Parentheticals

It has been a while since we posted, however we have been busy and we let it slide. Here are the things that we remember: On last Friday the kids were invited to a sleepover at Grandpa Craig and Grandma Julie's house with Ellie, Aelfric, and Victoria. They also got to see a play too. The play was "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever", which we like a lot. They came straight from the play to Grandma Sheila and Papa Mike's house on Saturday to go to the Giving Machine. This is a new tradition, where Papa and Grandma give each family a certain amount of money to donate to different causes. We chose ducks, a garden, and polio vaccines. Then we walked around Temple Square to see the lights and then got cookies at the Deseret Book across the street. Our family parked at the edge of the free fare zone and took the train downtown and back, which the kids loved. They're always excited for train rides. It was a very fun evening. Sunday we had a Brown family dinner. All of Papa

Well, we're back. We were tired on Monday, but we made it through Classical Conversations. Timmy and Gideon were encouraged to behave by promising that they could have Logan and Dustin come over. They were pretty good, but unfortunately the Plastows were sick this week, so it didn't happen until Thursday. They played their new game Amazing Frog and seemed pretty happy about it. We got some snow this week, which made the dog and the kids very happy. At nature group on Friday, they went sledding and had a great time. They ended up making chains of sleds and sending up to six kids down the hill at once. The "hill" they chose ends in a drop-off into a pool of water, and they seemed to think that the steering challenge added spice to sledding. No one actually got wet, so that was good. Speaking of the water, it's a collection point for storm drain water, and someone must have poured dish soap into it somewhere, because it produced an incredible amount of bubbles the en