Gold pans, a play, and a soup.

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 Draper Historic theatre. The OBT lost their theatre, but the troupe is still putting on plays despite that, and the current one: "The Importance of Being Earnest" was quite funny.

The way that Eric Jensen puts his own spin on every play that he rewrites is fun - especially if you really like the source material. We love the original play, but Eric's take on this one brought out different elements of the story, and especially made the scene where the brothers are reunited in the country home a degree of magnitude more funny (I won't give the new joke away, but it was really funny.)

We had so much fun!

The kids got babysat by a local girl, who did a good job. We will probably call on her again

On Saturday we went to the treehouse museum with Grandma Julie and Grandpa Mike. The kids had a lot of fun running around and playing with all of the things, and the adults were not completely overwhelmed because the ratio of adults to children was 4:5, which is pretty good relative to how it usually is.

After the museum visit was over, the Poulson's took us out to get "Farr better ice cream", which was very good. We all picked flavors, and we ate it outside in the heat of the day. We ended the day with Rea making her potato soup recipe (which she invented herself.) It tasted very good, and I have written it down below in case you all want to try it:

2 cans cream of bacon soup

6 potatoes, cubed

water

an onion

garlic, salt, pepper to taste

Chop the onion and sauté in oil till done. Add potatoes, then enough water to cover the potatoes. Add the soup and spices, then boil till potatoes start to fall apart - stirring occasionally.

Today all of the kids complained of sickness (some were obviously sick, but the others all said they also felt sick), so we kept them home from church. Mike forced them to lay down for 2 hours (since they were sick, which will hopefully help them to recover.