Chucky-Bucks

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, which took place outside with all of us in our own separate cars and our windows rolled up. We played bingo and sang Christmas songs and ate pizza. Santa came by standing up in the back of a pickup. The older kids thought it was fun to see Santa, and the younger were appalled that someone was standing up in the back of a truck. All in all, the party was pretty fun.

On Saturday It snowed, so we walked down to the park south of our house and the kids rode sleds down the hill. Mike had to take Gideon back to change his pants however when Mike came back he had picked up some burritos from the local Mexican restaurant and we ate a lunch of burritos at the park. The burritos were warm and the park was cold and it was very fun.

There was a nearby church putting on a drive-thru Christmas pageant. we went to it and it was also enjoyable

Between the two Christmas things we ended up with hot cocoa and candy canes and s'mores ingredients, so on Saturday night we had hot cocoa and candy canes and s'mores and a fire, and we stayed up late reading "the Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles".

The kids really like Pokémon this week. Some of it is probably in part due to the fact that Mike decided to get them to go on walks by pulling out Pokémon Go again. Probably the rest is due to the fact that they are going to be getting Pokémon games for Christmas.

In preparation for that, Mike has been transferring Pokémon from Pokémon Go to Pokémon Home. P.H. is a online repository for Pokémon that allows you to transfer the monsters from one game to another. As a joke he offered to trade a jigglypuff for a mewtwo (which was really an awful trade, honestly (a jigglypuff is super weak, and mewtwo is among the strongest Pokémon ever)), and someone agreed to the trade, and got an awful jigglypuff in exchange for a Shiny mewtwo (shiny are a rare variant of a Pokémon, so this was probably the worst trade ever for the person to have made). We are scratching our heads over that, however we think that it was funny, so perhaps that was all that the person was going for.

Finally, our tree is still alive - here is proof: