Parentheticals

We started writing this post last week, but it never got posted. Last Tuesday Alison's friend - Sylvia Dalyia invited Alison over for a group discussion about emotions. Alison presented the power emotions to them and they all talked about it and had a lot of fun. At the same time Mike discovered that our main sewer line was finally starting to back up in such a way that we will need to shortly get it fixed. He ordered a few plumbers to come over and look at it. So far they coming about $10k, so hopefully the last one has a cheaper plan. Last Thursday we had a plumber come over and scope things out and give us a estimate for the work we were doing. Rea and Alison are both writing stories right now, and have a lot of fun bouncing ideas off of each other, and of building upon each other's work. Last week on Friday Rea went for a walk in the neighborhood and can back with news of a big walnut tree in our neighborhood which seemed to not be being harvested. She had taken some walnut...

This last week we went to southern Utah in order to attend the nature group fall camp out. The leader has a relative who has 800 acers and a cabin on the Utah-Arizona border, and they let us camp there for free every October during fall break. It's a lot of fun, although we always end up getting a hotel instead of camping because Mike needs to work at night. That was a good thing this year, because they had an unbelievable cold snap down there! At one point, they were predicting lows of 25 for those nights! I think it was a little warmer, but most of the families ended up finding somewhere indoors to sleep. Some of the teenage boys tented the first night and woke up to frost on their sleeping bags - they slept in their cars for the other nights. We were glad to be in a hotel. We drove down Wednesday afternoon and checked into the hotel. Thursday morning we went to Coral Pink Sand Dunes, which is one of our favorite places down there. The dunes are pretty, playing in the sand is fun...

 The cold that Alison had a couple weeks ago went through all the kids this week. They took turns being super whiney and grumpy and such, so it lasted all week. We ended up keeping them home from nature group and church. Unfortunately, we played with the Plastows right as Boo was starting to get sick and we didn't realize everyone was getting it, so we may have given it to them. (And then Mike decided that since we'd already probably infected them, the kids could keep playing with them all week.) Sorry, Amy! So it was a grumpy week. That wasn't much fun. Saturday morning we had a power outage for an hour or so! It took the kids quite a while to catch on to what had happened (Saturday morning is their screen time, and apparently they were all using apps that didn't require the internet), but when they did, they were excited and a bit concerned. Alison told them to collect wood for a fire, and we had a fire in the fireplace. That's always a good solution to power outa...

Rea finished her story "Ever," but it wasn't quite long enough for publication through Amazon. While she's deciding what to do about that, she's started another story. It's a magical school story, the same genre as Harry Potter, and she's having a lot of fun writing it and discussing it with her siblings and figuring out the plot and characters and magic system. It's very exciting.  On Wednesday, Mike and Amy went to help Grandma Sheila finish moving in here in Utah. This is now their permanent home, even though they will still travel quite a bit. We're very excited to have them! The Plastow kids came to play with the Brown kids while the parents were working, so it was fun for everyone. Before the Plastows got here, Sara decided that she wanted to try following a more advanced recipe than she had before. She ended up deciding on raspberry-filled lemon cupcakes with buttercream frosting. It was a recipe that would have intimidated Alison a little, ...

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...