Parentheticals

This week Alison worked hard on preparing for the kid's upcoming year of school. She has planned a lot, and hopefully things will go smoothly because of that. On Wednesday Mike started his next semester of his Master's program. Hopefully it is smooth sailing now that Orsega is out of the way. He is certainly less nervous about this semester than last one. Also on Wednesday we went to the Brown's house and mowed the lawn. Everyone went over there, and half of us earned money from doing some part of the work. The other half picked weeds and cleaned up leaves to earn ice cream. While we were there, we picked up Grandpa Mike's gold panning pans. Mike has been thinking that that would be a good thing to do during weeks where there is nothing to forage, and Grandpa Mike is letting us borrow them to see if we like it. We were thinking of going this weekend, but that turned out to be a bust. What can you do? On Friday Alison and Mike went to a play which the OBT put on at Drap...

 This week the weather was really good, and we spent a lot of time in the yard enjoying it. Mike and the kids finished up building the "stump fort" - adding windows and a ladder up to the top. Mike also cleaned up the yard, and started planning what things were going where in the garden. We went to strawberry hill and took 7 strawberry plants to transplant in our yard. As of yet they are all still looking pretty good. We transplanted them under ideal conditions: a rainy, cool day, and we took the entire root ball of each one, so hopefully they survive well. The kids have been playing a lot with Aiden (the boy that lives one house to the south of us), and have been flooding the yard and making mud balls a lot. Mike doesn't love the mud that much, but the kids love it so much that we need to come up with some solution to the disagreement. Perhaps mike will offer the back area of the yard to them as long as they treat the part that is grass with more care. With the lingering...

 This week we had some sickness. Sunday night almost everyone threw up - we think it was too much junk food right before bed, because no one felt at all sick otherwise. Oops! Mike's homemade donuts might have to be eaten less enthusiastically in the future. Since Wednesday, we have a tiny bit of a cold going around the family. Baby Elizabeth is the only one with significant symptoms - mostly a runny nose, but she got stuffy enough at night to not sleep for several nights. Everyone else just gets really tired (and sometimes grumpy) for a day or so. It's not the worst cold ever, but it's annoying.  We stayed home from Nature Group and Wildflower Park on Friday so that we didn't spread the cold far and wide, but Mike and the kids built a treehouse this week, so they played in that instead! We have a huge waist-high stump at the front corner of the backyard, and Rea requested half-walls on the street and neighbor sides of it, with windows in them. The walls are up; the wind...

On Monday we celebrated Memorial day with Mike's family, having a picnic at the park and playing with the cousins. The kids all had a fun time together while the adults talked. The kids then all wandered too far away, so we had to break up the conversation to discover where they all had gone off to. Grandpa Mike helped them catch a little garter snake, and they all loved holding it. After that, we worked some more on the fort, and also prepared to swap all of the winter clothes with summer clothes. The girls needed new clothing, but aunt Amy had supplied enough boy clothes for Timmy and Gideon that we didn't need to buy them anything. The day was blessedly free of rain - We like rain normally, but picnics in the rain is another thing altogether. Overall this week was pretty rain free, so we got more time outside, however the kids still fought a lot, so perhaps we have to break the habit from them. Tuesday Alison and the kids went to Wheeler farm. The kids met up with some...

On Tuesday of last week we had Nature group, which was cancelled due to rain. It was raining all week, which made it hard to work on the tree house. Wednesday was Rea's date night. It was raining so we read the hobbit, had a fire, and then we ate currant pie (we still have some frozen currants that we just found in the freezer.) On Thursday we bought and wrapped presents for Alison's birthday. The kids wrapped all of their presents by themselves. Friday was Alison's birthday. Mike worked from home, and Grandma Sheila and Grandpa Mike came over and dropped off a care package. It included easy to make food for when the baby is born, which was a very nice thought. After Mike quit working we had Alison's birthday party, brownies, and then we went to bed. On Saturday first thing in the morning we had a dance party, and then after that since it was the first time in a week that it wasn't raining we worked on the tree house and Grandma Sheila came over to visit us....

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...