Parentheticals

Wow - apparently we missed a few weeks. Here is what happened: On Monday the 19th of July we celebrated Sara's birthday party. She really wanted to go to the Treehouse museum, but it is closed on  Mondays, and Alison didn't want to take the kids without another adult, so we haven't yet made it there. Instead we went to the Poulson's house and played in the creek near their house. In the evening Mike and Sara made a white cake for her with vanilla frosting. We opened up her presents, and sang her the birthday song. Andy and his family came back from Macedonia from the 21st to the 31st, and we pretty much spent every day over at the Poulson's house spending time with them. We had a lot of fun - playing legos, going on walks, canoeing, playing in the creek, etc. Mike even got in a few playtests of his board games. It was good to see them again. The next week we went to the Stromberg's house to celebrate Max's birthday. We watched movies and played video games, ...

Apparently, we are horrible at writing blog posts right now. I guess that we need to find a new time to write them as we keep having things after church on Sunday, and so they always fail to get written. Now - to try and remember the last few weeks: On the 27th we saw Macbeth at the historic draper theater - it was pretty fun. They used a post-apocalyptic setting so that everyone could dress in steampunk styles. They also abridged the original play slightly, and they did an awesome job; we could only recognize a few spots where they'd cut things. It was a great performance. On the 29th we opened up our winter clothes and started putting away our summer clothes. The kids have enough warm clothes for a few days now, which was good because it suddenly got cold. We don't normally have to turn on the heater in September! On the 3rd Mike went to BGDG. On the 5th we drove to Reno to visit the Poulsons while Mike went on a business trip. We had a fun trip and did a lot of...

Apparently we have not written blog posts in a long time. From the 22nd to the 26th of July we went to a family Reunion in Oregon. Much of the Brown family was able to make it there, and we had a fun time. We loved playing with our cousins and going to the beach. The kids also "found" arrow-heads that seemed to magically be seeded in the yard of our camp site. Rea remembers the really windy day at the beach where it was so windy that it kicked the sand around all over the place. The first time that we tried to fly kites at the beach, we were hardly able to get them up, however the second time, it was so windy that we had a hard time controlling all but the largest kites. Sara liked the fact that we stayed in Yurts, and she also liked "crab paradise", which was when grandpa Mike caught them a lot of crabs and they played with them in a man-made tide pool. Gideon liked playing on the sand, and drawing pictures to Mommy, and grandma Sheila sharing out foo...

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...

On the way to our vacation last week we listened to some books on tape. The highlight of the books we listened to was "Diary of a Mad Brownie." It was a fun book about a faerie that was supposed to clean up a bedroom of a slob. It was highly funny. We arrived in southern Utah and eventually found the cabin that Mike's parents rented for the Yoder reunion. It was a bit of a difficult job finding it. The cabin was beautiful, and we had a great time there. The cabin had a lot of mosquitoes (the kids think that this is the most pertinent bit of information about the cabin.) We spent an awesome day at the mouth of the Narrows in Zion's. The kids slept on bunk beds with Max, and the trip was very fun. Apparently Mike and Alison are bad at taking pictures, because we have no pictures of the entire trip. Next, we went to California to visit the Poulsons. The trip was long, but the kids were pretty good. The thing that the kids think is the most important to tell about t...