Parentheticals

On Monday we spent time at Grandpa Mike and Grandma Sheila's house. We don't remember much about it, but Caitlin and Sal were there. On Tuesday we walked around downtown Salt Lake with the Brown family and donated at the giving machine that they have set up there. The walk was cold but fun. Elizabeth loved the nativities, and all of the kids loved being with their cousins. The kids ran around like crazy, and we had to take uncle Dan's offer of being the leader of a penguin huddle at each street corner. It kept them all together and relatively warm - not to mention it being fun. Wednesday there was a basketball tournament at our house where the kids played the adults. Somehow the kids got Dan on their team, so they won. After that there was a late over at our house where the kids went crazy. During the late over Sara declared that she was no longer scared of Bruce, and so she stopped being scared of him at all. It was pretty sudden, but we are happy with it. On Thursday we w

Pretty much all we can remember about this week is getting used to having a dog. He really is an amazingly good dog. He loves his kids and is very well-behaved in general. Alison has also started on obedience training and he is good at it; he learns fast. Timmy is the most responsible for him, so Timmy and Alison take him out morning and night to walk around the block or run around the dog run. Brewster Rockit absolutely loves playing "Tag;" he play-bows, and the humans crouch down and then jump or lunge. Then Brewster dashes around at top speed before play bowing again to start over. Sometimes he goes around trees and waits behind them to see which way you're coming before running out the other way. It's a lot of fun, although Timmy is getting less enamored of the process as it gets colder. Alison will have to help him get properly dressed for the temperature before going out, even if it's annoying to spend as much time dressing and undressing as actually being o

This week we've been thinking about and working on Christmas presents. There were two big ones that we knew we wanted to get off KSL, so we were working on finding the right ones: a basketball hoop and a dog. We have been getting flu shots and finishing up everyone's covid vaccinations (the kids can now get vaccinated, and the parents can get a third shot, so we are doing all of those now. On Monday Boo got her flu shot. She was sad when she got it, but she also got a sucker, so that was good enough that she stopped crying right away. Later in the day Mike got his flu shot and his final covid shot too. After that he went to check out one of the basketball hoops that was for sale, and decided to buy it. It took about three hours to get the thing in the car (we had to take it apart and dump out the gravel from the base, and some of the parts were rusted. They broke one of the bolts, but otherwise it came apart without any trouble. On Tuesday, we played with the Dalyais for the fi

Continuing in the theme of explosions, we thought we'd go for two weeks in a row. So on Tuesday, Alison filled up the bathtub for Boo, and then exploded the water all over the kitchen floor. Now that we're getting into the groove of explosions, perhaps we'll have one every week! If you recall, right before we left on vacation we discovered some problems with our kitchen sink. Tuesday afternoon, Mike got to work fixing them. (Monday Alison took the older kids for their second Covid shots [yay! they will be fully vaccinated next week!], so Tuesday was his first opportunity.) He replaced the parts that had problem parts just fine, but then the sink started backing up in a whole new way. He pulled it apart again to try and figure it out, and warned everyone not to touch it. Boo asked for a bath, so Alison gave her one. After she was done, Alison let the water out of the bathtub and went to get her dressed. Then from the kitchen, Rea suddenly said, "Should the sink be filli

 Last week we mostly got ready for our trip to California. Friday night, as we were doing the last dishes before we left, the sink started leaking. Mike went and looked at it and found that some idiot somebody had taken two pieces of pipe, one of which was threaded and one wasn't, and just shoved them together as if that made an appropriate join. We had to leave it unfixed (just shoved together again) in order to leave on our trip, so hopefully it stays working until tomorrow when Mike can fix it. On Saturday we drove out to California. The drive there went fairly uneventfully. It went fast, too; we didn't have to stop for nursing a baby or anything, so we actually made it in twelve hours. (Twelve hours is still an insanely long drive.) But it was worth it, because being at the beach house is wonderful (although we missed Andy's family). The kids had a blast playing with their cousins all day every day. Alison stayed up late talking to her mom and sisters; Mike stayed up pl

 This week Alison and Mike caught whatever Elizabeth and Gideon have had. Alison stayed in bed all day Monday, then moved to the couch all day Tuesday, and was mostly better (if a little tired) after that. Mike got sick Friday and had a sinus headache Sunday. Neither of us was anywhere near as sick as the little ones, though. Gideon is almost  done coughing, and Boo stopped getting feverish in the afternoons sometime this week, so they're improving, but Boo is still super grumpy a lot of the time and needs lots of cuddles. (If grumpy is a symptom of this sickness, maybe Timmy has it, because he's had a really hard time getting along with people this week.) Mike took the oldest three kids to get their first Covid shots Monday afternoon. He decided to walk in to a clinic; Alison worried that they'd have to wait forever, but it wasn't that bad. The kids are very proud of getting their first shots and excited for their second ones. When they're fully vaccinated, they

