picked her a vase of lilacs (her favorite flowers). After the morel hunt, we had Mother's Day church. The kids gave a variety of talks on scripture stories, and we sang Mother's Day songs and made Mother's Day cards for Primary.

On Friday, Mike and Alison started playing an online Dungeons and Dragons game with some people in our ward. A friend of Alison's wanted to DM for the first time, and Mike is excited to play a character again. Mike is a human rogue who pretends he is a wizard (think Schmendrick the magician from The Last Unicorn). Alison is a dragonborn soldier who is working as a caravan guard to get experience; she is in line to inherit an officer position in her clan, but unfortunately, she's not actually very good at strategy and leadership. The third player, Sara, is a descendant of the angels and a cleric (she's good at healing). It should be really fun! We're playing on Zoom every Friday night after the kids are in bed. (For a given value of "in bed;" they came out so many times we lost track.)

Alison has prepped the material for the first week of her new program, and just today she got lots of ideas for a slightly different approach to the next one. She's pretty excited.

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