31 January 2016

Abe got braces on Tuesday.  By Sunday he was able to eat again, although slowly.

Tuesday evening we went to a music concert at the elementary school.  Helen and Gib's class played recorders together.  Gib also sang with the 3rd grade choir and Helen sang with the 4th/5th grade choir.

Thursday was the pinewood derby.  Gibson has been reading the Percy Jackson series so he painted a trident on his car.

 Here's a photo of his car racing.  He came in third place for the wolf den.

24 January 2016

We met with friends and made a stack of blankets for homeless teens for our 8th annual MLK Day of Service.  This is a photo of Luci and Abe.

Four families and an assortment of Abe's friends worked together.  We didn't get a great photo of the finished project, but here's a photo of some of the kids with some of the blankets.

Sofi got an official letter from the University of Utah offering her admission for fall 2016. The U is Sofi's first choice for college.

One of Sofi and her friends' favorite activities is dinner and a movie.  They work together to make a dinner and watch a movie that goes together thematically.  This Saturday they met at our house and cooked an Indian feast-- chicken curry, Indian scrambled eggs, basmati rice and naan.  Then they watched Khoobsurat, a delightful Bollywood fairytale.  In the photo, Josh and Patrick are cutting up onions while Gary cubes chicken.

 With ten teenagers taking up our kitchen space, Brandan took Abe, Helen and Gibson out to Target and dinner at a Mexican restaurant.  This is a photo of Abe trying on a goofy bicycle helmet.

 Gibson made himself breastplate/helmet combination armor on Sunday afternoon.

 Abe made an origami swan.  He folded about 180 pieces of paper into tiny triangles and assembled the triangles to make the swan.

17 January 2016

Brandan brought flowers and chocolate to Becky on Tuesday to mark the day when Becky had been married longer than she was single.  He called it "Greater Than" day.  This reminded Becky of Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 .  "Two are better than one."

 Abe made this paper cut in his Chinese class.  This is the sign for double happiness.  It's a common decoration used at Chinese weddings.

 Several high school helpers come each week to help Helen and Gib's class. One of them taught Helen how to knit.  This week she made a book mark and started on a headband.  

Sofi took a hip hop class this fall with her friends and one of her Young Women's leaders.  The class showed off their dance for their families this week.  They looked awesome!  From the left are Ireland, Nonie, Sidney (the dance teacher), Joey, Sofi and Tia (the leader).

10 January 2015

We celebrated Brandan's birthday on Monday!  You can calculate Brandan's age by solving his birthday math problem.  Abe made up the math problem this year.  The answer equals Brandan's age. If TEN + NET = 1191, then E(N+T)=?

On Tuesday we took invitations to Helen's friends for her birthday party.  Helen wanted a Harry Potter themed party.  We taped her invitations to white balloons.  Helen drew an owl on each balloon because the wizards in Harry Potter's world use owls to deliver messages.

Everyone in our family helped prepare for the birthday party.  Brandan and Helen frosted her birthday cake.

Gibson taped a humorous sign on the toilet in our powder room.  In the Harry Potter books, the entrance to the Ministry of Magic is disguised as a toilet.

Sofi made a list of guests to use during the party.

Sofi also set up a candy shop, renaming common candy with Harry Potter names.

The front door was decorated to look like platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross Station.  This is one of the magical entrances to the wizard world.

For the first activity, Sofi dressed as Professor McGonagall to help sort the guests into the 4 Hogwarts houses: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw.  

In the books, a magical hat decides which house each student will join.  The hat talks out loud after the student puts it on.  We made a hat with raggedy brown fabric. 

A walkie-talkie was hidden in the hat.  Abe hid outside and used another walkie-talkie to call out the name of the house each guest was sorted into.

After sorting, we went outside to play Quidditch, an excessively complicated wizarding sport.  Our version combined hide and seek, dodgeball and ultimate frisbee using styrofoam balls.  Gryffindor and Hufflepuff played Slytherin and Ravenclaw.  This is the Slytherin/Ravenclaw team: Sophie, Kate, Gibson, Helen and Clara.  Abe is not in the photo.

