Parentheticals

 Last Monday we brought dinner to Grandma Sheila because she had foot surgery. We made chicken noodle soup with chicken bone broth. It ended up really good, so we are going to remember the recipe: Add 10 chicken wings (bone in with skin) to a slow cooker and enough water to cover them slow cook until the meat is done. Pull out the wings and remove meat from them. Set aside meat in refrigerator. throw back the skin, fat and bones back into the water add five celery, an onion cut in half, two carrots, lots of garlic and then slow cook overnight. The next day toss out everything but the broth. Re-add the meat and then add carrots, celery, egg noodles and salt to taste. Cook as long as it takes egg noodles to be done. Serves multiple people. The first half of the week Mike was working on his final project for his Masters degree. He submitted it Wednesday and it has since been graded and he passed the class and earned his master's degree. Last Thursday we cleaned the church. We did...

 This week has been killer hot. There was only one day that it wasn't above 97, and the temperature right now is 106 degrees. Mike has been working on his finals pretty much all day every day so that leaves Alison to do all the work around here. (Internet cookies for anyone who recognizes the quote; it's a favorite around our house.) She is working very hard and we are all excited for Mike to be done shortly. He wrote an essay on the ethics of reverse engineering (which Alison had fun editing for him) and then recorded a presentation about the topics in his essay. He and his team are still working on coding a kids' banking app. It's due the day after tomorrow, so it's almost done! Alison has been catching up on all the to-dos from a over month ago, before everything was "get ready for Andy's visit" and "enjoy Andy's visit" and "recover from Andy's visit." (We absolutely adored having Andy's family here.) One of those thi...

 We posted last week and now we are posting again this week. Hooray for us! On Monday we celebrated the Fourth of July by having the Plastows over for Barbecue and fireworks.  Alison and the kids went over to visit Andy's family more this week. They spent Wednesday - Friday at the Poulson's house. Mike was doing his day job again, so he only went over in the evenings to have dinner and conversations with them, and during the day he worked on work and school and teaching and taking care of the dog. Rocket was a very sad dog last week. He thought that we had lost most of the members of our pack. He was very happy when they all came back home on Friday. Mike was happy too, but he at least understood what was going on. It was over 100 degrees all week so the kids all went swimming every day for most of each day. The ones that were not brave in the water all became very brave. Timmy can float and swim some now, and Gideon and Boo both practiced floating and swimming using puddle ju...

We failed to write for a few weeks, so this is a big post to get caught back up. Three weeks ago we did Organized Simplicity on the front room. On Monday the 13th we took everything out of the room. It doesn't look like it has that much stuff in it, but it still took up half of the carpeted room and half of Mike's work room to hold all of the stuff. After cleaning out all the stuff we cleaned the room and Alison decided that she also wanted to paint the walls. We ended up painting it a yellowish white that matches the color of the Kallax. Painting took till Wednesday night, so we started moving things back in Thursday and we got it all back together by Friday. Mike marked some board games for disposal, and we also got rid of some art stuff. The room was re-arranged during the move, so we now have a cool new setup which gives us less horizontal furniture to put things on. Hopefully that works to keep the room cleaner. Boo's birthday was on the 15th. We ate fruit pizza and sh...