Stabby

Timmy has been making good progress on the Lion Knight's Castle - he has been working on it with some help from Mike; however, he has been doing most of it himself. He is also making up a story of how each new bag that he opens was a new stage in the development of what started out as a small farmer's house.

We also got a robot vacuum that is either named "Stabby" or "Sharkie" (depending on who you ask and when. Alison decided that it would be a good motivator for the kids and would help them to clean up their floors without an adult having to check them out to make sure that they are done. The idea is that they clean their floors and then, when they are done, they get the robot to sweep them, and if they do a good job, it won't bump into things all the time. So far, they like it fairly well.

Alison, Rea, and Tim are now attending Connect-Ed again. Alison is teaching new classes (she hasn't taught before, so this is a first time for her). They are having a fun time and have enjoyed it. Alison's classes are: a history class about reading primary sources and formulating opinions about things in the past (where they use the Wings of Fire stories for some of the source materials, just as practice), and a literature class where they play various Microscope-based RPGs to talk about the structure of stories and how they are put together. They play games as if they were characters in the books in order to understand them better.

Speaking of school, Sara and Elsa have been enjoying their new schools a lot. Gideon often says that he wants to quit and go back to homeschooling; however, Alison is trying to convince him to try a bit longer before he quits.

We had the Waters over for Labor Day weekend - we made Yoder Family Egg Rolls for them, and ate and talked. It was fun to have them over.

Elsa wants to talk about aerial silks:

"So, Aerial silks are really good for like doing tricks on, and they are really fun, and they are really great with people helping you to do them, that is new. My favorite trick is like one of the 'fallen angels' because now I can do it. Sara has been doing aerial silks past when we were in Grandma's house. They can teach you how to do a backbend sometimes and a lot of different things."

Rea and Sara have tried out for the play "The Frightmare Before Christmas" at the OBT, and they both got parts. They are two of the kids who are Dracula's Henchmen, so all of you should buy tickets for the play, which is mostly in December. Here is a link to where you can buy tickets. We are excited to have them playing in a play again, and also that they got moderately important parts (they get to kidnap Santa Claus, and have speaking lines and deliver some jokes). There were 6 parts, and 17 kids tried to get them, so they were very good relative to the kids that didn't make the grade. The play is going to be really good, and they are super excited.

On Saturday, we went to the Rogers' house to play RPGs with them. The girls were also invited over to have a sleepover with them. I didn't hear how that went, so it must have been fun.

Saturday afternoon/evening, we invited the Gutierrez family over for a board game day. We played lots of games, and the kids built Legos and had fun. We perhaps went too long, since Timmy declared that it was the worst day of his life (because he was tired, not because he actually had a really bad thing happen to him). We will have to figure out how to remember to end them earlier in the future.

Today, after church, we went to the browns' house in order to have a family lunch. There were hamburgers and hot dogs, and afterwards the kids played video games, and some adults talked while others went to do some suburban foraging. We discovered an almond tree that we will be able to pick and two walnut trees, and we also picked all of the peaches on two peach trees, but ran out of storage space before we got the last few branches picked. We now have eight boxes of peaches, and we gave away two boxes as well.

The thing that started all of the suburban foraging was Grandpa Mike's story about ripening jujube fruits in a neighbor's yard. We tried a few out, but they weren't particularly tasty. We'll have to decide whether we actually want some when they are all the way ripe.