Parentheticals

As I sit down to write this, I see a one-paragraph summary from last Sunday and remember Mike telling me that he couldn't remember anything from that week and did I want to write something. I guess we never did anything about that. Oops. Last week we picked apples at the bishop's house, tried to get grapes, but didn't find many. We ended up buying grapes and made nearly three gallons of grape juice. This week we picked apples at the Paynes' and made delicious apple fruit leather. Gideon loved it so much that he wanted to eat all of it, so Mike told him that if he picked and processed the apples himself, he could have all the fruit leather that came from it. It took him four days, but he ended up with fruit leather that should be ready tomorrow morning. We hope it works for him. Monday was the last day of the first quarter of Classical Conversations; we had donuts and pizza. The kids are still not unequivocally enthusiastic, but Alison still thinks it's a great thing...

 This week, things started heading toward whatever 'normal' is going to be this fall.  We had our first day at our Classical Conversations community on Monday. It was what they call "Week 0," not a real week following the curriculum, but it gave us a chance to try getting there on time and to see how things will go. We made it on time, but not prettily. Alison is trying hard to think of a different way to do lunches - everyone says "just have the kids make their own" as if that weren't MORE work than doing it all myself. And Sunday evenings are an awful time to have something scheduled, because we don't have a schedule Sundays after church and we like that. Oh, well. We'll figure it out. We don't have community this week, because of Labor Day, so we have another week to think about it. The girls wanted to do first day of school pictures like their cousins, so we took some Monday afternoon. The boys didn't want to do back-to-school picture...

Monday night we got a new goat named Olive. She is a LaMancha. She is much the same color as Lala was, and only a little bit taller. She is producing about a half a gallon a day, and she is so quiet. We are very happy with her so far. We have started making yogurt again, as well as cheeses. Tuesday Alison went to the midwife and found out that she is Group B Strep negative. She was positive the last two babies we had and so had to get 4 hours' worth of IV antibiotics while in labor. She is really excited about not having to go to the midwife so early on our new baby's birthday. She has been eating a lot of probiotic foods to try and make sure that would be so. Tuesday night Mike went to another game design meeting. It was fun, and he played a cool new game. Wednesday was Rea's date night, and we watched "My Little Ponies: the Movie" (which is the movie with "Nothing can stop the smooze" in it). It was fun, and we had a good time. Thursday Ali...

On Tuesday night we went to the temple with the ward bishopric. Apparently the ward financial clerk is invited to such events. It was good to go. We don't get there enough because finding babysitters for an extended period of time is difficult. We also went to dinner afterward. It was fun. On Wednesday we had Science Time with Daddy. The subject was gravity. We had a fun time talking about why we build walls vertical (and not diagonal or horizontal). We also talked about how on the moon you can jump higher, and how every planet has gravity that pulls things that are near the planet to the planet. On Thursday Rea and I went out to the library for a daddy daughter date. She wanted to get more fairy books. It is great that she loves reading chapter books. Hopefully she can pick some that are higher quality some time :). I also went to do some home teaching. Friday we made apple sauce as a family date. It was surprisingly easy, and the results tasted great. Saturday we ...

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. ...

This last week we dried more apples. We are getting very good at it. We are almost entirely done. I figure that we have five more batches, so probably we will have finished them all by next week. After that is done the next goal would be to process all these peppers that we have been given. We intend to make a lot of salsa this year, and with our new food processor it should be much easier than it usually is. We went down to the cabin over the last weekend. We had a fun time (though sleeping with kids in the room is always rough). we went to Twelfth Night at the Shakespeare Festival as well as the Ninja Japanese Steakhouse . I would recommend both highly. One of the great parts about the cabin that I didn't get as much of as I would have liked this time was seeing the milky way. When you are out at night in apple valley you can see way more stars than you can see anywhere else. We played some Avalon (card game), Bubble Bobble, and Rampage (NES games). We also helped weed th...

This week we dried more apples. We are working on filling up our second 5 gallon bucket of dried apples, but still have a decent amount of space left in it. Hopefully we can get through them some time soon, but until that happens the girls are enjoying immensely taking a single bite out of each individual apple and then grabbing a new one. We need to figure out how to stop them from doing that. They have also been enjoying the empty apple boxes. We finished up building our shoe bench this last weekend. It still needs to be painted and to have the cushion top attached more solidly to the body of the bench, but it is structurally complete. We also ate Indian food, went to the flower garden at Thanksgiving Point, and made some cheeses (paneer and mozzarella). We got a lot done and had a pretty relaxing time. On Sunday Alison gave a talk at church and I and taught a lesson. We had a family dinner at my parents house after church we mostly talked and ate food, though I did ta...

This last week in summary: Monday: We celebrated Andrea's birthday. She got a kitchen set from Grandma Sumption's house and a Lynley Dodd book (We had Slinky Malinki and Hairy Mclairy already, and both were fun books, so we got her Open the door, which was fun, but the punch line was above Andrea's head (though Alison and I found it very funny)) Andrea also played with Legos for the first time. It brings back good memories to play with Legos again. Tuesday: I went to Sort tech conference. It was fun, and the classes were pretty useful. I especially enjoyed the class about the Netdurino, and look forward to figuring out some hack that I want to make. Andrea had her 2 year checkup. She is 27 lbs, 2' 10" and healthy. Wednesday: I went to Sort tech conference again. Thursday: We baby sat for the Nelsons so that they could go to the temple. It went well. Friday: We made pizza, and went to the Clark Planetarium for our date. Andrea especially enjoyed the stairs and...

Baby Andrea has started to throw tantrums. They are not very successful, honestly, but perhaps she will get better at them. She lays on the ground, and then cries, but if you distract her by asking her "Are you going to throw a tantrum?" she looks at you in a confused manner, and then gets back up off the floor. She has suddenly discovered trucks and cars. She loves watching them, and whenever we go on a walk, she points to them and does the 'come here' gesture. She has a car gesture that she will also make (which looks like she is holding a steering wheel and turning it right and left). Probably Alison taught her that. I just started NaNo. I am doing OK so far (though I am a bit behind like always). I have 1000 words and I want 5000 by the end of the day. I will report my progress here. By the way, I wrote a little program called "Just keep writing, Swee!" which 'helps' you to write a NaNo novel. She asked me for certain features (apparently t...