Parentheticals

We failed to blog last weekend. We were on vacation in California. Not last week but the week before I went to QCON sf  (a technical conference) for work. It was fun and I learned a lot, however it was sad to be gone so long.  I understand that Alison got along by visiting her mom's house nearly daily. Perhaps the highlight of the week away was the best sushi I have had in the US. It was at Pabu in San Francisco. Highly expensive, but amazing.  During our time as a family in San Diego we swam, walked on the beach, played games, and talked a lot. It was good to see the Poulson family.  I tried to prepare my games for the Ion award.  If anyone is willing to help read my documents to see if they are well written, I would be very appreciative. Here  is the one I am most worried about. A quick update about the children (since we want to go to bed) Timmy is being insanely cute and needy since we got home. Rea boogie boarded a lot on the trip. Sara wants to liv

Since we have tickets to Star Wars in Dec. we are trying to watch the rest of the Star Wars movies before we see the new one. I don't think that we are going to make it. We just finished Episode 2, and we have been trying for over a month so far. This week, Alison added a new section to Kidschool: Montessori activities.  She studied Montessori and we invested time and money into learning about it and making materials back when Rea was a baby, but it never really worked well then.  But she's pulled it back out now, with more mother-skills and knowledge about adapting things, and it's going very well.  The kids ask to do Montessori most days and spent hours using the materials on several different days this week.  It's been very rewarding for Alison to finally have it work. On Tuesday, Rea achieved her math goal (playing our math block Mastermind with four blocks hidden) and wanted to go straight to the zoo.  Unfortunately, Alison got flashes of light obscuring her vi

This week we finally decided that the kids were old enough to enjoy the 10 gallons of Legos Mike has saved since his childhood, so we've taken them out on about three different occasions and let them play.  Rea and Sara enjoy putting people on the horses and setting up barns and pastures.  Timmy watches Mike build space ships and then flies them around with whooshing noises and smashes them into things.  It has been very enjoyable. A neighbor gave us a large bag of beets this year.  She gives us all kinds of garden bounty and we're very grateful for it, but Alison is the only one who really loves beets.  So Alison spent a lot of time and effort this week trying to find new beet recipes.  Probably the best-accepted one was beet-stuffed ravioli in a cream sauce.  Beet hashbrowns aren't bad either. We did a lot of Halloween things this year.  One night we had a fire in the fireplace and ate donuts and drank apple cider; that's not exactly Halloween, but an important fa