Parentheticals

We missed writing last week apparently so, last week we did Halloween and probably did some other stuff too but I don't remember any of it. Elsa walked pretty good and kept up with us so we didn't have to split the group. Alison wanted Mike to stay home because he was feeling a little bit sick however since the group stay together we were okay. Sara performed the Thriller with her class at the elementary school Halloween party. She's been practicing very hard, and she did a fabulous job. Alison and the younger kids went to watch her (Rea was at her coop and Mike was at a service project at the cannery). We were very impressed! This week we celebrated Gideon's birthday. Gideon just turned eight, and we are very excited about that. Gideon got some cool Squirtles and other toys. Rea sewed him an amazing Squirtle plushy; Elsa absolutely loves it and carries it around and has it do school with her. Gideon is mostly very nice about this. He also got a stuffed frog with a Chri...

It still feels like we're just getting back into the swing of things, even though we have been home for weeks now. We're restarting all the kids' social activities: nature groups (three a week!), ballet class from a friend's older sister, library trips, etc. And of course getting the basics of school happening. January is always an exciting time in our homeschool. Every year, we retell the Montessori Five Great Lessons: The Story of the Coming of the Universe, The Story of the Coming of Life, The Story of the Coming of Humans, The Story of Communication in Signs, and The Story of Numbers. The goal is to put all learning into context and make it exciting! We did the first Great Lesson this week, which covers the Big Bang up to the Earth being covered with water. The big hit of this one is always the volcano, which did not explode in a very satisfactory way this year. Alison wants to remember to use a disposable water bottle for the reaction chamber next year. Rea mad...

On Monday, Alison opened up the new Montessori room for the kids. It was a big hit. They have had no trouble choosing work to occupy themselves for the entire 3 hour work cycle every day and usually wish it were open longer. It was set up perfectly for Sara and Timmy, but Rea's part needed some work. Her school is much more book focused; Alison has a list of classics for her to read and do something with. This week she read The Secret Garden, then looked up the flowers mentioned in it and drew pictures of them and labeled them with their Latin names. She also has a microscope and some science and history work to do (along with the math we do as a family first thing), so we decided Elementary needed its own set of shelves. But it was still a great start. Also on Monday, in the middle of the day, Mike got a message from Google Flights (which will watch airplane ticket prices for you and notify you when the change) saying that we could get to Italy from Utah and back for $400 each. ...

We asked the kids to dictate some of the blog post: Timmy loved playing with dad this week. He also liked playing with a teapot and plates. Timmy and Sara like the snow that we got. Timmy liked getting doughnuts from Grandma Sheila Sara loved seeing Grandma and Grandpa. (Except Grandpa wasn't there.) Sara liked going sledding and playing with Grandma and Petra. Gideon, don't touch our buttons! Gideon loves everything, especially peas. And music. Rea's favorite thing this week was reading "Pollyanna" for the first time. Also, on Sunday she made tiny snowmen and pretended to be a Tyrannosaurus and ate them! They didn't have noses or eyes or mouths. Rea was also super excited for her Baptism Preview last Sunday. Rea will be baptized on November 3rd at 10am, for those who like to plan ahead :-). Mike has completed his second week of teaching CS 101 at BYU-Idaho. He has been having a fun time so far. He has also bought tickets to Salt Con (a...

Gideon has been sleeping at night better, but not taking good naps. Alison needs to figure out a different time to exercise if he's going to only sleep for 20 minutes at a time during the day. Timmy got a robot car from the DI and is very happy about it. He has not been very obedient this week, although usually when we stand up to implement consequences he suddenly obeys, while wailing. But still sometimes not, and then he goes to bed and screams. Sara has been incredibly helpful and obedient this week. Apparently there's a balance, because she's just leaving a year of a not-very-helpful phase, and now Timmy's starting. But now we have two very helpful kids to run errands and clean up, which is amazing. Rea is growing up. She really enjoys being with friends and is figuring out social things. She is very responsible. She also has amazing biking skills. It rained a ridiculous amount this week. In about 10 years in Utah, we've never seen rain like this. It...

Last Monday we had family night. Sara gave the lesson, and then we went out and hunted for morels. The soil temperature was right, however there hadn't been any rain, so we weren't expecting any mushrooms. We had fun, however we didn't find anything. Tuesday Mike went to the Layton Board Game Design Guild meeting and presented some games to a guy who works for Mayday Games. Mike doesn't think that any of them have a large chance of success, but it was useful because he learned more about the current direction that Mayday Games is going, so he can tailor a game for their company. On Thursday Mike had a goal day party for finishing up reading the Book of Mormon with all of the footnotes. He had pasta and pie. The kids were really excited that he had finished his goal, and kept wishing him a "happy goalday!" On Friday Alison and Mike went to a play. The play had an interesting moral dilemma in the first half, and then during the second half of the play ever...

