Nages, nages, petit poisson

Alison wrote a post last week and then asked Mike to add images to it, however, Mike completely forgot to do that so this post is now a two-week post. Here is the post from last week:

We had one more week of vacation with Andy and Katie, which was great, and then this week we're trying to get back to a normal schedule. 

It wasn't quite normal, because Réa was at FSY this week. She had a wonderful time! She went with her friends Emma and Sara Waters to Snow College. Her favorite part was the classes; they had seminary teachers from all over Utah come and teach, and you got to choose which class to go to each hour. We all missed her a lot, but we're glad it was so great. 

Our neighbor girls who we've been taking to the park all summer started a class in the mornings, so it's just us now. This was the last week of school lunches, too; summer is winding down! :( Alison is ALMOST ready for the new school year, lol.

We got a dumpster Wednesday and Mike and the boys worked super hard going through the garage and throwing away all the old construction stuff and anything else we don't need. We filled the whole dumpster ourselves. Then they put up shelves along the garage wall and got everything up on them, so now we can park in the garage AND have a schoolroom out there. Alison still wants to redo the school side before August 17th (the first day of school), but the garage side looks amazing! 

Most exciting, Elsa learned to swim this week! All on her own, she decided to take off her puddle jumper life jacket, put her face in the water, and swim! It's amazing! She learned on Thursday, and on Saturday we celebrated by taking pizza to the pool so she could show Réa and Mike. We are all so proud of her.

On Sunday of last week Timmy got sick. He has been coughing ever since, so we aren't sure exactly what it is but it seems like it's possibly covid. He is not very good at resting so it just keeps going on (it might have just gone on anyway if it was covid)

On Monday Rea went to the orthodontist and was told that everything was fine, so things are going well there.

We also celebrated Mike's birthday this week. He had a hard time coming up with presents, but we were able to get some for him eventually. We didn't have his birthday meal until Saturday because Wednesday night was really busy.

On Saturday we all went to see a play at the off Broadway theater: Hamlet's Son. The play is a parody of Hamlet. They took the story from Hamlet and the songs from Hamilton and mash them together. It is one of our favorite plays that the off Broadway theater has put on. 

They are still showing it for multiple weeks, and we plan on going back to see it a second time, so if any of you feel like seeing it, tell us and perhaps we could go see it together assuming that our schedules line up.

When we went into the play Rea and Sara were invited to try out for the November production that they are putting on - the Frightmare Before Christmas. They played in it last time that it was put on, and they are apparently wanted back again.

With Grandma and Grandpa Sheila and Mike moving south they returned a lot of our food storage which they have been storing for us, so we now have all of our 5 gallon buckets back. This prompted us to build the front room couch that Alison had been wanting Mike to build ever since we moved back into the house.

We have a majority of the woodwork done and we have ordered the upholstery foam and we also have the vinyl, so we intend to put it all together once the upholstery foam comes. It will be very long, should be waterproof, will be built with a very tall back so that Alison can be comfortable sitting on it, and will hold 29 5 gallon buckets underneath it as well as 145 number 10 cans in it.

After that line was written originally Mike started trying to figure out ways to fit more number 10 cans, so the original number was lower than that

A funny story about the vinyl that we're putting on the outside of the couch: the last time that we built a bench using 5 gallon buckets in our front room we used Marine vinyl to wrap the seat of the bench so that it would be waterproof. That worked fairly well so we wanted to do it again, however, while we were working on rebuilding the house we pulled off that vinyl roofing material from the top of the house and Mike decided to save a giant roll of it because it looked like it would be so good for building another bench.

Now that we are actually ready to build it, and we decided to build it as a couch, it is sort of surprising but it seems like we have enough material to build the entire thing (bench seat as well as couch back), so Mike went overboard in terms of saving that stuff because he saved way more than he actually needed to build a single bench.

After the couch is built the next plan is to build a second level above the first level, so we'll have a double decker couch. I guess that's not technically true - the upper part will be more like a loft than an actual couch, but it will be interesting no matter how it ends up. 

Since Mike already had the woodworking tools out he also built some shelves for our hallway so that the kids can hold all of their personal toiletries in an easy to access place.