The long normal-length week

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 and Sarah's house however he is soon going to leave. he made a room in their house, and downstairs is where he slept and upstairs is where he played.

Timmy added that we were playing Pokémon Fire Red this week because Timmy really wanted to play a lot. Timmy was very excited that he was able to catch and trade for so many Pokemon.

Mike has been working hard to keep up with school work, his two jobs, and all the things he wants to do around the new house. This week he added doorknobs with locks to the bathroom, the library (where he works every day), and the girls' bedroom (they want to be able to keep their treasures safe from a rampaging baby), replaced the broken toilet seat, and put together the monkey bars, as well as fixing the wifi and other issues that came up during the week.

We had our first freeze last week, so we picked 30lbs of green tomatoes and are in the process of turning them into enchilada sauce. We made a test batch and it was pretty good, so we're preparing the rest for canning. We still need to put the garden to bed for the year.

The day after the freeze, we noticed a housing house outside, and discovered that one of our sprinkler pipes had broken. We shut off the water, and got it semi-fixed, but we don't have all the parts yet, so we still haven't fixed it for real.

Halloween was on a Saturday and a full moon - how awesome! We carved jack-o-lanterns Saturday morning because we were having too much fun with Grandma to think about them earlier. Rea helped all of the kids design and make their costumes: a sea dragon for Rea, a mermaid for Sara, a Oddish Pokemon for Timmy, and a wolf for Gideon. (Mom bought Baby Elizabeth a ladybug costume at the dollar store, but she didn't like the wings, so she didn't really wear it.)

Our new ward had a socially distanced Halloween activity: a kids' costume parade, with families 6ft apart and spectators in their cars, with gift bags of candy given out at the end. We went trick-or-treating afterwards; many of the houses had set out candy, although very few had taken care that no one would touch another person's candy, and we got to talk to some of our neighbors from the door. It was probably the longest we've ever stayed out on Halloween - we walked all the way to Amy's house and back. It was a lovely, warm night and we enjoyed it. 

Today Elizabeth, Gideon, and Timmy have runny noses, so we probably won't be able to go out and do things for the next week. Too bad! That's how winter goes, unfortunately.