Apples and Apples

 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 creative things like that. We haven't made final decisions yet.

Speaking of decisions, we have decided to go back to remote church attendance for a while. We are in a high transmission area where everyone, vaccinated or not, is advised to wear masks indoors, and only about a third of our ward does. Even though we're not at high risk, we've decided we don't want to be part of a situation that's set up to spread Covid, especially since we have so many high-risk members of the ward who will be in danger if it starts spreading around the ward. It's hard to bow out of our callings (Mike might be able to teach adult Sunday school remotely, but Alison definitely is leaving the Primary in the lurch), but we feel that it's important.

Alison is reading a fascinating book called "Humankind: A Hopeful History" by Rutger Bregman. She highly recommends it to everyone and is constantly quoting parts of it to our family. It will probably be one of her Christmas presents.

Rea is excited for her birthday and has already made a list of the presents she wants, so Mom and Dad need to get going on buying them! It's a month away, but she's ready to start preparing now, which is always a good idea if you want Alison to get on board with something complicated. She wants a Redwall Feast for a meal, so it'll definitely take some prep! We're excited for it.

There is an older couple in our ward who let us pick from their apple tree. We probably got 100 lbs of apples this week. We've made gallons of apple sauce and apple chips from the first picking, and went picking again yesterday and got the other half of the apples that we're now starting to process. It's a good thing our kids love applesauce!

The weather is finally getting nice, so hopefully we will be outside a lot this week. It's the first week of our Nature Group, so that should be fun. Alison is in charge of mentoring the older kids that are supposed to help younger kids resolve disagreements. She has her fingers crossed that it goes well!