Alison assigned the kids a new project for school this week. They've been listening to the Wings of Fire novels as audiobooks and playing dragons, so for biology, they are each supposed to design a real-life dragon. They have to explain their dragon's skeletal, muscular, nervous, and digestive system, and how it would be classified scientifically. Rea also has to talk about how her dragon develops from an egg and how the cells differentiate to make those different systems. It has been fairly popular; the kids are enjoying looking at books of how bodies are put together and thinking about what their dragons are like. Rea wants to make a swimming octopus dragon, Timmy an ice dragon that's eaten by polar bears and is adapted to protect itself, and Sara a crocodile dragon. Alison is working hard on getting better at helping the kids learn to design their own projects for learning; the dragon one is a fun start, and she hopes it will help them learn how to create their own proje

We started writing this post last week, but it never got posted. Last Tuesday Alison's friend - Sylvia Dalyia invited Alison over for a group discussion about emotions. Alison presented the power emotions to them and they all talked about it and had a lot of fun. At the same time Mike discovered that our main sewer line was finally starting to back up in such a way that we will need to shortly get it fixed. He ordered a few plumbers to come over and look at it. So far they coming about $10k, so hopefully the last one has a cheaper plan. Last Thursday we had a plumber come over and scope things out and give us a estimate for the work we were doing. Rea and Alison are both writing stories right now, and have a lot of fun bouncing ideas off of each other, and of building upon each other's work. Last week on Friday Rea went for a walk in the neighborhood and can back with news of a big walnut tree in our neighborhood which seemed to not be being harvested. She had taken some walnut

This last week we went to southern Utah in order to attend the nature group fall camp out. The leader has a relative who has 800 acers and a cabin on the Utah-Arizona border, and they let us camp there for free every October during fall break. It's a lot of fun, although we always end up getting a hotel instead of camping because Mike needs to work at night. That was a good thing this year, because they had an unbelievable cold snap down there! At one point, they were predicting lows of 25 for those nights! I think it was a little warmer, but most of the families ended up finding somewhere indoors to sleep. Some of the teenage boys tented the first night and woke up to frost on their sleeping bags - they slept in their cars for the other nights. We were glad to be in a hotel. We drove down Wednesday afternoon and checked into the hotel. Thursday morning we went to Coral Pink Sand Dunes, which is one of our favorite places down there. The dunes are pretty, playing in the sand is fun

 The cold that Alison had a couple weeks ago went through all the kids this week. They took turns being super whiney and grumpy and such, so it lasted all week. We ended up keeping them home from nature group and church. Unfortunately, we played with the Plastows right as Boo was starting to get sick and we didn't realize everyone was getting it, so we may have given it to them. (And then Mike decided that since we'd already probably infected them, the kids could keep playing with them all week.) Sorry, Amy! So it was a grumpy week. That wasn't much fun. Saturday morning we had a power outage for an hour or so! It took the kids quite a while to catch on to what had happened (Saturday morning is their screen time, and apparently they were all using apps that didn't require the internet), but when they did, they were excited and a bit concerned. Alison told them to collect wood for a fire, and we had a fire in the fireplace. That's always a good solution to power outa

Rea finished her story "Ever," but it wasn't quite long enough for publication through Amazon. While she's deciding what to do about that, she's started another story. It's a magical school story, the same genre as Harry Potter, and she's having a lot of fun writing it and discussing it with her siblings and figuring out the plot and characters and magic system. It's very exciting.  On Wednesday, Mike and Amy went to help Grandma Sheila finish moving in here in Utah. This is now their permanent home, even though they will still travel quite a bit. We're very excited to have them! The Plastow kids came to play with the Brown kids while the parents were working, so it was fun for everyone. Before the Plastows got here, Sara decided that she wanted to try following a more advanced recipe than she had before. She ended up deciding on raspberry-filled lemon cupcakes with buttercream frosting. It was a recipe that would have intimidated Alison a little,

Mike got over the not-Covid pretty fast, but Alison was wiped out for half this week. She barely got out of bed over the weekend, and Monday and Tuesday she dragged herself downstairs and did school while laying in a sleeping bag. The kids were pretty good. In the afternoons she would sleep while Mike took the kids - it is very convenient to have him off work at 2, so Alison didn't have to try to be functional for longer than that. By Wednesday Alison was feeling a little better, so we went on a few walks; Boo has started to ask to be walked in her stroller when she gets sleepy. We went to Crestwood Park to see what we could forage. There were tons of riverbank grapes this year, so we picked a bushel. (That is an approximation, since we don't actually know how much a bushel is, but it seems about right. It was a very big reusable shopping bag full.)  Thursday we were mostly back to normal life, just in time for the craziness of Friday. Every Friday, we have to get up, get break

 This last week the Brown family battled with a sickness that was not covid (Alison took a covid test to see if it was, and it came back negative, so though there is a possibility that it was a false negative, it doesn't seem likely). It is mostly characterized by coughing, phlegm, and headaches, but some of the kids also got super cranky. We also were given a whole bunch of tomatoes by a ward member and made 4.25 gallons of salsa. The recipe that we made it from is the normal family recipe, but we doubled the garlic, and added 8 different varieties of peppers (because we like a lot of different varieties of peppers - they add more flavor). The peppers included: jalapeno, habanero, serrano, poblano, chili, yellow chili, anaheim, and pasilla. We didn't add any thai peppers this year, but only because we didn't want to go to more stores than was necessary with all of the sickness going around. Timmy is proud to have helped can it (he made sure that we always had enough rings

