Parentheticals

This is a post that covers 3 weeks because we were too busy or tired to post the last two times Two weeks ago it was spring break and we organized lots of playdates for the kids. Timmy larped twice: once at Dimitri's house with Sally and Gideon and Momo and kind of Dimitri. Sally was a wizard Momo was a barbarian Gideon was a rogue and Timmy was the dungeon master. They fought some goblins and freed a city from an evil goblin. They also went to the Rogers house and larped there. During the whole time, Timmy has been playing his dinosaur game a lot and has enjoyed it a lot.  Also two weeks ago they got the digging done for putting in a new foundation for the garage and master bedroom. Alison also started organized simplicity and cleaned about one room a day in Grandpa Mike and Grandma Sheila's basement. It looks super good now that she is done with all of it. She rearranged the main room and our bedroom to make them much more efficiently positioned. We also moved the carpet rug ...

Elsa volunteered to help me write this blog post. This is what she said: "We were going to the beach house, and Victoria was there, and we went on the beach and we found so many pretty shells. That's all I remember." Just to be clear, we did not go to the beach house last week. :P I'm not sure if she's making up a story, telling me what she remembers from the last year, or what. She did get to play with Victoria this week, though; Grandma Julie and Grandpa Craig were in town this weekend and invited all the cousins for a sleepover. Alison and Mike and Becky and Chauncey had Arby's for dinner and played Here to Slay at Becky's house while the kids were all at Grandma's. It was very fun! And when we went to pick up the kids, we sat and created characters for a The One Ring roleplaying game that Chauncey's going to GM for us. Earlier this week, Rea got to go to Grandma's house an extra time for an adventure. She was signed up to take her official ...

On Monday we went to Sara's 7th grade orientation for her new Junior high School. She is very excited to do acting and art classes.  Alison and Mike went to meet with the cabinet guy on Tuesday so that we could finalize our cabinet choices for the new kitchen.  On Wednesday Sara went to a play rehearsal for her part in Seussical the Musical. This week during outside time all of the kids who participate in outside time and Mike have been playing a LARP game. We go around the nearby Church and we each have our own characters: Michael is a cyborg named Stinky Pete who shoots rockets and has the ability to charge up with batteries. Timmy is a son of a wind God who uses wind Magic. Timmy also has a dragon who is a water dragon. Gideon is an apprentice to the god of wizards and he has a katana which was broken. Elsa is a pink ice dragon named Rapunzel who also has beautiful golden hair. Rocket is an assassin dog named Shadow who can use lightning and fire magic. We tend to go on epi...

Apparently we missed some blog posts recently.  Christmas went well. All the kids enjoyed their presents. We made egg rolls and had Mike's parents over for dinner. The only complaint that anyone has was that we didn't have a white Christmas For the 12 days of Christmas this year we did the following: Day 1: the Tuesday after Christmas we went to the Gateway Lights On! - we actually went to Gallivan Plaza first accidentally. It was really pretty, but after realizing we were in the wrong place we took the train to the Gateway and saw the lights there. We had Panda Express, played in fountain (the kids thought the risk of getting wet was worth it (and no one actually got wet anyway))  One of Mike's Christmas present was a new faucet for our kitchen sink because Mike has hated the faucet we have ever since we moved in. Before going to the light show Mike installed the new faucet and ever since then has been appreciating it every time he turns on the faucet in the kitchen. Day 2...

Last Sunday we had a game day with The Wilsons. We played the Goose of Grillner Grove , a rules light RPG where you try and dissuade a newcomer in your town from messing with a dangerous and troublemaking goose that has been terrorizing the place for 20 years. It was fun. We also played half a game of Mike's RPG and had a fun time with that too. The kids played with the Waters family kids multiple times this week. We are really glad that they moved in right next to us since they seem to be really fun for our kids, and Alison and Mike also enjoy spending time together with the parents as well. One thing that Timmy wanted to add to the blog is that they have a chameleon, and that Timmy was able to get some of its skin and look at it in a microscope. This week Gideon earned a goal-day party when he read through the half way point in one of his reading workbooks. He had us go to ride the ponies at thanksgiving point and then make pizza for dinner with fruit pizza for dessert. It was fu...

