Parentheticals

On Monday, Grandpa Craig had President's Day off, so Alison and the kids went on a field trip with Grandpa Craig, Grandma Julie, and Becky and her kids. They went to Thanksgiving Point, where they got to play in the dinosaur water table and sand pit, eat lunch in the cafe there, get ice cream, see butterflies in the jungle room, and play in the bug museum. They had so much fun! Rea spent a long time in the butterfly biosphere. Boo liked a plastic chrysalis she could sit in in the bug museum. Timmy liked learning about the end of the dinosaurs and how birds survived from a movie in the dinosaur museum and about ants in the bug museum; he wants to make an ant farm now.   Tuesday Timmy reorganized all of Alison's Montessori shelves in order to earn an ant farm. Unfortunately, it's too cold to mail ants, and although we went to three different places where we know ants live, we couldn't find the right places to dig them up. So we have to wait, much to his disappointment. On

We missed a few weeks - things have been busy. One event that occurred in the interim is our car broke down. Alison was driving the kids to nature group three weeks ago and had just gotten off the freeway when all the dials on the dashboard suddenly dropped to zero. After pulling into a parking lot and ascertaining that we still had steering and brakes, Alison decided to try to drive home instead of trying to figure out a way to safely get five kids in carseats home from Sandy. It was rather terrifying, but the car worked the whole way home. Not only that, we managed to get it to start and more-or-less drive to the car shop the next day. (None of the lights or headlights worked, and it got harder and harder to start up after each stoplight, but we made it.) Apparently the belt that runs the alternator was too old, and it needed to be replaced. They fixed it quickly and it wasn't nearly as difficult as it could have been. The Browns lent us a car, so we could send one parent out for