Parentheticals

Apparently we forgot to write a post last weekend, so this is a twofer. That being said, we are not able to come up with too many things that happened that were not normal stuff. Sara is done playing in The Lore of the Rings, since last night they put on the last showing of it, so if you wanted to see it, it is too late. We went to see her last performance, and we all agree that they did even better than their first one. Sara was incredible as Frollo and we are so proud of her. We all love the OBT, and are happy to have had our kids participate in one of their plays.  Rea has been doing a lot of sewing - both making plushies for herself and helping her friend Rachel Waters make a seal for her twin cousin's baby blessing. Rachel wanted to make a stuffed animal for them, and wanted help the evening before they had to leave to go there. She had also never sewn anything from a pattern before and she was using minky, which is very difficult to sew with. Despite all the difficulties they...

This week was the most beautiful spring weather! We've been spending lots of time outside. (Except when Mike's work was bonkers and awful, which happened a lot this week.) The fruit trees are all in bloom, and it's wonderful. Everyone has working bikes now, so we've been riding to the park and stuff and having fun. Tim choreographed and announced a bike show where he and Gideon performed feats of derring-do like riding straight toward each other and going really fast. It was very fun. Early in the week Rea threw up again. We're starting to wonder if there's something wrong; she's thrown up more in the last couple months than she had for years before that.We're just not sure what to do about it. Alison's first thought was to get her tested for food allergies and intolerances - it's definitely not tied to one specific food, but maybe she's damaged her digestive system and now it's more sensitive? Who knows? Maybe it will just go away. Grand...

We didn't get around to an Easter egg hunt last week, so we did one Monday morning. We've had warm weather and rain this March, so it was really easy to hide the eggs; Alison said, "I didn't even have to bury any to hide them all!" Alison is kind of obsessed with making Easter egg hunts actual hunts and not just picking up eggs that are laying around. We joke about it, but it's a tradition, as is losing a few eggs every year. We didn't have an official egg count this year, but we're sure we lost less than 10. Out of almost 200, that's not too bad. This week was the local schools' spring break, so Alison picked one thing that each kid HAD to do for school and let them skip the other things. Except for Réa; she had to do CC since there are only 3 weeks left. She got to skip math, though! She was not super impressed by Alison's attempts to sell that as a break.  They had a lot of fun playing with friends and playing outside and building with L...

On Monday we went and made a fire in Crestwood Park and we had hot dogs and cooked s'mores. We usually do this activity on Thursday in memory of Jesus in The garden of gethsemane, however this time we did it on Monday because it was the only day of the week that we had enough time for the activity. The fire went well enough apart from some local busy-bodies telling us that open fires were not permitted in the park (which, our fire wasn't open because it was inside of one of the fire boxes that are provided by the park). Tuesday we had our last supper, which is usually on Wednesday. Since this year we learned that it is not appropriate to make a meal similar to a Passover if you're not Jewish we instead made unleavened pizzas and drink grape juice and had haroseth. On Wednesday we watch Prince of Egypt and talked about the Passover. Thursday we played clean up your own backyard in memory of how Jesus cleansed the temples. And we sent our oldest two daughters off to their tem...