This week we have had more sickness. Alison, Boo, Giddy, Sara, and Rea have all caught the sickness, so it is just lingering forever. The symptoms don't match covid, so we think it is just the standard midwinter sickness that we get every year. We took Gideon to get his feet looked at because he has never liked shoes, and Alison noticed that his toes were bumping up close to each other. The doctor took an X-Ray, and said that he wanted an MRI done as well. The one foot has an extra bit of bone in it, and it is possible that he will need surgery to correct them. He will definitely need surgery when his growth plates close as well. While we were on a walk, the kids decided that they wanted a piece of furniture that was on the side of the road. Mike told them that we couldn't possibly get it on the way out, and that we would have to talk to the owner of the house on the way back to see if they were getting rid of it, or if they were just storing it there. The piece of furniture wa...

We had a barbecue on memorial day, and had the Plastows and Rogers over to visit us. We played Mike's new RPG, and the kids joined in as well. It went well. We also ate lots of desserts and had a watermelon as well. Amy found a doll house and offered it to our kids earlier on in the week. They have been enjoying the doll house a lot. Baby even tried to climb into it herself. On Thursday Mike took a half day off and went to the bishops storehouse and cleaned up the floors, stocked the shelves, and washed food bins. On Friday it was 100 degrees and Alison took the kids to wild flower park. They managed to have fun for hours despite the heat. The moms mostly stayed in the shade. At the park one kid brought a doll to hand down to Elizabeth, which Elizabeth liked a lot, but she decided that it needed hair, so she found orange chalk, gave it hair and then proudly told Alison that the doll had hair. Saturday we did our errands and then invited the Plastow kids over to play.  Logan showed ...

Oops, we forgot to write last week, so here's two weeks' worth of notes: Last week we played the board game Near and Far with the kids for the first time. It's a board game with a bit of an RPG flavor, so we picked it when Timmy wanted an RPG and the girls wanted a board game. It was fairly fun, although Timmy wanted a real  RPG and wasn't totally satisfied. Timmy got masking tape tangled in his hair and decided to cut it out instead of asking for help. He ended up getting a haircut, so it's now chin length. Mike did a good job; it looks nice and he still feels like it's long. Every kid has to cut their own hair at least once; at least Timmy's was more fixable than Sara's. There was a snowstorm last week; Alison offered the kids the day off school if they spent it outside in the snow. They had a good time. Gideon helped shovel Grandma and Grandpa's driveway after the storm (Mike invited the kids to go along, and he was the only one who accepted). The...

This week Rea, Sara, and Timmy had horse-camp, where they learned how to ride horses. Timmy told me that he rode a blue roan, Sara said she learned how to ride all by herself, and Rea said she didn't want to talk about it. Since it was a long drive, Alison, Gideon, and Elizabeth all hung out at a nearby park during the lessons. Gideon liked the park and loved eating apples and nuts and pepperoni, and playing. When I asked Elizabeth what she liked about the park, she just signed "more water", and handed me a water bottle. We celebrated Elizabeth's first birthday, and Timmy's 6th this week. Elizabeth loved three dollies that the Browns got for her, and Timmy loved all of his presents a lot, though we have already had to repair his treasure chest. One night the Dalyias invited us over to pick their cherry tree. The tree was insanely huge (30ish feet tall), so we also brought over our pole chainsaw and hacked at it from the roof. Some branches were too high to reach e...

Utah went to "Orange" social distancing this week. After studying and pondering the directives for DAYS (because they were so contradictory), we finally figured them out: "Stay home, unless you want to spend money, in which case, try to stay 6 feet apart, but go ahead." Since we have literally engineered our life so that none of the things that bring us joy involve spending money, we can either just stay home forever (Alison isn't anticipating getting out of orange before next Christmas), change the way we live, or stretch the guidelines a bit. We've started socializing with one other family outdoors, reminding the kids to stay 6 feet apart. They try hard :). And once every week or two we'll get together with another family. However, Alison's best friend's mom just died, so we have been babysitting her kids several times this week; we feel that's far more important than the guidelines.  The kids have lost a lot of social skills in two months ...

The weather has been really nice, so we went hiking some more this week. We gathered more plants for the food forest, and played that we were from redwall We now have lots of currants, some serviceberries, black raspberries, a gooseberry bush, strawberries, mint, a plum tree, and some Oregon grape. We want cherry trees, apples, raspberries probably more plums, and perhaps a peach tree and some asparagus before we are all the way done. The garden is finally starting to sprout. We have tons of pea plants, and some lettuces to show for our work so far. We have also been burning all of the trees we cut down and dug up from our yard. The kids really wish we had marshmallows. Mike's next school semester started, and it has mostly been going well. Alison has been preparing to teach a bunch of people about how to get along with their kids. Her class starts on Monday. She has nearly 100 people signed up so far -that is pretty exciting. We also have been recently playing a lot of...

