A Whiny Week, and Winning the Stock Market.

Rea finished her story "Ever," but it wasn't quite long enough for publication through Amazon. While she's deciding what to do about that, she's started another story. It's a magical school story, the same genre as Harry Potter, and she's having a lot of fun writing it and discussing it with her siblings and figuring out the plot and characters and magic system. It's very exciting. 

On Wednesday, Mike and Amy went to help Grandma Sheila finish moving in here in Utah. This is now their permanent home, even though they will still travel quite a bit. We're very excited to have them! The Plastow kids came to play with the Brown kids while the parents were working, so it was fun for everyone.

Before the Plastows got here, Sara decided that she wanted to try following a more advanced recipe than she had before. She ended up deciding on raspberry-filled lemon cupcakes with buttercream frosting. It was a recipe that would have intimidated Alison a little, but Rea and Sara worked together on it and made some delicious cupcakes without any help. It took several hours, but they ended up with enough for everyone to have two after Mike and Amy got back from moving duty. They even cleaned up the kitchen after themselves! They are learning to be excellent cooks.

On Thursday, Alison got fed up with the kids' whineyness and took away all screens from the time school ended Thursday until school started Monday. The kids responded by being much more whiney, of course, so we decided we needed to get out of the house. We ended up taking dinner as a picnic to Wheeler Farm and spent three hours or so picnicking, seeing the animals, and playing on the playground. It was really fun. 

We ended up doing Saturday General Conference at Grandma Julie's house this year. Our kids were so bad during virtual Stake Conference last week that we decided we weren't going to work as hard as usual to make them stay in the room and be quiet. We had a room with a screen showing Conference, and anyone in there could get jelly beans for hearing names of Jesus and lollipops for figuring out what the talk was about, but if they got loud or bored, they went to the toy room, where there was a radio in hopes that they'd pick up something by osmosis. They actually listened for a surprising amount of the first session; we were impressed! 

Then we had a picnic by the lake; Rea and Ellie had a lot of fun sending leaves across the river. During the second session they pretty much played. But at least the parents could hear. We had a birthday dinner for Becky and went canoeing before the evening session, which we didn't even invite the kids to. (Alison has declared it grownups-only for this year at least.) Both Mike and Alison particularly liked the Saturday afternoon session. 

Sunday we watched the sessions at home. We tried to do the same thing with a room with Legos, but almost the whole time the kids stayed with us. They went through a bag and half of jelly beans and a half bag of Sour Patch Kids and then we just stopped giving treats for hearing names of Christ because we didn't have any left. Boo got tired, so Mike cuddled her to sleep, and then Timmy went and cuddled with them and went to sleep, and Rea fell asleep, so it was really just Gideon and Sara who felt like they were missing out on candy. They all slept for an hour and a half, while Alison took Gideon and Sara out to draw with chalk and on walks to keep from waking them up. Hopefully that will help with the whineyness (which taking away screens did not cure, although it did mean that we had some fun at times we otherwise would have been on them).

We also now have reached the 1 year anniversary of selling our old house. When we sold it we got $291,959.64, which we put into the stock market - buying a vanguard socially responsible etf instead of paying off our new mortgage with it. Leaving the money in there for 1 year, we gained $50,912.20. This is taking into account the interest that we paid on our mortgage as well, so this is the actual amount that we gained from leaning it in there. That is about a 17% return, which is a pretty good investment. Now I wish that we hadn't paid off our first mortgage, and had invested the money all in the stock market instead. If that had happened I would probably be retired today.

As a side note - the real thing that enabled all of this was the fact that we got a 2.5% interest rate on the mortgage, so we felt pretty confident that the market would outperform that - even if it were a bad year.