Parentheticals

Last Tuesday we left for our trip to Italy. We woke up the kids at 3:30, and the plane left at 7:30. We were on various planes all day, and we arrived in Italy at 11 am the next day. The kids (aside from Gideon) binged watched movies all day long, and practically everyone on the entire plane commented on how well behaved they were. Sleeping on the plane was hard, but what can you do? It is a small price to pay. After landing we got a car (which took an hour at least). The car that we got was an 8 seater van with a huge trunk, which we named the "Behemoth". We had planned on getting a smaller car, but that was all they had apparently. Timmy is sure Behemoth means "A small mammoth". After we got the car, we went to a train museum and saw some trains and planes. We only really went there because we needed to find a bathroom, but we made the most of it when we were there. Timmy and the other kids loved the whole museum a lot, especially the trains that you could c...

This week the kids have been playing with the Marissa Dalyai a lot. The Dalyais are our best friends, and they are moving out of our neighborhood and closer to the library. We will miss being able to walk or bike over whenever we want, so we played with them almost every day this week. Mike had Board Game Design Guild and Alison had League of Utah Writers this week, so it was busy. The kids took naps and cleaned up so that they got to watch movies both nights, so they were pretty happy. During the week, the kids got a card from Grandma Sheila and Grandpa Mike with stickers and $20 to do something fun. On Thursday, we went to the grocery store and spent the money on supplies for an ice cream bar: ice cream, cones, chocolate coconut sauce, walnuts, sprinkles, whipped cream, and cherries. It was a very fun family activity. Thank you, Grandpa and Grandma! Friday we sat around after dinner lamenting our lack of date planning. Alison checked the internet and found a free "Youth...

Monday was Memorial Day, so we had our traditional Memorial Day BBQ. The Strombergs came this year; we had lots of fun. The kids love playing together, and the adults enjoyed sitting and talking while the kids were all occupied. Alison also drove out early Monday to buy a Vitamix blender. She has been wanting one for years, and she is very excited. She isn't quite accustomed to making smoothies in it yet, but it makes wonderful peanut butter out of raw peanuts, which is very cool. The kids have been playing with Duplos a lot this week. Mike discovered that he doesn't mind as much when the kids have Duplos all over the floor as he minds other toys, probably because he likes LEGO so much. The kids have really enjoyed it. This week, Rea lost another tooth. Sara has her first loose tooth. Timmy's excited for his birthday (15 days and counting... constantly!). Mike is doing more work on his management book - he's thinking about Kickstartering ia second edition to pay for...

The kids have loved riding their bikes this week, but they've all outgrown their own bikes. We need to buy Rea a bigger one, put training wheels on Rea's for Sara, and move Timmy from the trike to Sara's bike with training wheels. Alison also wants to put a handle on the back of the trike so she can push Gideon. The kids are not too excited about the changes. Sara was OK as long as the doll seat moves to the back of her new bike, but Rea was very upset about losing hers. Alison finally had to tell her that she could only keep her old bike if she bought Sara a new one with her own money. Then she started fighting with Sara about the name of the bike. Rea insisted it keep whatever name Rea gave it, and Sara wanted to transfer her old bike's name to her new one. Finally they agreed that if Rea paid Sara $2, Sara would keep the bike's name. So we hope that's all settled, and this week we'll get Rea her first geared bike and another set of training wheels, and th...

We never actually finished our blog post last week, so this week is two-for-one. That means that it is double long as well. Last week was Holy Week, and we have been celebrating in many different ways. Alison always comes up with activities for each day, so this week, on Sunday we played the Triumphal Entry game, On Monday we talked about cleaning the temple and played "Clean Up Your Own Backyard", on Tuesday the kids learned about the origins of the Passover by watching Prince of Egypt, Wednesday we had a Passover meal, Thursday we did service (opening the church nursery for a funeral), Friday we talked about the Stations of the Cross, Saturday we had an egg hunt, and Sunday we celebrated Easter. Really, Easter should be as big as (if not bigger than) Christmas. We wouldn't celebrate Christmas at all if it weren't for Easter. So Alison goes to a lot of effort to make Easter a big deal. This year the food turned out the best of any of the years we've done...

