Parentheticals

 This week has been killer hot. There was only one day that it wasn't above 97, and the temperature right now is 106 degrees. Mike has been working on his finals pretty much all day every day so that leaves Alison to do all the work around here. (Internet cookies for anyone who recognizes the quote; it's a favorite around our house.) She is working very hard and we are all excited for Mike to be done shortly. He wrote an essay on the ethics of reverse engineering (which Alison had fun editing for him) and then recorded a presentation about the topics in his essay. He and his team are still working on coding a kids' banking app. It's due the day after tomorrow, so it's almost done! Alison has been catching up on all the to-dos from a over month ago, before everything was "get ready for Andy's visit" and "enjoy Andy's visit" and "recover from Andy's visit." (We absolutely adored having Andy's family here.) One of those thi...

Continuing in the theme of explosions, we thought we'd go for two weeks in a row. So on Tuesday, Alison filled up the bathtub for Boo, and then exploded the water all over the kitchen floor. Now that we're getting into the groove of explosions, perhaps we'll have one every week! If you recall, right before we left on vacation we discovered some problems with our kitchen sink. Tuesday afternoon, Mike got to work fixing them. (Monday Alison took the older kids for their second Covid shots [yay! they will be fully vaccinated next week!], so Tuesday was his first opportunity.) He replaced the parts that had problem parts just fine, but then the sink started backing up in a whole new way. He pulled it apart again to try and figure it out, and warned everyone not to touch it. Boo asked for a bath, so Alison gave her one. After she was done, Alison let the water out of the bathtub and went to get her dressed. Then from the kitchen, Rea suddenly said, "Should the sink be filli...

 This week Alison and Mike caught whatever Elizabeth and Gideon have had. Alison stayed in bed all day Monday, then moved to the couch all day Tuesday, and was mostly better (if a little tired) after that. Mike got sick Friday and had a sinus headache Sunday. Neither of us was anywhere near as sick as the little ones, though. Gideon is almost  done coughing, and Boo stopped getting feverish in the afternoons sometime this week, so they're improving, but Boo is still super grumpy a lot of the time and needs lots of cuddles. (If grumpy is a symptom of this sickness, maybe Timmy has it, because he's had a really hard time getting along with people this week.) Mike took the oldest three kids to get their first Covid shots Monday afternoon. He decided to walk in to a clinic; Alison worried that they'd have to wait forever, but it wasn't that bad. The kids are very proud of getting their first shots and excited for their second ones. When they're fully vaccinated, they...

Previously on parentheticals blog - we had already moved the bare minimum of stuff and furniture into this house so that we could survive. We then discovered that our car was broken in such a way that we shouldn't drive it and our mechanic was unable to get to our car before Wednesday of last week. As all of this was going on all of the kids were coming down with symptoms of some sort of sickness. Timmy ended up having symptoms that could theoretically have been covid so we had to keep the whole family quarantined until we were able to get Timmy's test results back. For the first half of last week we pretty much had to stay home the entire time and tried to eat whatever random stuff we happened to have in our freezer. Wednesday we went back to Sandy to drop the car off at the mechanic. We took the entire family back to the old house and spent the day boxing up every single thing in the entire house. we ran out of boxes, however we were able to make it through by using garbage b...