Parentheticals

Alison decided that it was time for life to go back to normal this week, so she's been trying to get the girls outside every day, do their reading and math and scripture study daily, and keep up with the housework.  She is very proud of actually getting the house clean this week; after a month of her not doing any work, it really needed it!  Maybe next week they'll start swim lessons at the pool with Max. Thursday night we had the first meeting of a board game developers' playtesting group at our library.  We arranged for the girls to go play with the Dalyais, a family in our ward, while we were playing.  However, when we went to drop the girls off, no one was home.  We ended up just taking them along to the library, and one of us would read to them while the other played.  The other people were nice about it, but it was distracting.  We hope the next one will go better. Scott and Sheila took the girls on Friday, and we took Timothy along to a play...

We went to Wicked on Thursday. I had never seen it before (though Alison had seen it back in California). It was pretty good. I liked Fiyero the best, however there were other fun characters as well, and the acting was pretty good all around. It got me sort of nostalgic for school at the beginning. Perhaps when I retire I will become a school teacher. We grew our First Red Tomatoes of the year. Rea and Sara ate them yesterday as we were working outside in the back yard. Hopefully Alison will get one some day. Timothy is now three weeks old. He is huge, and he is easily walking around now. That was a joke. He is, however sleeping very will for a new born. We got 6 hours of sleep two nights in a row. Alison and the girls went to the park on Wednesday for the first time since Timothy was born. It is good to get outside again. Rea and Sara played with other little girls, and Alison took care of Timothy. Timothy has been working on choosing a nick name. The current contenders are:...

This post is days late. I am going to blame it on our week of little sleep. Timothy put on 1 lb at his two week appointment. I have been working on Dancing Robots cards. They are coming along nicely. Perhaps in a week more I will be ready to order an actual printing of them. Bob - our development lead - has accepted a job at a different place. Additionally Chris - one of my coworkers - broke his leg recently and is out recovering from the surgery that they had to do to fix it. Because of this things have been hectic at work. Hopefully we can get a new team member and get Chris back some time soon so that we can get back to working normally. If anyone is looking for a software engineering job, contact me. I could give you the posting. We have tickets to see Wicked today. I have never seen it, so hopefully it is good. It sounds like it is not in any way based on the original book by Baum. This could be good, or it could be bad. Rea and Sara want me to post that they got rag d...

This week we have been ambling along like we were members of the living dead, or perhaps more like a polar bear in cowboy boots. What I am trying to say is that we have not gotten much sleep. Timothy has made some unusual decisions about the importance of sleep in relation to the three other things that he knows how to do (I am sure any parents out there know the list of four things that a baby can do). Either way, last night we needed to have an intervention. It was three am and he had just pooped for the fifth time in the same number of hours and I had had enough. I gave him a pacifier and a stern (if not coherent) lecture and he finally went to sleep for two whole hours. And they say that parenting is a lost art :). Either way, Rea and Sara were up and in our bed for who knows how long before we became conscious at 6:00 am. To go back in time a bit, I started to go back to work on Wednesday. Alison had her mom help her out a lot, and we are paying some of the yo...

I have been taking time off from work to take care of Timothy.  Generally he has been a pretty good kid, but he wants to eat every hour, and he thinks that he needs to sleep on top of us. We are trying to make him realize that he doesn't actually need to sleep on top of us by putting him down when he sleeps, but it is still something that he prefers quite a bit. Timothy sometimes snorts when he breathes, and a few days ago Sara (upon hearing him snorting) laughed and said "Timothy is a honking pig." Rea went over to grandma's house when Timothy came and when she got back she had a new hair cut. It is shorter so her hair does not get tangled up. Rea refused to comment on her hair cut, but I think that she likes it. After I typed that last sentence Rea responded that she does like it.  Saturday morning we went to a ward breakfast. It was pretty good. Everyone was surprised that we came (with our new baby only four days old). They did not have a ward camp out this...

Baby Timothy 'Blup' James Brown was born. He is 8 lbs and 14.5 oz, 22 inches long, and pretty healthy. He arrived on the 18th at 3:26 pm after 12 hours of labor (active labor started at noon). We went to a birthing center  (warning, embarrassing photos) to have this baby as Alison wanted to have a water birth and they don't do those in hospitals here. We really liked the birth center. It was way better than having a baby in a hospital. Alison is very excited that even though he was such a large baby she didn't tear at all. Her hypnosis worked very (pretty in her own words) well. She was even able to push out the placenta without too much trouble (which caused her much more trouble with Sara). Since we have come home we have mostly been taking care of the new baby. He has small nasal passages, which makes him breathe really funny. He eats and sleeps very well, though. He likes cuddling a lot, and seems to be very peeky. He didn't try to stay awake all night (...

This week we have been waiting for the baby to come. (He still hasn't.) Last Sunday I gave a talk in Sacrament Meeting. Alison wrote it for me since she hadn't given a talk in so long (not since we moved in to the ward; I've spoken six times since then). It seemed to be well received, although I had to cut out two thirds of the talk because the other speakers took so long. On Wednesday we had some young women from the ward clean out our goat shed. They had asked for work that they could do to earn money for Girls Camp. (We offered the job to the young men first, to earn money for Camp Helaman, and they weren't interested. The girls were willing to do it, though.) It is pretty clean right now. On Thursday Alison, Rea, and Sara went to Amy's house so the girls could play with Logan. They had lots of fun together. Sara especially loved helping take care of baby Dustin; she loves babies. Hopefully that will continue when we have one. We went to a food storage t...