Parentheticals

Probably Tuesday, but perhaps Wednesday Mike was trying to encourage all of the kids to clean up so he began arbitrarily awarding out points using a point system which he called "Chucky Bucks." (Mike's plan was to let them spend the points to be thrown into the air, but they wanted to spend them on random things). The kids liked them so much that by the end of the night they had earned many Chucky bucks. Mike printed out the Chucky box as physical objects. here is an image of a Chucky buck in case you want to print them for your own children. The picture of the person on the Chucky buck is a character known in our family as old Uncle Andrew. he is the subject of many stories that Mike tells. a normal old Uncle Andrew's story involves old Uncle Andrew doing something weird in order to try to get donuts. Usually he gets in trouble and probably gets the narrator in trouble as well. It is a fun story for all of the family. On Friday we went to the ward Christmas party, wh...

This week we were in quarantine since we went to California last week. We will have one more week of quarantine till we are done. Alison still says that it was totally worth it, even if quarantine is hard. Elizabeth is having her first major language acquisition explosion. Every day she says two or three more words or phrases that she has never said before. It is really fun. On the other hand, She seems to be cutting more teeth, so two days out of the week she didn't sleep all night. That was pretty bad. Mike has finished his finals, and gotten his grades for his first semester of his master's program. He is also approaching finals in the class that he is teaching. His grades are As, so even with his annoying teacher he is still doing well (he has one teacher that likes to try and trick people into answering wrong on quizzes and things, and that makes it more difficult than necessary. He really likes his other teacher, however). We bought Christmas gifts this week. It was a bit...

This last week we went to California for the Poulson family Thanksgiving trip. Before the trip we quarantined ourselves for two weeks, during the trip we stayed away from anyone that was not in our group, and always wore masks when we were near people not in our group, and after the trip we plan on quarantining for an additional two weeks. With this minimum level of contact we didn't get sick at all during the trip (which is actually a first for our group, since usually someone gets sick during Thanksgiving), and we hope to prevent anyone from getting sick after the trip as well. There were far fewer people out there than usual, but the weather and beach was still fun. We played in the sand, and boogie boarded. We dug a giant pit, and built sand castles, and raked zen gardens. This year the three oldest girls (Rea, Sara, and Ellie) got along incredibly well, and Timmy, Kendrick, and William also got along very well (They played Pokemon practically the whole time), and Gideon and Æl...

We spent this week (and will spend the next) in self-quarantine before going to California for Thanksgiving. It's been challenging at times! But we also had some fun. Monday we woke up to snow! One day a week our school time is devoted to handicrafts and tales - normally we embroider or draw while I read aloud from King Arthur, Tales from the Odyssey, and whatever else we're reading. With the beautiful snow, I decided that snowcrafting was certainly a handicraft, so we headed outside. The boys and I built a snow fort, and the girls made a snow garden. It was a lot of fun! When we were tired, we came in and drank hot chocolate while I read aloud. It was awesome.  In the afternoon, we tried to do our Crowned with Virtue meetings over zoom. It didn't work so well. Only one of the two other girls got on, and Rea and Sara started by being super silly and ended by fighting. Oh, well. Tuesday we finished up our unit on medieval Japan. We must have done something else, but no one r...

This week baby Elizabeth slept better than she ever has before. She only woke up Michael two times during his core sleeps, and she was mostly happy for Alison on most of the nights as well. She is also sometimes eating meals with us like a toddler usually does, which is to say that she will pick one thing that she wants and eat a lot of it. This is significantly better eating than she usually does. Early this week we turned half of the Halloween candy that we collected from the children into Halloween candy cookies. We have approximately three dozen Halloween candy cookies frozen as balls and our freezer now. The weather has been good (up until today), so we have been playing outside a lot Mike's schooling is continuing to go well. He currently has A's in both of his classes. Mike's teaching is also going well, and he received some of the best ratings possible this last semester. He is also getting good ratings at work, and getting used to the newly reorganized team that he...

This past week we had Grandma Julie come over to live with us. she helped us to continue to get our house closer to being unpacked. The girls' closet is organized and working well, thanks to her, as well as the winter gear closet and the kitchen. It was wonderful having her! She stayed Sunday-Thursday, and we miss her a lot. We're glad that we'll be seeing her soon at Thanksgiving. Alison discovered that the delivery service for ugly fruits and vegetables (Misfit Market) is now available in Utah, so we signed up for it and got our first crate of ugly fruits and vegetables on Tuesday. The fruit and vegetables are organic and delicious, even if they are not sellable for various reasons. We asked the kids to contribute to this post, but only Gideon and Timmy wanted to. Gideon was very happy that they could make a house and play a game. He was a kid in the game and his mom and dad died and so he built a house by himself and then fire flooded it. And then he had to live in Timmy...

On Monday we had a guy from a window place come over to give us an estimate for replacing all the old windows. It was over 10k and Mike had already scheduled another meeting with another company, so we didn't accept it at that time. By Tuesday we had received offers from 7 people to buy our house. They went from 1k under the asking price to 15k above it with most in the 5-10k above range.  The one that offered 15k over also sent a letter and seemed pretty excited to buy the place, so we went with him. However, he had an inspection on Wednesday, and the inspector told him that some weeds were growing in the crawlspace, and it freaked him out so much that he backed out of the deal.  Mike went down there to fix the problem that night, and with the help of the teenage Dalyai boy, had all the tree roots removed in two hours. There has never been normal weeds growing in our crawlspace, however those trees of heaven aggressively sucker, and they constantly attempt to colonize the cra...