Parentheticals

Monday Alison felt sick - she had a temperature and wanted to lay around all day. Mike offered to stay home and take care of her, but she said that she would be fine. Rea did a great job keeping the other big kids happy and fed, and Gideon loved being able to snuggle with Mommy all day long. Monday about 11:00 we got an offer to host a foreign exchange student from China. One of Mike's co-workers knows a guy at a college whose job it is to set up places for them to stay. We all discussed the offer, and decided to give it a go. The kids are very excited. 柳青(Liu Qing) is a 40 year old grad student who wants to learn English as part of her medical education. She will live in the spare room for at least a month (if both parties are still having fun after that, then it can continue on a month to month basis up to until she gets her degree). She is arriving on Monday. It has been a very busy week, getting ready for her. Tuesday Alison was feeling better, but still lethargic. As ...

This year we acted out the nativity with our children. Timmy chose to be a donkey while Alison was Mary and baby Gideon was baby Jesus. Rea and Sara were all other characters. Mike was the Narrator. During the performance, there were many hasty costume changes. We opened our Christmas eve pajamas, and the kids loved dressing up in them. We ended up taking a picture for our Christmas post in them. Christmas eve we left out fudge for Santa, and he swapped it for cookies, which he must have picked up somewhere in the neighborhood or something. We definitely did not make them. On Christmas morning, the kids woke up at 5:00, and we went out to open our presents. Santa had also brought us fruit, which we all cut up and made a salad out of. It was amazing. We also had Apple dumplings, but the salad was really the star of the show. Gideon got two presents,  and he didn't really like either of them since he doesn't grab things yet. Timmy really loves his robotic dog toy. He al...

Apparently we forgot to write last week. This post will cover both weeks. Last week everyone got better from their sicknesses (except Gideon, who was still a little bit sick, but also much better). By now he is pretty much the rest of the way better. Last week and this week we wrapped Christmas presents. We have a few more to wrap, but we are mostly done. Mike has been working on the rule books of his games in anticipation of sending them in to the Ion Award again. Hopefully he gets them done in time. If anyone wants to help, feel free to volunteer. The 3d printer has been broken for a long time, but last Saturday I fixed it, so it is working again. Alison has begun doing Montessori again (for the past two weeks). They have been doing it pretty much every day, and are enjoying it a lot. The kids watched a few episodes of My Little Ponies as Sara's date, and then they were all terrified (except Timmy). Sara won't go to the bathroom by herself since then, which is rea...