Parentheticals

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