Parentheticals

This week got off to a slow start, trying to recover from all the bad habits sickness breeds. We took the week mostly off kid school and watched some movies and played. As we started to recover at the end of the week, Timmy got fussy. We finally realized that he's cutting a molar. Neither of our girls fused at all with molars, but we think that's his problem. Thursday we watched Max and Petra while Scott and Sheila went to the new Star Wars movie, and then they watched our kids so we could go see it on Friday. Mike and Scott's work gave out tickets to the opening weekend, which was fabulous. We invited Daniel and some of his friends to join us, which was fun. The movie was great, very funny and well acted and enjoyable. We have been enjoying some long discussions about the plot and possible future directions for the series. Friday during the day Alison and the kids went up to Kaysville. Josh and Katie and Kendrick are in town, and it was fun to see them. We went swimmin...

This week for family night we bought some stuff for the ward secret Santa. On various other days we wrapped them up. Sunday we delivered them to the ward building (where the massive pile of gifts filled the clerks office). It was fun to talk to the girls about the spirit of giving and how it relates to the birth of Christ and the meaning of the Christmas season. Starting Thursday we had a medium length sickness in some of our house. Rea and Sara both caught it, and it manifested as fever, lethargy, and vomiting. The lethargy was actually kind of nice a little, since it gave time to clean up the vomiting without the girls causing too much trouble. Timmy was still super healthy and he wanted to cheer up the girls. This led to humorous miscommunication between the three, and Timmy learned how to say the word "OW!" whenever anyone does something to him that he doesn't like. Rea got the worst of the sickness (she threw up on two different days), and Sara got a much less ...

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...

This week Timmy has woken us up way too many times. It is like he has no respect for sleep. On Tuesday the kids and Alison went to the Zoo. Rea and Sara both loved the dinosaur birds the best. Apparently, some scientists have decided that Utah Raptor was heavily feathered, so the zoo had a new feathery Utah Raptor. Timmy liked the elephants best. Timmy has been playing peekaboo with people, and saying "Boo!" a lot this week. On Wednesday Timmy had his 15 month check up. Alison was a little worried that the doctor would be concerned that he's not walking yet, but the doctor watched him walk holding on to Alison's hands and realized that he's capable of walking, he just doesn't choose to, so no worries. That's nice. Apparently his language development is right on target, although it's so far behind where the girls were at this age. He'll get his next shots when we get the not-sleeping-through-the-night thing worked out. On Friday, Alison'...