Parentheticals

Mike got over the not-Covid pretty fast, but Alison was wiped out for half this week. She barely got out of bed over the weekend, and Monday and Tuesday she dragged herself downstairs and did school while laying in a sleeping bag. The kids were pretty good. In the afternoons she would sleep while Mike took the kids - it is very convenient to have him off work at 2, so Alison didn't have to try to be functional for longer than that. By Wednesday Alison was feeling a little better, so we went on a few walks; Boo has started to ask to be walked in her stroller when she gets sleepy. We went to Crestwood Park to see what we could forage. There were tons of riverbank grapes this year, so we picked a bushel. (That is an approximation, since we don't actually know how much a bushel is, but it seems about right. It was a very big reusable shopping bag full.)  Thursday we were mostly back to normal life, just in time for the craziness of Friday. Every Friday, we have to get up, get break...

 This last week the Brown family battled with a sickness that was not covid (Alison took a covid test to see if it was, and it came back negative, so though there is a possibility that it was a false negative, it doesn't seem likely). It is mostly characterized by coughing, phlegm, and headaches, but some of the kids also got super cranky. We also were given a whole bunch of tomatoes by a ward member and made 4.25 gallons of salsa. The recipe that we made it from is the normal family recipe, but we doubled the garlic, and added 8 different varieties of peppers (because we like a lot of different varieties of peppers - they add more flavor). The peppers included: jalapeno, habanero, serrano, poblano, chili, yellow chili, anaheim, and pasilla. We didn't add any thai peppers this year, but only because we didn't want to go to more stores than was necessary with all of the sickness going around. Timmy is proud to have helped can it (he made sure that we always had enough rings ...

(This blog post title comes to you courtesy of Gideon.) We organized a last-minute Labor Day barbecue at our house with the Brown grandparents, the Poulson grandparents, and Amy's family. We had a lot of fun getting together. It was beautiful weather. We finally finished processing the apples this week. All told we made about 4 gallons of applesauce, 4 gallons of apple chips, a bevy of beautiful apple muffins, and also a pitcher of apple cider. Unfortunately, the weather got hot again toward the end of the week. Alison tried to take the kids outside when they got rowdy, and we were melting with the heat and couldn't stay out long. Friday was our first day of Nature Group for this year, and the kids were a little grumpy with the hot weather, so it wasn't the perfect first day. Still, we made it fairly close to on time and participated in all the activities, so that was good. We also really appreciated the random bits of rain that fell during the day, and the heavier rain aft...

 This was the second(?) week of school for the kids and Alison. It has been a bit challenging to get everyone in the habit of doing school again, but we've slowly been getting back in the groove. Alison asked the kids to contribute something to this part of the blog post, and they ignored her. So she's going to unilaterally declare that it's going great! Mike's school has been going well. He is glad to be done with the hard-to-work-with professor forever; this week, one of his new professors made a mistake in an assignment, and he was able to point it out to her and get it changed. Hooray! I guess one good thing about the bad professor was that he set a low bar. We are getting the kids new tablets so that everyone can do their online math at the same time, so we are working on screen time limits.  It's easy enough to limit video games; it's harder to decide how much time they can spend composing music or coding animated videos or cool technology-assisted creativ...

On Monday Sara made brownies and decorated them with candy and colored frosting. The kids also were sitting at the table, and decided to act like they were bored during school, so Alison took pictures of them doing it. On Tuesday Sara cleaned up the new wheat grinder that we got from Grandma Yoder, and she posted it to KSL to try and sell it. We already had one, but thought that this one might work to grind peanuts into peanut butter, but the intake hole was not big enough, so we are going to let another owner have it. Wednesday we went to the Brown's house to mow the lawn and Rea and Sara worked on sewing Christmas presents with grandma. They gave us ice cream, and the kids played around a lot. Timmy mowed the front all by himself, and Rea mowed half the back yard because she was having too much fun with grandma to mow it all. Thursday Mike went to Board Game Design Guild for the first time since Covid. He had a fun time playing a game where you are a dreamer who is trying to rese...

In celebration of completing a 5 year project we got a bonus day of paid leave at work. Since Alison and the kids' nature group was planning a camping trip on this last Wednesday, that day seemed like the obvious choice. On the day that the trip was scheduled to begin (Tuesday) it was raining, so all of the other people that were supposed to come wimped out except for one family. We got our tarps and hammocks set up before the rain was really going, and we also got a fire going despite the rain. It was colder than usual, however it was still pretty good weather. It didn't snow at least :) The rain continued all night, and well into the next day. Mike was able to get a fire going on day two as well by tearing apart a dried out pine tree that he found in the camp site. Mike, Rea, and Sara went out and picked a bunch of berries (raspberries, currants, and serviceberries). We plan on making a pie, though that hasn't happened yet.  The kids were a bit grumpy about the rain, but ...

This week Alison worked hard on preparing for the kid's upcoming year of school. She has planned a lot, and hopefully things will go smoothly because of that. On Wednesday Mike started his next semester of his Master's program. Hopefully it is smooth sailing now that Orsega is out of the way. He is certainly less nervous about this semester than last one. Also on Wednesday we went to the Brown's house and mowed the lawn. Everyone went over there, and half of us earned money from doing some part of the work. The other half picked weeds and cleaned up leaves to earn ice cream. While we were there, we picked up Grandpa Mike's gold panning pans. Mike has been thinking that that would be a good thing to do during weeks where there is nothing to forage, and Grandpa Mike is letting us borrow them to see if we like it. We were thinking of going this weekend, but that turned out to be a bust. What can you do? On Friday Alison and Mike went to a play which the OBT put on at Drap...