Parentheticals

This week we have had more sickness. Alison, Boo, Giddy, Sara, and Rea have all caught the sickness, so it is just lingering forever. The symptoms don't match covid, so we think it is just the standard midwinter sickness that we get every year. We took Gideon to get his feet looked at because he has never liked shoes, and Alison noticed that his toes were bumping up close to each other. The doctor took an X-Ray, and said that he wanted an MRI done as well. The one foot has an extra bit of bone in it, and it is possible that he will need surgery to correct them. He will definitely need surgery when his growth plates close as well. While we were on a walk, the kids decided that they wanted a piece of furniture that was on the side of the road. Mike told them that we couldn't possibly get it on the way out, and that we would have to talk to the owner of the house on the way back to see if they were getting rid of it, or if they were just storing it there. The piece of furniture wa...

We did a lot of engineering for school this week. The kids' project was to make a car that went down a ramp and hit a wall at the bottom while keeping a LEGO person safe. They came up with different solutions: Timmy took all the wheels off his car and slid it down the ramp, Sara put a wheel in the back perpendicular to the axle to drag behind, and Rea made a pad in front to dissipate the impact. They all worked very well. We watched some Bill Nye physics videos and explained what was happening in terms of inertia and friction. The kids had so much fun that they kept going and built boats. Then Alison pulled out the next engineering project on her list and had them start building cable cars. They really like that idea and had fun with the first iterations. We'll be working on this project for a few weeks. For Young Women's and Activity Days this week, Rea painted and Sara drew. They made beautiful pictures and had a lot of fun. Alison got sick with a nasty cold this week. It...

Since we did so much over the last few weeks we planned this week to be a lower energy week. We spent some time teaching Rocket to walk with a no-pull collar. He really doesn't like the collar, but he is also getting used to it, and walks without pulling much better on it. He still tries to get out of the collar, however. On Tuesday Timmy lost one of his front teeth which has been wiggly. He lost the tooth literally as well as having had it fall out. He thought that that meant that he wouldn't get any tooth fairy money, but apparently the tooth fairy knew that he had lost it. The kids are doing school again, and it is going well. We also were given a bunch of apples and a loaf of bread and some cheese from the food bank left-overs again, so we have been eating apples a lot this week.  Friday and Saturday Alison went to the Brown Family Quilting Retreat. She knitted two more figures for her nativity, and they all quilted two quilt tops for charity and they also ate a bunch of ch...

We missed last week, so this post is a twofer. Last week Mike took time off so we remodeled the downstairs. The walls used to be made out of wood paneling which had been painted yellowish tan, but the paint was all peeling off since the people that painted it didn't either buy the right paint or didn't sand the surface at all, so the paint didn't grip at all. We ripped out all the walls on Monday, put in insulation on Tuesday, put in drywall Wednesday, taped and mudded on Thursday and Friday, painted on Saturday, and touched up the painting and applied the trim on Sunday. It was a big job, but we like the color much more the way it is now, and we also no longer have to worry about the paint all coming off. It is a light blue, by the way. We bought a wireless fence for the dog, and when we opened it up it had already been opened, and it didn't have a collar. We returned that one and ordered a new one, but the seller accidentally listed it wrong, so it wasn't the one ...