Parentheticals

On Memorial Day we had the traditional Memorial Day barbecue. We had 4 families over and it was super fun. I would call it an amazing success (even if Meowth would have called it a day to forget) On Tuesday we started to switch over to summer schedule. What this means is the kids can play outside as long as they want in the morning and then when they come inside they have to do a little reading or math. Next they take a siesta and do team clean, then they can have screen time to dinner, then we play outside to dark again. We haven't really gotten into it fully yet, so perhaps this week will be better. Tim has finally gotten through his level three book of his reading program, and to celebrate his hard work we got sushi and made tempura for Wednesday night dinner. A lot of the kids complained about the idea of sushi, but we got a coconut tempura shrimp roll from the local sushi place that is practically a dessert, and everyone who actually gave it a decent try liked it. Timmy insist...

Since we missed last week's post we are reporting on two weeks now. I will refer to the 14th-the 20th as last week and the 21st-27th as this week. Last week Alison got a new calling - she is now the Primary Secretary. That combined with Mike's new calling (Activity Dudes leader) means that neither of us are teaching anymore. It is too bad because we both like teaching, but it is what it is. For Mike's first activity dudes meeting he had the kids play an amongus retheme of mafia/werewolf. The kids enjoyed it and we got to know them a bit. It was good. Mike still has a lingering cough which just hasn't gone away for far too long. It is super annoying, but he is dealing with it Last Sunday the ward had Treats at the Park, (the kids insisted in calling it "Pops at the Stops" because the fact that popsicles were the treats, and the park is located at a three way stop.) Alison's birthday was this week. We were super busy all week so we waited till Saturday to ha...

The kids just discovered stop motion animation and are making videos of their modeling clay dinosaurs. They're having fun. We have a wasp nest in our big tree in the front yard that Mike is really, really trying to figure out how to deal with before the weather warms up. It's much too high for any of the normal methods. He's thinking of shooting balls of clay at it with a slingshot to try to knock it down. This week we had CC and the kids are making friends with a new family, Will and Grace. They're nine year old twins and Timmy and Sara are having fun talking about Wings of Fire and Spirit Animals and other books with them. Tuesday the Rogers were off school, so we went with them and Grandma Julie to Thanksgiving Point all day. We did the dinosaur museum in the morning and butterflies in the afternoon. The kids got to see some new butterflies being released into the Biosphere, which was very exciting. Timmy and Gideon got separated from the rest of us in the Dinosaur M...

Hey, look, we wrote two weeks in a row this time! We finished up the Twelve Days of Christmas this week and are heading into Carnival season, where we plan a party every week to head off the intermitability of January and February. We got out of the habit during the lockdowns from COVID, so hopefully we'll do a good job this year. It really is helpful with the February blahs. Last Sunday the power went out on the other side of the ward, so the Plastow kids came and built an amazing snow fort and played with our kids. Amy and Dave came over for dinner and we invited them to spend the night if their power didn't come back on. It did come back, but the kids were all excited about having a sleepover, so Logan, Dustin, and Brooklyn spent the night. Monday we had our annual New Year's Day game day. Becky and Chauncey's family came, and we had a wonderful time playing The Scarlet Pimpernell. The girls actually got invited to hang out with their friend Marissa from Sandy in the...

The weather was really good this week. Because it was so good, we played outside a lot - many days we went mushroom hunting, and tried to find morels, but we didn't end up finding any yet. Tuesday nature group at the park went long, and Mike got off work a little early, so he met us at the park. Then we decided to pick up fast food on the way to Dimple Dell and hunt morels for the evening. It was a nice evening. Alison started to attend a water aerobics class this week. She developed Symphysis Pubis Pain this pregnancy for the first time, and all her normal forms of cardio hurt. Water aerobics was recommended by everyone she asked, so she's excited to try it out for a few weeks. Most of the water aerobics moves didn't hurt, which is better than anything else she's tried. On Friday we tried to go to the OBT and catch a show, however we decided to take the train, and the weather was so crazy that lightning struck the train lines, and the trains were no longer running ...

This week was a crazy one. On Monday Mike was told by his boss and grandboss that his team had been disbanded, and that he was assigned to work on the web team. If someone were to ask Mike which software engineering team at 1800Contacts he would have liked to work at the least, he would have certainly told you the web team. After talking with Alison, Mike started to search for a new job. He applied at five places - all of them in Ithaca NY. He also posted his resume at three different employment sites. Monday night our toilet clogged, and wouldn't unclog. Mike worked on it for a few hours, and eventually we decided to call a plumber. Tuesday morning the plumber came over and got the water flowing again, so we could use the bathroom. This has made our desire to add a second bathroom increase significantly. Also on Monday, Alison did her first class teaching English online with VIPKID. She's been seeing people mention this job for about a year now, and it really felt like i...

Being sick over Christmas is no fun! We managed to do many of our traditions, though. Everyone got Gold, Frankincense, Myrrh, and Swaddling Clothes presents. Sara loved her new dolls, Timmy was excited to get a Playmobile nativity set, and Rea can't wait to start horseback riding lessons next month. Alison got a new phone, which prompted weeks of work to get her old phone replaced under warranty and send it to Katie. That should be completed tomorrow, which is exciting. Mike's favorite was his new board game about meteors. Then we tried to celebrate the Twelve Days of Christmas (which, if you recall, were originally after Christmas; that works well for Alison, who is never organized enough to do them before). The first few days we got to spend with the Brown and Poulson grandparents, which was awesome. We did a few activities at home, like making homemade face paints and finger paints, but we mostly watched a lot of movies. It's really hard being too contagious to leave t...