Carnival ended this week with Mardi Gras on Tuesday February 13th. We had planned to invite all the kids in the neighborhood to parade around the park and eat doughnuts to celebrate. We bought party favors and Mardi Gras beads and invited everyone we knew. Then Monday night, the kids started throwing up. All four of them threw up multiple times that night, so there went our Mardi Gras plans. We spent the day laying around watching movies (Wild Kratts, Nothing Can Stop the Smooze, and Roger and Hammerstein's Cinderella), which was fun, but not Mardi Gras. Alison was going to let it drop, but the kids insisted that Mardi Gras be rescheduled. So we emailed everyone to come to the park Thursday after school. Thursday ended up having a bitter, biting wind that froze us to tears. No one else braved the wind to join us, so the kids got to eat some doughnut holes and then went home. So we took our decorated bikes and doughnuts to our regular park day on Friday. Then at least we had som...

We missed writing last week. Certainly stuff happened, but I can't remember all of it. I can recall making a cheddar, and practicing my presentation a lot. This week I practiced my presentation more, started making a game called "Doge City", and also started printing Dominion Adventures tokens on my printer. We spent a lot of time outside (it was certainly unseasonably warm out in Utah, perhaps global warming finally caught up with us.) We spent a few hours on Saturday fixing up all the bikes and preparing for Alison to take three kids on extended bike rides. Alison has been reading a blogger called " Mr. Money Mustache " about having a better life by buying less, and one of his big points is how much better bikes are than cars. She is eager to try it out. (Warning: the MMM blog does include swearing.) Our first chicken started laying again, so we have about 8 eggs so far. Hopefully the others begin their laying regimen soon, otherwise we will have to sell...

This last week began with sicknesses. Alison stayed home from Church due to feelings of nausea. Alison says that the primary leaders say that Mike does a very good job as a substitute music leader. I will poll the children next time I sub to see if this is true. By evening Alison thought that her sickness was caused by too much cake, so we went to the Poulson family for a Poulson/Brown family dinner. It was awesome. But that night, Rea started throwing up, and threw up all the next day. Sara then started throwing up that night. So if we infected your kids with some throwing-up disease, we apologize. We had planned to do Twelve Days of Christmas activities from Christmas Day until Three Kings Day (January 5th), but the sickness messed with some of the plans. We ended up with multiple Movie Days of Christmas. Rea and Sara were really excited on Tuesday, when they found that Mommy had checked out "Frozen" from the library. The kids have experienced branded Frozen dolls and c...

This week we... Certainly we did something. Wednesday for Science Time we talked about the particulate nature of matter.  That was an interesting one.  Rea seemed to get it, though. She did, at one point tell me that particles are called atoms, so apparently we had talked about it before. Thursday was Rea's birthday.  She requested homemade macaroni and cheese and asparagus for dinner, and chocolate cupcakes for dessert.  We at it as a picnic in the backyard.  She made little fairy decorations for the cupcakes, and she got some lovely presents: a kit to make flower fairies, a set of laminated paper dolls of horses and fairies, a coloring book, a toy Dalmation puppy, a doll with a dress modeled after Elsa, and Quints dolls.  It was a very fun day and she was very happy. Saturday we went and picked apples from a neighbor of Amy's.  Amy told us the apples were falling off her tree, so we asked if we could pick some and clean up the ground for her. ...

