Parentheticals

Apparently we forgot to post this last week, even though we started writing it. On Monday (last week) Alison and the kids met up with Katrina and her kids (their friends who moved to southern Utah). They had a fun time. Friday Alison and the kids went to nature group and it was raining and snowing and quite cold and they were all very sad so they came home early. On Friday night the Plastow kids came over and had a sleepover with our kids. They are all good friends, so they enjoyed sitting up all hours of the night and talking about things. Baby Elizabeth slept down with them and she only woke up once during the night, so she seems to be getting much better at sleeping through the night even under unusual circumstances. Saturday Mike and Sarah went out to gather raspberry canes to transplant into our yard. They were located in a park in Sandy on the top of a wooded hill. We ended up digging up a total of seven plants and we planted them in our backyard beside the strawberries. Hopefull...

 This week we did all of our Holy Week traditions. Sunday we played the Palm Sunday triumphal entry game, where Mike is a donkey and the kids have to race to strew blankets in his path. Then we read about the triumphal entry. On Monday we played up Clean Up Your Own Backyard and talked about Jesus cleansing the temple. Tuesday we watched The Prince of Egypt and discussed the source of the Passover traditions. Wednesday we had our modified Passover meal. This year we made it a bit longer because Rea wanted to include the afikomen and waiting for Elijah. It went pretty smoothly. Thursday Easter walk in the canyon with fire and marshmallows. This is a new tradition to commemorate the Garden of Gethsemane, and it seems we finally have a winner! Alison has tried a lot of things that haven't worked, but everyone loved going up the canyon, and we built a fire and talked about Jesus' suffering and sang "The Miracle" before roasting marshmallows. The kids didn't want to le...

 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...

 We didn't actually write about our family Salt Con last week! We had too much fun, I guess :). So last Thursday we woke up and packed up the car. The kids were so eager to go, they pushed and prodded us out the door - they were in the car buckled up half an hour before we were ready to leave, which was half an hour before we supposed to leave. We were aiming to get to Crystal Hot Springs near Brigham City at noon, when they open, but we ended up getting there at 11:30. We went to a nearby park to eat a picnic lunch, and then we went back to the hot springs. They were beautiful rock pool with different temperatures of water. We deliberately picked one of the least-busy days and times, and there were plenty of people but not so many that we couldn't stay socially distanced. Mike and Alison enjoyed soaking in the hot water; the kids went back and forth between soaking and playing in the traditional swimming pool. Even Elizabeth ended up liking the water by the end! We had planned...

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...

Monday we had our Crowned with Virtue activity at our house with the girls' friend Bailey. This month we're learning about a woman named Irina Sedlar, who smuggled Jewish children out of Nazi territory. We had never heard of her, so it was interesting to learn about her. The program suggested having the kids figure out codes or do a treasure hunt, so Alison bought an escape room from Teachers Pay Teachers, and the three girls spent over an hour happily working their way through the puzzles to save the baby doll. Tuesday Sara wanted Broccoli Cheese Soup for dinner, and Mike made it while Alison napped. We had some bunches of parsley and he threw them in. It made the soup vibrantly green, but the kids were not a big fan of the flavor addition. It all got eaten eventually. We had a lot of nice weather this week and Timmy became a big fan of riding his bike around the block. He fell several times, but he kept going, and he's had a lot of fun. Lots of times other people would go...