Parentheticals

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,