The first week of December

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 harder than usual, since we are boycotting Amazon this year. You will hear about the gifts in the future, however we can tell you about the boycott right now. Since Amazon made more money than it ever has in previous years, we think that it is super unethical that they have cut hazard pay for their employees - especially given the pandemic that we are in. We have bought all of our gifts that we have acquired so far from other retailers. 

Timmy is excited that he will be getting Pokemon Let's Go Eevee. Because we are so excited about the new pokemon game, we started playing Pokemon Go again. It has gotten us to take walks out in the cold a few times so far.

On one of our trips Rea found some duck or goose eggs beside the trail, so we grabbed them. There were three total, so we took two so that the other one would go to seed. Just kidding - we left the third because it was already frozen solid, and had cracked itself. It seems unlikely that the eggs are Canada goose eggs, since they don't lay this time of year, however that means that there is some feral fowl, or an escaped back yard duck or goose that is laying eggs all over the place. We are excited to see how they taste.

Here is a picture of one of the eggs and a chicken egg for scale, and also a picture of the cracked egg.

We got our Christmas stuff set up, and also got a live tree (for the first time since we killed that tree when we were first married.) The tree was picked by all of us, and we found one that we really love. Sara has been watering it, and with her green thumb it is still alive at this exact moment. We will see what tomorrow brings.

Alison spent a lot of time building a wall of Science Knowledge in our school room. It has all sorts of topics, and the kids pick topics to learn about from it. The topics are arranged in a tree pattern, and to get to the upper branches you need to learn about everything below them in the tree. This allows the kids to pick things that are interesting to them, while still understanding what they are learning.