Here is the Gryffindor/Hufflepuff team: Paige, Annie, Addi, Brooke and Sofi.  Adele is behind Addi.

Saturday was a drizzly day, so we felt very lucky to have sunshine during our Quidditch match.  The kids figured out the rules pretty quickly and enjoyed the game.

Next up was potions class with potions master, Abe and his assistant, Gib.  Abe spent a few hours earlier in the week testing out dramatic demonstrations.  First they used a special potion to identify poisons. (Cabbage juice acid/base indicator.)

Then they created the dramatic and crowd-pleasing thestral toothpaste. (A mixture of yeast, dish soap and highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide.)

Finally Abe reformed snakes using powdered basilisk skin. (Burning powdered sugar and baking soda.)

Time for cake!

Here's a photo of all the guests enjoying cake and root beer floats.

Brandan added dry ice to the floats.

Sofi put some dry ice in a bowl of soapy water just for fun.

At the end of the party, everyone stopped by Hogsmeade to visit Honeydukes sweet shop.  It was a lovely party and the nicest part of it was everyone in our family helped bring Helen's wishlist to life.  We're looking forward to doing all our future parties together with our family party committee. 

3 January 2016

For family night this week, Abe gave each of us a paper plate, a straw and some masking tape and told us to build a turbine.  This is a photo of Gib using a fan to try to make his first design spin.  After a few more tries, Gib's design worked.

Here's Sofi with her design.  We learned the turbine spun best if the blades were angled.

Abe's turbine was the smallest and spun the fastest.

 Every year during Christmas break Sofi tries to read as much of the Harry Potter series as she can in one day.  This year she went to bed after finishing book 4 at 3 am.  She'll finish the rest at a slower pace over the next few days.  This is her 13th time to read the series.  She still laughs and cries her way through.  Gibson made the "do not disturb" sign and gave it to her for Christmas.

 Gibson started on his pine wood derby car this week.  He needed Becky's help to cut his car out.  Becky needed Gibson's help to turn the bandsaw on.  It's trickier than you might think.

 Helen turned 11 on Tuesday!  Helen has a very active mind.  She's in the middle of lots of projects and lots of books right now.

 Helen helped Becky make her rainbow birthday cake.

We went ice skating on New Year's Eve.  None of us are very good, but by the time we left we could all skate without holding on to the wall.

Sofi went to our stake New Year's Eve dance.  The rest of us celebrated by playing games, watching season 5 of the BBC series "Merlin," and making pizzelles.  Abe was our master pizzelle baker.

 We made vanilla pizzelles and gluten free chocolate ones.  We ate them with cool whip.  Delicious!

After working a 12 hour day, Brandan was ready for bed at 11 pm.  The rest of us made it to midnight.  We watched our neighbor's fireworks and took a selfie.

Helen and Abe stayed up even later to help Becky cook breakfast for a group of Sofi's friends.  They got to our house about 12:30 am.

The kids looked great even after hours of dancing.  Sofi DJ'd the dance so she got to play all her favorite music.  In the back row: Josh, AJ, Indie, Nonie, Joey, Mishawn and Sofi.  In the middle: Harrison and Denver.  In front: Gary, Patrick and Carson.

 Our home teachers gave us a 4-pack of puzzles for Christmas.  Abe finished all 4 puzzles in 5 days.  

Sofi saved all her Christmas break homework for Friday and Saturday.  Then she realized her Spanish teacher had assigned her class to practice on a Spanish language website for 5 hours!  She got it done (along with her Chinese homework, her psychology paper and her internship project) but this photo expresses her feelings as she worked on it.  Becky reminded her this was her last Christmas break to put off homework until the last minute.

 We woke up this morning to a dusting of snow.  Our state is coming out of a drought, so we love all the rain and snow we've had this winter.  Sofi, Abe and Helen slept in today (11 am church this year!)  Gib hurried out to play in the snow before it melted.  He threw snowballs at the others' windows to wake them up.

 This is Gib's itty bitty snowman.