Parentheticals

On Monday Mike and Alison built some magnet balls for Rea's science curriculum. Rea is learning about how chemical reactions work, and having balls with magnets of various strengths can show how certain bonds can form based on the relative strength of electronegativity between the different substances that are present. Friday during the day Timmy and Gideon were making and preforming plays, and one of the wonderful dialogues that they came up with went like this: Timmy gesturing with a machine-gun: "So, I can shoot my employees if they go on strike." Gideon shrugs: "Well, he is a millionaire!" On Friday we went to a ward carnival fundraiser. The kids played a lot of games and there was a silent auction where we bought some freeze dried strawberries. There were not a lot of gluten free things, so we couldn't bid on a lot. The kids all had a good time. Throughout the whole week Mike has also been working on a Flint Knapping website for grandpa Mike. It has mad...

Sunday night of last week when Mike was going on a walk with the dog he saw a bat swooping repeatedly in front of a neighbor's house, so he quickly ran back home and invited Rea and Sara to see it. They saw it swoop a few times before it flew away. It isn't too often that you get to see bats in Utah, so it was pretty fun. On Wednesday the kids went over to the Brown's house to make Alison mother's day gifts. They made her bracelets, which she likes a lot. Some of them also got her other candies and things to give to her on Mothers Day. Thursday Rea went back to the orthodontist. They told her that he mouth has successfully expanded enough, and so they are going to let it harden back up for a while, and then she is going to get braces. She is happy that expanding it worked, but it is annoying to still have to have machinery in her mouth. Elsa is going to have a travel themed end of kindergarten party. They are all going to wear cars and have stations where they do travel...

I asked Timmy to write the blog post, so this is what he produced: "So this week I was sort of sad because I wanted to play outside but it was always raining and it was like 'swish swish pour pour waah waah' (that was the noise that the cat makes when he goes in the rain). Also all the plants are growing except I don't like that because some of the plants I don't like and I did D&D with the Plastows the other day and Dustin killed the green dragon what's his name but we're going to bring him back today. Future note: we brought back Anglecon the green and Dustin wants to adopt a silver dragon and I think that Anglecon is not that angry at us. Also Dad's making me write the blog post I'm not particularly sure why. I got my book a while back it's about the hollow night. It has Dung-Defender and the Mantis Lords and the Traitor Lord and it's cool. And so it's fun when we play hollow Knight and we find all sorts of stuff that correlates w...

This week we started up another round of sickness- lots of people were tired, some felt nauseous, and Mike got a headache (which might have been related to the sickness that the others felt.) Tim and Gideon ordered a book which talks about Hollow Knight. It's name is "The Hollow Knight Wanderers Journal, and it arrived on Monday. "It is really cool and it tells you a lot of things about different characters and places in Hollow Knight. Me and Gideon have been obsessing over it." says Timmy. We also did more work on the garden with grandpa Craig this week. It is starting to look good. Here's hoping that we get some good food out of it this year. It was also last week of co-op this week. Alison's classes went well, and Timmy and Rea liked the ones that they attended as well, so it was a success overall. We had parties all Saturday. The younger three kids went to a party at the Dalyias The party was medieval themed. There was a pinata and a feast and you could b...

Timmy has been playing FTL recently, and he just beat the final boss for the first time without Mike helping a lot, so he is getting much better at the game. He also finished his first warrior cats series.  Elsa has had a messy room for a few weeks now, however, she helped clean up her room early this week, and since then she has kept it very clean. It is still looking good, so she has an easy time cleaning it up again. Yay Elsa! We have also (well, mostly grandpa Craig and the Boys) been working on the garden this week. We got lots of seeds planted, and we transplanted a lot of onions, garlic, and chard into the garden plot that Timmy and Gideon built. It is looking good! On Thursday when Alison and the kids went to connect-ed they had a special activity where the kids all sold things and so they bought presents for each of the members of the family who did not get to attend. Mike was given a gluten-free Oreo/Rice Krispie Treat dessert, Gideon was given a white elephant candle hol...

At Mike's work they are finally (about a year after it was supposed to happen) releasing the product that he has been working on to production. It has been in the lower environments for a long time, but many of the other teams that were supposed to be integrating with them have taken significantly longer than was originally planned for. They will be releasing it piece at a time for the next 12 weeks or so. Elsa liked playing with her friends Jay-Jay and Bethy this week. She says, "I didn't want to talk about it", so we will just leave it at that. Elsa also liked playing with Jell-o (the cat) this week as well. She liked watching him chase easter eggs and eat food, and it was so cute. Mike went out to get a English Walnut tree this week. Brock found it and scheduled the trip and the two of them went up and dug it out of the ground. The base of the trunk is 2 inches in diameter, so it is a few years old. Elsa, Gideon, and Timmy helped to plant it in the front yard. We h...