This last week the weather was nice, so we played outside a lot of the time. As we were preparing to plant our garden in the backyard, we ordered some fruit bushes. Alison had read about building a permaculture food forest, and this seemed like a good way to start that. We had ordered a gooseberry bush, two Serviceberry bushes, and also a pair of black raspberry bushes from a nursery in the east. The bushes all arrived on Friday, so Mike went outside and planted them and watered them heavily. We hope that they produce lots of berries for us to eat in the future. Of all of the seeds we planted a few weeks ago, very few of them have begun sprouting, so we went and replanted the whole entire area yesterday. We have also been burning a lot of wood that we got by ripping out all of the trees of heaven which were growing in our backyard. The fires have been crazy, according to Rea. Alison also went on a massive food shopping trip on Saturday so that we could get all of the stuff that w...

Rea scheduled a party this week with some local kids. The Beuses ere going to come but they couldn't because they got sick, however the Dalyias were able to make it. Rea made a lemon cake for the party, which turned out pretty good. They also put on a play: Cinderella. Everyone got a part, and they had a fun time putting on the play. Sara was particularly silly - she was Cinderella, but she played that she was scared of the fairy godmother. Mike finished his game of Twilight Imperium at work on Friday. He won despite two of the other three players teaming up against him. It is good that they were not able to stop him because this upcoming week Mike's office building is changing to an office in Draper (right next to 1800Contacts actually). Friday we made tempura for our date night. It ended up pretty good. Mike determined that with the oil at a really high temperature the tempura ended up more crispy than is usual (which was good.) This weekend Mike tried to fix the fridge...

This week Mike called and asked a local repair shop how much it would cost to fix his phone. The price that they quoted was more than the price to buy a new phone, so he just ordered the parts, and planned on fixing it himself. All the parts have arrived, but no matter how many screwdrivers he bought he couldn't find one the right size to open the phone up. So, now he has the parts, but can't actually fix the phone yet. He has another screwdriver on the way that will hopefully work this time. We sold our chickens on Monday to an old guy. We decided that finding chicken sitters for the trip to Italy would be too hard, and since we already are leaving the goats at the stud, we will be able to get by without any pet sitters as long as we release (or eat) the grasshoppers before we go. Speaking of the grasshoppers: we have about four right now in the aquarium. The kids haven't decided to eat them yet, so we are just taking care of them and feeding and watering them regularl...

Gideon became a meerkat this week. He can crawl around, stand up on his two legs (without any support), and then squat back down to crawling all by himself. He seems to be closer to walking than he was before, and his balance is getting much better. This week Sara, Rea, and Timmy all drew all over their faces. It took quite a lot of scrubbing to get it all off. Perhaps this will be a learning experience for them. They also carved some pumpkins. We are not sure what they were supposed to look like, but they are pretty scary. On Thursday Rea invited some friends over for a Halloween party. It was supposed to be a costume party, but no-one showed up in costumes since they all cam straight from school. They cut corn tortillas in the shape of pumpkins and coated them with orange oil, and toasted them into chips. Rea was very excited about this recipe. Other than that they mostly played outside. It was Alison's type of party. Alison and Mike have been dreaming of making an onsen ...

This week I spent a lot of time working on my online Dancing Robots game. I am currently trying to get it online, but I have not yet been able to get a production worthy server for it (Serving it from a development environment is way easier than serving it from a production worthy server). I will keep you all up to date on it. I had the Fourth of July off for Independence Day. In the morning we went down to Dimple Dell and hiked around looking for mushrooms. We got a bunch of mushrooms including four edible puffball mushrooms. We also found some golf balls (which were way more popular than the mushrooms with the girls). In the evening we had a barbecue, which Sheila, Scott, and Max came over to. We had hamburgers and bratwurst. We made home made buns, and had freshly picked sauteed mushrooms over them. We also had watermelon. It was fun. In the evening we lit off some small fireworks. Running perpendicular to the bench, and about a half a mile away from our house stands a hil...