(This blog post title comes to you courtesy of Gideon.) We organized a last-minute Labor Day barbecue at our house with the Brown grandparents, the Poulson grandparents, and Amy's family. We had a lot of fun getting together. It was beautiful weather. We finally finished processing the apples this week. All told we made about 4 gallons of applesauce, 4 gallons of apple chips, a bevy of beautiful apple muffins, and also a pitcher of apple cider. Unfortunately, the weather got hot again toward the end of the week. Alison tried to take the kids outside when they got rowdy, and we were melting with the heat and couldn't stay out long. Friday was our first day of Nature Group for this year, and the kids were a little grumpy with the hot weather, so it wasn't the perfect first day. Still, we made it fairly close to on time and participated in all the activities, so that was good. We also really appreciated the random bits of rain that fell during the day, and the heavier rain aft

 This was the second(?) week of school for the kids and Alison. It has been a bit challenging to get everyone in the habit of doing school again, but we've slowly been getting back in the groove. Alison asked the kids to contribute something to this part of the blog post, and they ignored her. So she's going to unilaterally declare that it's going great! Mike's school has been going well. He is glad to be done with the hard-to-work-with professor forever; this week, one of his new professors made a mistake in an assignment, and he was able to point it out to her and get it changed. Hooray! I guess one good thing about the bad professor was that he set a low bar. We are getting the kids new tablets so that everyone can do their online math at the same time, so we are working on screen time limits.  It's easy enough to limit video games; it's harder to decide how much time they can spend composing music or coding animated videos or cool technology-assisted creativ

On Monday Sara made brownies and decorated them with candy and colored frosting. The kids also were sitting at the table, and decided to act like they were bored during school, so Alison took pictures of them doing it. On Tuesday Sara cleaned up the new wheat grinder that we got from Grandma Yoder, and she posted it to KSL to try and sell it. We already had one, but thought that this one might work to grind peanuts into peanut butter, but the intake hole was not big enough, so we are going to let another owner have it. Wednesday we went to the Brown's house to mow the lawn and Rea and Sara worked on sewing Christmas presents with grandma. They gave us ice cream, and the kids played around a lot. Timmy mowed the front all by himself, and Rea mowed half the back yard because she was having too much fun with grandma to mow it all. Thursday Mike went to Board Game Design Guild for the first time since Covid. He had a fun time playing a game where you are a dreamer who is trying to rese

In celebration of completing a 5 year project we got a bonus day of paid leave at work. Since Alison and the kids' nature group was planning a camping trip on this last Wednesday, that day seemed like the obvious choice. On the day that the trip was scheduled to begin (Tuesday) it was raining, so all of the other people that were supposed to come wimped out except for one family. We got our tarps and hammocks set up before the rain was really going, and we also got a fire going despite the rain. It was colder than usual, however it was still pretty good weather. It didn't snow at least :) The rain continued all night, and well into the next day. Mike was able to get a fire going on day two as well by tearing apart a dried out pine tree that he found in the camp site. Mike, Rea, and Sara went out and picked a bunch of berries (raspberries, currants, and serviceberries). We plan on making a pie, though that hasn't happened yet.  The kids were a bit grumpy about the rain, but

This week Alison worked hard on preparing for the kid's upcoming year of school. She has planned a lot, and hopefully things will go smoothly because of that. On Wednesday Mike started his next semester of his Master's program. Hopefully it is smooth sailing now that Orsega is out of the way. He is certainly less nervous about this semester than last one. Also on Wednesday we went to the Brown's house and mowed the lawn. Everyone went over there, and half of us earned money from doing some part of the work. The other half picked weeds and cleaned up leaves to earn ice cream. While we were there, we picked up Grandpa Mike's gold panning pans. Mike has been thinking that that would be a good thing to do during weeks where there is nothing to forage, and Grandpa Mike is letting us borrow them to see if we like it. We were thinking of going this weekend, but that turned out to be a bust. What can you do? On Friday Alison and Mike went to a play which the OBT put on at Drap

Wow - apparently we missed a few weeks. Here is what happened: On Monday the 19th of July we celebrated Sara's birthday party. She really wanted to go to the Treehouse museum, but it is closed on  Mondays, and Alison didn't want to take the kids without another adult, so we haven't yet made it there. Instead we went to the Poulson's house and played in the creek near their house. In the evening Mike and Sara made a white cake for her with vanilla frosting. We opened up her presents, and sang her the birthday song. Andy and his family came back from Macedonia from the 21st to the 31st, and we pretty much spent every day over at the Poulson's house spending time with them. We had a lot of fun - playing legos, going on walks, canoeing, playing in the creek, etc. Mike even got in a few playtests of his board games. It was good to see them again. The next week we went to the Stromberg's house to celebrate Max's birthday. We watched movies and played video games,