Earnest Again

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 research something while being asleep and dreaming. If you wake up you have to fall back asleep again, and you you can learn dream techniques and use them to defeat dream foes, and complete dream sequences

Friday in the evening we went to the ward pool party. The Plastows were there, and we had a fun time playing in the water and eating cookies and junk food. Timmy enjoyed the water slide, and Elizabeth enjoyed pointing out planes that were all apparently landing at the airport. It was a little bit cold, but not too cold, and we all had a fun time. 

Saturday Mike took Gideon's and Sara's tablets to get them fixed (because both have damaged charging ports), but the repairs would cost more than buying working tablets, so we are just getting new ones. It is too bad that they make them that hard to fix, but I guess that that is how it is.

We also went on a quadruple date with the parents and Plastows to see the Importance of Being Earnest at the Off Broadway Theatre. Rea made Alison's crunchy salad recipe all by herself, and she did a really good job on it. All of the kids liked it a lot. When the parents went out, first they went to eat at Zupas, then they attended the play. It was the closing night, and the performers did wonderfully well. We always love attending the OBT, and look forward to doing it periodically with the grandparents.

Mike also made some calculations this week to see if our choice to not pay off our house when we got our mortgage was financially sound. Since getting our house we have paid ~$10k in mortgage payments, half of which is interest (~$5k). If we had paid off our mortgage immediately, we would have not paid any of that interest, but we also wouldn't have been able to put any extra money into the stock market. The money that we put into the stock market (from selling our old house) has grown by ~$68k (the stock market has been growing really well recently, and we invested it in broad spectrum investments, so it worked out great.) In the end, we are up ~$63k from where we would have been had we paid off the mortgage early. Too bad we didn't think to do this with our first house, or Mike could already be retired.