Parentheticals

The Fourth of July went well. The Plastows came to our house for a barbecue, and Amy brought an awesome collection of fireworks from Costco (Rea really hopes we can find the ones called "goddess fountains" next year). It didn't have Pop-Its or sparklers or tanks, so we bought those. We didn't find any Bestest Crackering Ballz this year, though. It rained a tiny bit and then was very windy, which is not great for fireworks in a drought, but we survived and didn't even light anything on fire. We had a lot of fun. No-one got hurt, and we got to bed at a reasonable hour. Timmy and Gideon both ordered more Bakugan on the internet. Both packages arrived on Saturday, and they have been enjoying them a lot. For those that don't know, Bakugan are ball shaped toys that transform using magnets and springs to become monsters and robots. They are pretty cool. Mike is getting closer and closer to the end of this semester of grad school. He only has one assignment left from ...

Good grief! Apparently we are terrible at remembering to make blog posts. We will now try to remember the last two weeks... We gave up trying to hunt morels. They just don't seem to be out there this year. We made more shoes for Gideon two weeks ago as well - that is a huge process. Alison's mom came over two weeks ago, and they all went to gardner village and had a fairy party. Also, we gathered ingredients for, and began construction on a "tree house"for the kids. It also rained a ton this last week, so construction has been slow. We read and finished "the last unicorn". The kids really enjoyed it. We ordered another bunch of parts from Haba in order to enter their kids game design contest. Timmy and Dad designed a game that we are considering entering into the contest. It is currently about stealing a magic lamp from a cave full of monsters. On this last Friday we went to see Matilda, which was pretty fun, but was also one of those Dahl st...

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...

The pool is closing soon, so this week Alison and the kids went to it a lot of times. They even brought Marissa over to the pool a few times. As Mike is still a financial clerk in the ward, he did his audit this week. It took almost two hours, and went very smoothly. We found a clerical error, and corrected it on the spot, but otherwise it was uneventful. On Wednesday Mike had his birthday dinner. We had curry and rice with Paratha bread. It was to the core. Mike ate for lunch on Thursday and Friday because well spiced food isn't the kids favorite thing in the universe. This week Alison has also been planning for the kids upcoming school year. With the kids being part of My Tech High this year, she has to write up plans for which classes they will take, and then figure out how to spend the funds that they are giving us. Alison likes planning like this, so it has been fun for her. Mike also found out this week that his game's publication date has been pushed back to Octo...

This was a full week. All week Mike has been working on a surprise expansion for The Perfect Moment. Jason Tagmire - Mike's publisher - asked him to prepare an expansion as a stretch goal for the kickstarter campaign. It has been fun so far to come up with some new abilities as it has been a while since the game has changed. Rea started horseback riding lessons this week. She has four lessons, every Monday night from 6 to 7pm. She is very, very excited and she had a wonderful time. She learned to signal the horse to walk and to stop and practiced posting and trotted a few steps. She is very proud of herself. She was also eager to tell everyone about how one of the older girls in her class got bucked off a horse! That was a little scary, but Rea still loves riding. Wednesday was the 4th of July, so we went to the pool park and picked some chokecherries. They were not as ripe as they could have been, but we still got a ton of ones that were fairly ripe. Mike and Rea were the...