Riverbank Grapes

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 breakfast, get the house cleaned up, make lunches, find appropriate clothes and shoes, and drive back to Sandy for our Nature Group, and then go straight from there to our Park Day. This preparation is never one of Alison's strong points, and this week we had to leave Park Day early and pick up Mike to get to Grandpa and Grandma Poulson's house at 5:30, so it was a lot of planning and packing.

But it was worth it, because we were going on a family campout with the grandparents and cousins.
Their community had a camp out in the local park, and they invited us and the Rogers over for it. The kids had fun playing games with the cousins, and the organizers provided fires and smores equipment. The campout was fun in general, but it got surprisingly cold at night, and Alison and Mike were ill prepared for it, so they slept poorly. The kids on the other hand slept fine.

On Saturday after the campout we went over to mow the Brown grandparent's lawn, but discovered them at the house, so we visited with them as well. Rea and Timmy both worked hard and earned money. The others just cleaned up some leaves and earned ice cream. 

The kids really wanted to go geocaching on Saturday, so after mowing we stopped at the Dollar Tree to get some cool swag to put in the geocache, and then the big park on Redwood , which was supposed to have a "microcache." If you are going geocaching with kids, don't do microcaches. They don't have any cool treasures to trade for, just a teeny-tiny container with a scrap of paper to write your name on. The kids were very, very disappointed, but we didn't have time for more. We had to go home and get ready for the adult session of Stake Conference. Poor sad kids. We told them maybe we'll create a geocache or two of our own near our house. We've been scouting out possible locations.

Sunday was our stake conference, which we attended virtually. The younger kids were not at all well-behaved, which made us nervous about General Conference next week. (Incidentally, did you realize it's General Conference next week? We didn't.) We finally decided that we would have a room for the parents to listen in, and if the kids want to listen they can get their usual candy (jelly beans for hearing the names of Christ, lollypops for knowing what the talk is about), but if they don't want to listen they can be in another room. We'll have Conference playing in there too in hopes that they might pick something up by osmosis, but we're not going to wrestle three kids and try to hear the talks ourselves this time.