On Monday we played clean up your own backyard  On Tuesday we watched The Prince of Egypt  On Wednesday we had unleavened pizzas and haroseth. On Thursday we went up into the mountains and had a barbecue. We also had on Thursday practically the only snow storm this winter, which meant that when we went up into the canyons there was snow on the ground and beautiful flockage in the trees. Some of the kids did not dress sufficiently warm, so they were sort of sad, however we made a wonderful fire in the snow and roasted hot dogs and sausages and s'mores. Mike took a gluten pill because he didn't want to miss out on hot dogs cooked over a fire and s'mores. On Friday we had an Easter egg hunt and then the kids went to Grandma's for a sleepover with cousins and the adults had a double date with the Rogers. We played some lotr RPG and watched MegaMind. Our favorite part was when he said "Muh-LON-kuh-lee" instead of melancholy. When Timmy learned about how we watched ...

We missed a week again, however, given our current rate or posting, posting twice in three weeks is pretty good, so I am not going to complain.  Last week I don't remember anything interesting happening except for us all being sick in various degrees. Being sick sucks. I found a picture Alison took last week - here it is. This week the kids had off of school for spring break. They mostly played games and visited with people. Timmy, Mike, Logan, and Dustin have been playing multiple games of D&D recently in their campaign. Dustin's character (Vlad) just got turned into a werewolf (he wanted to, since it is a character concept for him). Timmy has been building a big skeleton mech unit to carry Skipper around. Skipper is a NPC party member who mostly just exists so that Mike has an easier time doing the math, since all of the math in the game is made for a team of 4 party members. On Saturday the kids were invited over to grandpa Mike and grandma Sheila's house for a ...

Timmy attempted to voice to text this blog post, since we have not posted in so long. Here is what he produced:  "This week was saltcon week I don't remember where was also I can play I Believe. And so when we got to so can we painted minis and people finding and I got to Nuke toothless and then we had to go back home and that's how we can there you go." So now, we haven't posted since mid February and it's now March so we are deeply behind on our blog posting. I don't think it would be reasonable to attempt to remember everything that happened in that time period, so I'm just going to give a few highlights.  It has been unusually warm, so we have been going canoeing in the Jordan River. We also got a big pile of wood chips for our front yard, and we have spread those around a lot. Hopefully this will prevent our yard from growing lots of weeds.  Mike has been sick with covid or something for about a month, and everyone else is also sort of feeling sic...

Alison was recently asked if she was planning to teach a new class next semester in the same teaching co-op that she is currently teaching in. She would like to teach, however, she hasn't yet put too much thought into it, so she is now starting to try to figure out what to teach. Mike and Rea were sick for multiple days this last week. Both of them are pretty good about wearing masks, so probably they didn't pass it on to anyone, however, it is hard to know for sure. Some of the kids went to the Dalyas on Wednesday instead of going to nature group like usual. One can only assume that they had a fun time, however, they are not here to confirm or deny that right now. On Friday Alison and Mike went to see The Importance of Being Earnest. The Sandy arts guild was putting it on, and they did a pretty good job of it. We really love to play and go to see it every chance that we can get, so we might not be likely to call it horrible, but that being said we still thought it was fun.  Sa...

This week was very exciting in the video game community; there was a new update for Terraria! Mike, Tim, Gideon, and cousin Logan spent a lot of hours exploring the new rules of the world. If you want to talk to any of them, they would be happy to tell you about how stacking whips no longer works or the trick to sand blocks or some other things I've forgotten by now. The Terraria update was on Tuesday, so that was the main thing going on for a few days. Oh, before that, on Monday Elsa's school had a Literacy Night, and she and Mom went and read some books and did some activities and got given a few free books. Elsa got Pete the Cat and the New White Shoes, which she was very excited about. Her school lets her track when we read together online for prizes. Friday the Elders Quorem hosted a ward Pinewood Derby. The kids were soo excited. There's a sister in the ward known for decorating, and she painted her car like Pikachu, organized all the kids to cheer for her, and won th...

We noticed we haven't written a blog post in a little while. Alison sums it up thus: we were sick and then sick and then sick and then sick and then sick and now we are finally getting better.  Here are some good things that we did recently: We went to the zoo. Timmy really wants to go back, so it must have been fun. We played another RPG session with Chauncey and Becky. The highlight of the session was as we were trying to escape the evil ruler of the city in a boat on the water we accidentally summoned the fish of the hills (which is a cryptozooid which my character invented as a cover story for why we were hanging around the town). Apparently something that matched the description that I came up with actually existed in the river, so when we sang a song about it we summoned it and it ate the bad guy who was chasing us.  It was rather entertaining, and a perfect ending to the session.