Parentheticals

 This week the weather was really good, and we spent a lot of time in the yard enjoying it. Mike and the kids finished up building the "stump fort" - adding windows and a ladder up to the top. Mike also cleaned up the yard, and started planning what things were going where in the garden. We went to strawberry hill and took 7 strawberry plants to transplant in our yard. As of yet they are all still looking pretty good. We transplanted them under ideal conditions: a rainy, cool day, and we took the entire root ball of each one, so hopefully they survive well. The kids have been playing a lot with Aiden (the boy that lives one house to the south of us), and have been flooding the yard and making mud balls a lot. Mike doesn't love the mud that much, but the kids love it so much that we need to come up with some solution to the disagreement. Perhaps mike will offer the back area of the yard to them as long as they treat the part that is grass with more care. With the lingering...

 This week we had some sickness. Sunday night almost everyone threw up - we think it was too much junk food right before bed, because no one felt at all sick otherwise. Oops! Mike's homemade donuts might have to be eaten less enthusiastically in the future. Since Wednesday, we have a tiny bit of a cold going around the family. Baby Elizabeth is the only one with significant symptoms - mostly a runny nose, but she got stuffy enough at night to not sleep for several nights. Everyone else just gets really tired (and sometimes grumpy) for a day or so. It's not the worst cold ever, but it's annoying.  We stayed home from Nature Group and Wildflower Park on Friday so that we didn't spread the cold far and wide, but Mike and the kids built a treehouse this week, so they played in that instead! We have a huge waist-high stump at the front corner of the backyard, and Rea requested half-walls on the street and neighbor sides of it, with windows in them. The walls are up; the wind...

 We didn't actually write about our family Salt Con last week! We had too much fun, I guess :). So last Thursday we woke up and packed up the car. The kids were so eager to go, they pushed and prodded us out the door - they were in the car buckled up half an hour before we were ready to leave, which was half an hour before we supposed to leave. We were aiming to get to Crystal Hot Springs near Brigham City at noon, when they open, but we ended up getting there at 11:30. We went to a nearby park to eat a picnic lunch, and then we went back to the hot springs. They were beautiful rock pool with different temperatures of water. We deliberately picked one of the least-busy days and times, and there were plenty of people but not so many that we couldn't stay socially distanced. Mike and Alison enjoyed soaking in the hot water; the kids went back and forth between soaking and playing in the traditional swimming pool. Even Elizabeth ended up liking the water by the end! We had planned...