I don't remember if I ever mentioned it, but Gideon is now crawling! Three weeks ago, on our vacation, he started scooting around on his stomach. By the time we got back, he could push himself up to all fours and then to sitting. Over the last two weeks, he progressed from scooting to crawling, and now he mostly crawls. He does the one-knee-and-one-foot crawl that most of our kids have done at this stage. It's very cute. Gideon has also started signing more, usually by clasping his hands together and bouncing them up and down, but sometimes by patting his tummy. He also occasionally sticks his finger in his mouth to sign water. Both of those were goals for Gideon, so we had a goal day party. Timmy decided to pass off on his color goal, so he identified something of the correct color each time we said it, for a dozen basic colors. So it was a triple goal day party on Saturday. Timmy picked the menu: shells with sausages and mushrooms, in a homemade white sauce with Havarti c...

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...

We had our first sub-goal achieved this week: Rea finished reading 1st Nephi. Her goal for the year is to finish the small plates section of the Book of Mormon, but waiting until the end of a year for a goal day party is too long for the kids, so they get parties for important milestones. We went to a drive through for a chocolate Oreo milkshake and made homemade macaroni and cheese with ham to celebrate. (The mac and cheese had a secret ingredient that no one even guessed: a baked sweet potato pureed in the sauce. Alison had her doubts about the recipe, but no one noticed a thing, so maybe this will always be done in the future; more vegetables are always good.) Gideon loves grabbing on to people's fingers and getting picked up in that manner. We compliment him profusely when he does (calling him a strong baby). Whenever he is done with a diaper change Alison does that, and Mike just does it whenever Gideon seems to be in a good mood. He really is a very easy baby. We are so h...

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...

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...

This week we finally decided that the kids were old enough to enjoy the 10 gallons of Legos Mike has saved since his childhood, so we've taken them out on about three different occasions and let them play.  Rea and Sara enjoy putting people on the horses and setting up barns and pastures.  Timmy watches Mike build space ships and then flies them around with whooshing noises and smashes them into things.  It has been very enjoyable. A neighbor gave us a large bag of beets this year.  She gives us all kinds of garden bounty and we're very grateful for it, but Alison is the only one who really loves beets.  So Alison spent a lot of time and effort this week trying to find new beet recipes.  Probably the best-accepted one was beet-stuffed ravioli in a cream sauce.  Beet hashbrowns aren't bad either. We did a lot of Halloween things this year.  One night we had a fire in the fireplace and ate donuts and drank apple cider; that's not exactly Hallowe...

This week we... Certainly we did something. Wednesday for Science Time we talked about the particulate nature of matter.  That was an interesting one.  Rea seemed to get it, though. She did, at one point tell me that particles are called atoms, so apparently we had talked about it before. Thursday was Rea's birthday.  She requested homemade macaroni and cheese and asparagus for dinner, and chocolate cupcakes for dessert.  We at it as a picnic in the backyard.  She made little fairy decorations for the cupcakes, and she got some lovely presents: a kit to make flower fairies, a set of laminated paper dolls of horses and fairies, a coloring book, a toy Dalmation puppy, a doll with a dress modeled after Elsa, and Quints dolls.  It was a very fun day and she was very happy. Saturday we went and picked apples from a neighbor of Amy's.  Amy told us the apples were falling off her tree, so we asked if we could pick some and clean up the ground for her. ...

Almost everyone achieved a goal in the last week or so: Rea read an entire chapter book by herself ( Polar Bears Past Bedtime , a Magic Treehouse book), Sara finished her first run-through of her phonics program, Reading Bear , and Mike read his scriptures for more than 60 days straight. (Alison needs to achieve a goal!) So we had a very big goal day party. The girls got balloons and created a unicorn piñata out of paper mache (mostly Rea with Alison's help). Then we stuffed it with some clearanced Easter candy and the girls joyfully smashed it open for our party treat. We also had hamburgers for dinner for our celebration. Alison and the kids were going to go to the zoo for the rest of the goal day party (goal day parties now include a special dinner, a treat, and a ride on the carousel at the zoo), but then it started to snow. It snowed for at least 24 hours and we got over 7 inches. Alison and Rea had a lot of fun playing in it; they like to play in the snow (yo ho!), mor...

I am tired, so this will be a bit disjointed. This week we ate a lot of brie. It was pretty melty, but not spreadable to the core. Everyone loves it when it is toasted over bread. It tastes way better than mozzarella and melts just as good. Probably we will make a pizza on Monday with brie on top of it. If we like that then perhaps we will start making brie instead of mozzarella on a biweekly basis. We went on a date to a Indian restaurant in Sandy named Karma. While there we had a new type of naan bread (this one was called peshwari naan). It was pretty good. Perhaps we will make it some time. The food was very good, but medium was a little too spicy. Alison wants to get some coconut cream to make lots of curries. In terms of sickness: we all got better, and then Alison and Timmy got sick again. They are a little better, but it is a never-ending thing it seems.. We made a parmesan this week, and also 1 lb of butter (we made the parmesan from skim milk). They both turned out pre...