Parentheticals

This week we went up to Jordan pines camp ground and camped all week. We went up there with the nature group. We had a lot of fun. We set up hammocks in the trees and slept under the stars. We hiked up to donut falls, and saw tons of different types of wild berries (though only the strawberries were ripe yet). We saw wolf currants and gooseberries, both of which we have never seen here before. Every night there were campfire stories told, and Mike, Rea, and Alison told one each. Baby Elizabeth slept terribly up there, but otherwise it was pretty successful. Saturday we picked more strawberries, and currants as well. We are deep into strawberry season, and currant season is well underway. This year has been an excellent year for currants. Perhaps we should meet with the Plastows and pick the currants near their house as well We went down to dimple dell, Sunday and checked on the red currants there as well as the gold currants and serviceberries but they were not ready yet. We did end up...

This week Rea, Sara, and Timmy had horse-camp, where they learned how to ride horses. Timmy told me that he rode a blue roan, Sara said she learned how to ride all by herself, and Rea said she didn't want to talk about it. Since it was a long drive, Alison, Gideon, and Elizabeth all hung out at a nearby park during the lessons. Gideon liked the park and loved eating apples and nuts and pepperoni, and playing. When I asked Elizabeth what she liked about the park, she just signed "more water", and handed me a water bottle. We celebrated Elizabeth's first birthday, and Timmy's 6th this week. Elizabeth loved three dollies that the Browns got for her, and Timmy loved all of his presents a lot, though we have already had to repair his treasure chest. One night the Dalyias invited us over to pick their cherry tree. The tree was insanely huge (30ish feet tall), so we also brought over our pole chainsaw and hacked at it from the roof. Some branches were too high to reach e...

We missed last week, so we are trying to do both weeks Baby Elizabeth has been having sleeping issues again - she wakes up in the middle of the night even though she is way too old for that. We are not sure about how to fix that We picked a few strawberries from strawberry hill, but they are mostly still white. Fortunately mullberries are out in force right now, and we have picked tons of those. We have moved over to a siesta sleep schedule (those that are not polyphasiac, that is. The kids get to stay up to 9 when they take a good siesta. They really love it, so siestas have been a popular thing. To use our good mild weather, we have been visiting parks in the evening. We now have a list of places all over the area where we will be trying to forage many different foods from parks this upcoming year.  On Saturday we made a pie with some of the mulberries that we picked - Rea really wanted to learn how, so she helped out a lot. Friday nights we have been having RPG date nights with ...

This week Mike's started to create a list of all of the public places that we forage for food, and another list of parks and places that we want to try to forage for food. We are going to visit a few parks a week and see what new things we find. We have already found a new source of grapes and a patch of raspberry bushes. We are excited to see what we find next. This week Mike also submitted a game to a contest. It is an 18 card legacy game. Here's hoping that it does well. We went to Amy and Dave's house for the girls to get haircuts and everyone to watch Frozen 2. The kids had a great time, until Rea was jumping down the stairs and banged her rib. She was in a lot of pain, but it's been steadily getting better, so we're no longer worried. A few days after the rib incident, Rea decided to climb a tree and scratched her leg really badly. Poor Rea! What a week! Alison got a history curriculum that includes suggested Minecraft builds. Sara and Timmy were so eager to l...

We totally meant to send this Monday night, but it never got finished.  This past week we didn't have any luck in finding morels - It looks like the season for them is over in Utah. We also celebrated Alison's birthday, which was fun. Besides the brownie crust chocolate pudding whipped cream and mint chocolate ship pies she wanted Alison got some books, artificial additives for making movie-theater-style popcorn, and a new belt as well. We played a game of DnD with the group from our ward. It was fun. We fought goblins and more goblins, and hopefully they won't all kill us. This week Alison also continued to work on her business. She is still trying to figure out how it should look, but she is diligently working on it none the less. The Browns came over to visit us, and we got to play and swim and hike with them. It was good to have them over. We also went to a barbecue at the Plastows - which was fun as well. The digital version of Mike's "how to be an evil manage...

Our garden is growing nicely this year, even if we haven't seen a single cucurbit sprout yet. The beans, lettuce, and peas are all growing quickly, and various other plants are doing well too.  We went on two more morel hunts this week, but we only found three more morels so far. It did rain a bit on Wednesday, but not enough to produce that many morels apparently. All of the other mushroom hunters that we have found in the dell have reported that it was a bad year for them as well, so the Utah morel crop of 2020 might be a decidedly meager one. While going out mushroom hunting, we must have run into a little bit of poison ivy, because Mike got a bit of it behind his knee (it was only one spot, but even one spot is annoying.) To a lesser extent Rea and Sara got it as well (though their rashes were smaller - single blisters mostly.  There has also been a sickness that has gone through our family - It doesn't seem like covid - it mostly manifests as a sore throat, and lasts only...

Utah went to "Orange" social distancing this week. After studying and pondering the directives for DAYS (because they were so contradictory), we finally figured them out: "Stay home, unless you want to spend money, in which case, try to stay 6 feet apart, but go ahead." Since we have literally engineered our life so that none of the things that bring us joy involve spending money, we can either just stay home forever (Alison isn't anticipating getting out of orange before next Christmas), change the way we live, or stretch the guidelines a bit. We've started socializing with one other family outdoors, reminding the kids to stay 6 feet apart. They try hard :). And once every week or two we'll get together with another family. However, Alison's best friend's mom just died, so we have been babysitting her kids several times this week; we feel that's far more important than the guidelines.  The kids have lost a lot of social skills in two months ...