I have been printing up the 240 twist counter order that I received. I ran out of filament on Friday, and had to order more. I am not done with all of the counters yet, but I have completed 175 of them. Thursday grandma Sheila offered to watch the kids, so we went out to dinner and had a walk in a park. It was nice. We went to see Fiddler on the Roof on Friday. It was excellent. We took the Poulsons and the Browns out to see it with us, and we had a good time. I would highly recommend it to anyone that has not seen it. I have been reading about an ancient German permaculture technique called hugelkultur as part of doing research for my space game, so on Saturday we made a hugelkultur in our front yard. We have planted it with beans and are hoping that it will grow us lots of good food in future years. Additionally, on Saturday we made another Havarti. I skimmed the milk this time, so hopefully it comes out less sharp than it did last time. I had it hotter than it needed to be ...

Rea's rash is getting better, though it is still a little bit itchy for her. We expect it to be better entirely before next Sunday. I worked more on my space game this week. On Thursday we had a Board game design group meeting wherein I got a lot of good feedback. Alison and I brainstormed afterward and rewrote a lot of the game to make it simpler. Also on Thursday I got a rough draft of the Moar Moai board from Dave. It is looking pretty good. I look forward to playing it again once he finishes it. On Friday we finished off the sharp Havarti that we made a while back. We changed our minds and decided that we liked it because it melted so well. We will have to make another Havarti soon so that we can have more creamy Havarti goodness. On Friday and Saturday we were able to go the seminar that Alison wrote about last week. The seminar was not as good as Alison was hoping, but we still had fun spending time together, and talked about good things. We are grateful to the Poulso...

This was Rea's first week of homeschool kindergarten: She missed the kindergarten cut-off by a month, so all her friends from Church and the neighborhood started kindergarten this week and she didn't. So Alison told her that they would do a homeschool kindergarten. Alison says there's definitely been a learning curve, but things are going pretty well. Rea says her favorite thing to do is math, which Alison would have guessed was her least favorite from her responses, so that's interesting. She also practices handwriting, reading (Rea is reading aloud "Little House in the Big Woods"), and memory work, and Alison reads some classics (fairy tales, Aesop's fables, etc) to her. It all takes 30-45 minutes a day and has been going well. Alison is looking for some sort of group to join once a week to get out of the house more, but she hasn't found one she loves. She might have to create one. On Wednesday we had Science time with Daddy for the first time. We ...

This week we spent some time working on the front yard. We have dug paths in a wagon wheel configuration around the yard, covered them with sand and pavers (that were being thrown away by a ward member), and also built a sandbox in the middle. Alison is ordering a patio umbrella to cover the sandbox (to keep the neighbor cat out of it), and we plan on planting various gardens in between the spokes of the wheel. Alison and the kids went on two hikes this week.  On Tuesday they joined a Meetup group hiking in Little Cottonwood Canyon.  The other big kids ended up not meeting us, so there were two 2 year olds and Rea and Sara and Timmy.  The girls still had fun, and we climbed on boulders and threw rocks in the creek and had a great time.  On Friday, we hiked Cecret Lake with Grandpa Craig and Grandma Julie.  Even Sara hiked the full 3.2 miles with steep switchbacks!  We ate currants, saw a moose up close, and watched waterdogs in the lake.  It was an ...

...Brazilian Lumberjacks cut down the last tree in the rain forest. A spokesman for the Acme Toothpick company said, "Gee, that's too bad." Additionally, grandma Sheila sent us thank you money for helping move. We decided that it would be best to go to Thai food with it. The girls ate a whole plate of chicken and vegetables in peanut sauce between them. They were apparently very hungry. We also just discovered that Sara is very motivated by reverse psychology. All that you have to do to get her to clean her room is to tell her "It is time to clean this room. I want to make you clean it up by grabbing your hands and making you grab the things, but mom said that if you clean it up by yourself that I am not allowed to do that." She cleans it up every time if you say that. She also will wash her dishes if you tell her she is too young to wash dishes. Sara loves helping Timmy. she helped Timmy walk around the house by holding his hands one time. He doesn...

