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...

Wow, SO MUCH has happened in the last three weeks! Buckle up, it's been a wild ride. The first week of August was Rea's first time at Girls' Camp. I'm going to ask her to type up an account of it for her typing class this week, so we'll give it its own post. Suffice it to say, she had a wonderful time! Aunt Amy was still YW President (she got released two weeks later), so she had that point of familiarity, and Rea made good friends with some of the other girls. It was perfect and we're all so happy for her. While she was gone, the rest of the family went to a meeting of a homeschooling group called Classical Conversations. I (Alison) first heard of this organization eight years ago when I was first looking into homeschooling. I went to their three day homeschool parent training class and their high school program sounded AMAZING. My kids were really too young for it then, and it's very expensive, but I bought their Memory Work CDs and we've been using th...

We missed posting last week, so this post will cover two weeks. Last weekend we went up to Silver Lake for a hike. We saw a moose in the wild, climbed on rocks and trees, took a nap in the woods, and generally enjoyed ourselves. Timmy really wants to go canoeing on the lake. I can't imagine dragging a canoe up there, but maybe one day... The kids did really well, and they hardly complained at all. After going to silver lake, the rest of the week we had a lot of meetings - Alison's calling, Mike's Board game design guild (BGDG), and Alison's writing group each claimed a weeknight. Mike tried to get his "Grab the Loot" game played with 6 players at BGDG, but there were not enough people there for that to happen. He has been preparing this game for submission to a publisher, and it wants some more playtesting at that player count. He is also trying to fit the game into a mint tin for the mint tin design contest. So far it is fitting, but he will perhap...

This week for FHE we talked about what we learned at General Conference. Wednesday we went to Wheeler Farm for Timmy's date night. The kids loved seeing the animals, and playing on the play structures. Thursday Mike went to the BGDG meeting, and the kids and Alison watched a movie. On Friday we went to the new sushi place for a date. It has really good prices, and the sushi was also pretty good, so we are excited that they opened the place up. We also got a large quantity of cooking oil, which we ordered from a website which had qite reasonable prices. At the rate that we use oil for Mike's bread making, it was a good thing to get. Saturday Mike spent some time getting Storybook weaver up and running on Alison's computer. Alison remembers playing it all of the time as a kid, and it seems that the kids quite like it already. Mike made a story for Timmy, and this is a page of it: Saturday night we had the church easter egg hunt, and made toothpick-marshmallow ge...

This week has been much less busy. We didn't have plans most evenings and, although Alison and the kids met Grandma Julie and Cousin Ellie at City Creek and the zoo on Monday and Tuesday, Timmy was sick with a cold for the second half of the week so not much happened. Timmy points to anyone with a beard and says "Ho, Ho, Ho!" meaning Santa Claus. This is ironic when it's actually a picture of Jesus. His speaking is improving every day. He now makes 2 word sentences. He also says "Daddy" instead of "Dada" Hurray! On Friday we were invited to a Financial Fitness class with some other couples in our neighborhood. We are more financially fit than many people, but we still got some good advice and enjoyed the time with friends. We are slowly working through the homework, which is very detailed and takes a while but has some good discussion questions. Mike has been spending a decent amount of time preparing for his Ion Award presentations. This nex...

This last week we dried more apples. We are getting very good at it. We are almost entirely done. I figure that we have five more batches, so probably we will have finished them all by next week. After that is done the next goal would be to process all these peppers that we have been given. We intend to make a lot of salsa this year, and with our new food processor it should be much easier than it usually is. We went down to the cabin over the last weekend. We had a fun time (though sleeping with kids in the room is always rough). we went to Twelfth Night at the Shakespeare Festival as well as the Ninja Japanese Steakhouse . I would recommend both highly. One of the great parts about the cabin that I didn't get as much of as I would have liked this time was seeing the milky way. When you are out at night in apple valley you can see way more stars than you can see anywhere else. We played some Avalon (card game), Bubble Bobble, and Rampage (NES games). We also helped weed th...

I have been having an allergic reaction to something. It really looks a lot like poison ivy, but I can't figure out where I could have come in contact with poison ivy recently. Alison thinks that it might be from the goat's hay, but I can't imagine how poison ivy could get into hay. Either way, it is itchy and annoying. Friday Alison and I got a baby sitter for the girls and went out to get sushi. We had yaki soba (with less barbecue sauce than you would get in osaka), crunch rolls, and dragon rolls. Our choices mainly were selected based on the fact that we couldn't have raw fish with Alison being pregnant. We also had some seaweed jello, bean paste, ice cream a fruit for dessert. It was very traditional. We need to make some bean paste pancakes some time. They are so good! Alison's Birthday was yesterday. We celebrated it by opening presents, having a barbecue, and not going to the zoo. The Zoo was originally in our plans, but we ended up changing them becau...