This week we created charts for the kids to mark off what they do every day. They are things that are part of the daily routine anyway, but don't happen every single day (math practice, brushing their own hair, scrubbing some part of the house, etc). We will still do these things most days, but now the kids have the option of marking it on their charts when they do them. At the end of the week, each mark on the chart is worth 10 cents. Rea is very motivated by marking things off and was pushing us to do more things every day just to get marks on her chart. Sara and Timmy care less about filling out the chart but are excited by the opportunity to earn money; both are saving up for cool Lego kits. We are just starting this system, so we will see how it works. (The idea is from the "Family Economic System" by Richard and Linda Eyre, to give due credit.) Our Montessori time went very well this week. In January, the girls worked on reading aloud every day as part of a challe...

On Martin Luther King Jr Day we were invited over to Scott and Sheila's house to visit with them. Max and Olivia really wanted to play Axis and Allies, and so Mike set it up to play with them. Scott called the game after a few hours, and since Timmy had abandoned Moscow and Olivia had taken it over, the Axis won. Max was very unhappy about that. Mike took the opportunity to discuss an idea that he has had with Sheila. He has decided to make a children's book entitled "Brave Lala", and he asked her if she wanted to do some illustrations for it. She agreed to give it a try. We are looking forward to seeing what her drawings look like. In addition, Alison and Mike have been reading through "In Which a Prince Burns Things" - A very rough draft novel that Mike wrote in 2011. We are considering trying to clean it up to get it published. It has quite a few funny parts, but also needs a lot of work. It will be a fun change of pace from editing rules docs all the...

In January we switched over to late church. Late church is not my favorite thing, it feels like the whole day is used up getting ready for church. Alison doesn't love it either, but at least we don't have to have two lunches. The kids seem to be adjusting OK. This week Gideon started sleeping all night long. It is a much appreciated development. He still has rough nights, and he still doesn't always sleep all night, but he does it a decent amount of the time. He is almost two and a half months old. This might be the youngest that any of our kids have slept through the night, but we aren't sure. Alison and the kids have been really regular about doing Montessori time; they've done several hours every morning this week. They are really enjoying it and learning a lot. Sara can count much better than Alison expected and is moving quickly through the Montessori math materials; it's time to start the Golden Beads. We are also doing a read aloud challenge, where bo...

This week two of my games were announced to be ION Award finalists. Last year I had two finalists as well, however neither of them went on to win the competition. Perhaps this year I will have better luck. In order to prepare for the presentation of my games, I am hosting the first ever  ION Award finalist showcase . I know one of the other finalists personally (he comes to our design meetup), and I have met an other a few times, so I got them to agree to presenting their games to the public as a practice. Anyone is invited, so if you are interested we would love to hear your feedback about our presentations. I have also been really enjoying preparing for SaltCon proper. I always love participating in the math trade, and enjoy planning how I am going to be spending my time during the convention. This year the Sandy Board Game Design meetup group is going to be meeting at SaltCon to do some play-testing, and I am also presenting a game at prototype alley. Timmy started "readi...

When we asked the kids what we should write about today, Rea immediately wanted to let you know that we LOVE snow. It has snowed so much this year, and it's snowing again as we compose this blog post. We have really enjoyed it. (Except when Mike's car got stuck. But other than that, it's been awesome.) It seems like we got about 5 inches this time through, and it was very wet snow. Perhaps we will make another snowman. Timmy is growing up into such a big boy. He's in the midst of a language explosion; he adds words almost every day and can really communicate lots of ideas. Sometimes he still has that air of, "I'll just keep repeating this to those stupid big people until they figure it out," but we usually do figure it out in the end. He is also doing really well with potty training. He went at least one solid day with no accidents last week. And he's started the funny phase where he says "no" to everything, even things he really wants. T...

Timmy continues adding words to his repetoire each day and is making great strides in potty training. On numerous occasions, he has told us he needs to use the potty, gotten there with dry pants, and tinkled or pooped in the potty. However, he has gotten addicted to our current reward system (watching a movie clip on a parent's phone while sitting on the potty) and sometimes likes to sit on the potty every five minutes so he can see more movies. (He prefers movies of horses with background music; the girls want songs from the My Little Pony TV show.) We are very excited about his progress. Sara has come up with a fun new descriptive phrase construction: when she's wrapped up in her new snowsuit, she is "warmer than a warmit" and if she goes outside without it she is "colder than a coldit" and so on. We have fun coming up with "-er than a -it" and laugh a lot. Rea is making excellent progress on learning subtraction. This week they were counting...

Since we have tickets to Star Wars in Dec. we are trying to watch the rest of the Star Wars movies before we see the new one. I don't think that we are going to make it. We just finished Episode 2, and we have been trying for over a month so far. This week, Alison added a new section to Kidschool: Montessori activities.  She studied Montessori and we invested time and money into learning about it and making materials back when Rea was a baby, but it never really worked well then.  But she's pulled it back out now, with more mother-skills and knowledge about adapting things, and it's going very well.  The kids ask to do Montessori most days and spent hours using the materials on several different days this week.  It's been very rewarding for Alison to finally have it work. On Tuesday, Rea achieved her math goal (playing our math block Mastermind with four blocks hidden) and wanted to go straight to the zoo.  Unfortunately, Alison got flashes of light obscurin...