On Monday Sara taught a family night lesson. We don't really know what it was about, but she did teach it herself. Tuesday I had a triple daddy daughter son date. We got ice-cream and went to the store. The kids liked it. Wednesday Timmy got one shot and had no side effects this time (except for a little bit of sleepiness.) We are really happy about this because last one was a beast. Alison tried every natural remedy she could find for helping him adjust, so maybe some of the worked. She's not going to do a proper study, because that would risk it not working, and there's no way we're going through that again. (Three solid months of him screaming every time Alison wasn't holding him, and yes, the doctor said it was probably due to the shots. Yikes.) Thursday Alison went to a meeting at the library, which turned out to be a fascist rally. She had me call her so that she could exit the meeting discreetly. We don't think that any fascists spies trailed her ho...

This week Timmy has been standing independently quite a bit. He really likes doing it. He is still not walking, but it has to be coming soon. He is really proud about it. On Monday I printed up a larger twist counter to see if I could display 40 numbers on a twist counter. It took two tries to get something usable, but that is way less than the 20ish tries I had to do for the smaller ones. On Wednesday we had a Sandy Board Game Design group meeting . It was fun. We played three games (one of which was a possible sequel to Above and Below (Which Alison and I both liked quite a bit)). Ryan liked my "Sorcery, Inc." game enough to offer to co-design it with me (which is really exciting since he is a game publisher, which makes me believe that if we can make it finalized then it will probably be published). On Thursday I found out that my work was going to be moving to a new building one day early. That meant that I had to pack up all my stuff and get out one day early. ...

On Monday and Tuesday we helped Andy and Amanda paint the front of their house and clean out their gutters. We were pretty tired from the trip so far, so that was a nice break. On Wednesday we went to the airport to go home, but the plane had been delayed. We missed our connecting flight in Denver by about half an hour and so we had to wait for 12 hours in Denver to get home. We went to the children's museum amid a tornado warning and flash floods. They made us stay in an inner room with nothing fun in it since the tornado could break the windows and turn the entire museum into a museum of death by flying glass as it were (the joys of tornadoes). When we got home (at 1:30 am) we went to sleep. I missed some work on Thursday for some strange reason. Not really, Alison's car was broken and we had to get Timmy to a doctor's appointment. Not only is Timmy healthy, but we got the car fixed as well. On Friday Alison took the kids to her mom's house. Her sister Katie was...

This past week in Utah it rained a lot. I tried to look up how much it was, but apparently that is difficult to find on the internet. Anyway, it was a lot. Today it even hailed a bit. On Thursday we watched Music Man at the Pioneer theater. They did  a good job of it. The program commented how surprising it was that the play was thematically relevant after 100 years, and that was in fact true (with the exception of the shapoopie song, which wasn't even relevant the day that it was written.) They sang well, danced well, and enunciated well. They even watched their phraseology. On Friday we had a mushroom hunt, which was not very successful (but was fun anyway). Saturday we made a brie and went to the DI to discover a vacuum sealer on sale for $10. We bought it since I have been thinking of vacuum sealing cheeses and $10 is super cheap. We haven't used it yet, but we will soon. Saturday we also went to Grandma's house and picked up some things that the grands were g...

Alison and the kids went to the zoo TWICE this week. The first time, on Tuesday, was for a goal day party, and they met Grandma Julie and Aunt Becky and Cousin Ellie there for a fun time. Thursday Uncle Chauncey finished school, so he went with Becky and Ellie again, and they invited Grandma Julie, who invited us. We had a great time both days. Tuesday they were setting up the dinosaurs (Zoorasic Park 2 this summer!), and Rea was excited to see them on Thursday, but they were all covered up until opening day. Now Rea wants to go this upcoming Friday for the dinosaurs. On Wednesday we had a Board Game Design Group of Sandy meetup. There were five people there, and we played two games: Polynesia and Zodiac Dice. It went pretty well. The girls had a babysitter and had a lot of fun as well. On Thursday we ate dinner in the front yard. As we ate the heady scent of the lilac flowers made us think about edible flowers. We looked up the edibility of lilacs, and found that lilac jelly is a ...