Parentheticals

Alison and the kids went to the zoo TWICE this week. The first time, on Tuesday, was for a goal day party, and they met Grandma Julie and Aunt Becky and Cousin Ellie there for a fun time. Thursday Uncle Chauncey finished school, so he went with Becky and Ellie again, and they invited Grandma Julie, who invited us. We had a great time both days. Tuesday they were setting up the dinosaurs (Zoorasic Park 2 this summer!), and Rea was excited to see them on Thursday, but they were all covered up until opening day. Now Rea wants to go this upcoming Friday for the dinosaurs. On Wednesday we had a Board Game Design Group of Sandy meetup. There were five people there, and we played two games: Polynesia and Zodiac Dice. It went pretty well. The girls had a babysitter and had a lot of fun as well. On Thursday we ate dinner in the front yard. As we ate the heady scent of the lilac flowers made us think about edible flowers. We looked up the edibility of lilacs, and found that lilac jelly is a

Almost everyone achieved a goal in the last week or so: Rea read an entire chapter book by herself ( Polar Bears Past Bedtime , a Magic Treehouse book), Sara finished her first run-through of her phonics program, Reading Bear , and Mike read his scriptures for more than 60 days straight. (Alison needs to achieve a goal!) So we had a very big goal day party. The girls got balloons and created a unicorn piñata out of paper mache (mostly Rea with Alison's help). Then we stuffed it with some clearanced Easter candy and the girls joyfully smashed it open for our party treat. We also had hamburgers for dinner for our celebration. Alison and the kids were going to go to the zoo for the rest of the goal day party (goal day parties now include a special dinner, a treat, and a ride on the carousel at the zoo), but then it started to snow. It snowed for at least 24 hours and we got over 7 inches. Alison and Rea had a lot of fun playing in it; they like to play in the snow (yo ho!), more tha

This post covers two weeks, since we apparently never clicked post last week after we wrote our post. On Wednesday last week we had our Passover dinner. We ate matzoh, maror, haroseth, lamb, and drank a lot of grape juice. Sara didn't understand that she was supposed to ask me the questions (the youngest kid is supposed to ask the patriarch why we eat so many weird things) so she tried to answer the questions herself. In the end Rea asked them. Sara said that matzoh is a boy, and that the girl is named Mozzarella. I don't know if she knew that the bread that we were eating was the matzoh. On Thursday last week we went to "I Hate Hamlet", which is a play. It was a decent play. There was a crazy girl, a ghost of a womanizer, a Medium (bordering on small) a TV doctor, and a guy from Brooklyn, CA. Last weekend we watched General Conference and celebrated Easter. General Conference was really good. I am glad that we were able to attend it. Last Saturday we had ou