29 January 2017

Abe's Chinese teacher sent us photos of her class practicing calligraphy.  From the left are Jake, Abe and Ashton.

Gibson's class has been studying Native Americans since the beginning of the school year.  They ended their studies on Tuesday with a pow wow where they presented everything they learned.  Gibson's group explained what dreamcatchers are and how to make one.  From the left are Jayden, Collin and Gibson.

The Young Women in our ward gave us a heart attack on Wednesday.  Or maybe they heart attacked us? We don't know the correct term.

Brandan was out of town Wednesday night so we left the hearts up for him to see when he got home.

Sofi wrote a letter to President Obama back in 2009.  She got a nice letter from his office a short time later thanking her for her letter.  This week she got her second letter from the White House.  Becky asked her permission to open the second letter and read it.  It looks like President Obama sent this letter to everyone who wrote to him during the 8 years he was president.  It's an eloquent statement of thanks and a reminder of the responsibilities of citizenship.

The long awaited pinewood derby race was Thursday night.  Gibson painted his car to match his Halloween costume.

 Here's a close up of his car.

 Abe built a car to race in the family races.  He calls his car the Moo Mobile.

 Here's a close up of Abe's car.

Abe took some photos of the races.  Here's Gibson's car.

 Gibson's car took a nosedive off the top of the track at the beginning of his third race.  You can see it hitting the floor on the right of the track.  He got to repeat this race.

 Here's Abe racing during the family races.  We had more girls from our ward build cars than boys.  The activity day girls had a great time racing their cars.

Once a month Gibson's class holds a marketplace.  Each student thinks of a good or service to sell.  They choose what to sell and how much to sell it for.  They use classroom money, not real money.  They set up their storefronts on their desks and spend about an hour buying and selling.  Gibson likes to make crafts to sell.  This month he made monster bookmarks.

Last month Gibson made wobble egg ninjas.  This was his most successful marketplace day because he sold out.  

 Our home teachers gave our kids prizes for completing a quiz about the apostles.  Abe's prize was a 750 piece puzzle.  Abe finished the puzzle this afternoon.

 Gibson's prize was a 300 piece puzzle.  He also finished his puzzle this afternoon.  He spent a lot of time chasing Abe and Helen away from his puzzle because he wanted to work on it himself.  Our home teachers gave Helen a scrapbook that she is happily filling with mementos.

22 January 2017

On Monday we pushed all our furniture to the walls to make room for our annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service.   Two other families joined us.  We made fewer, bigger blankets this year.  Here's a photo of Rebeka and Helen finishing up a blanket.

Abe completed most of a blanket by himself.

We put toys in the library for the little kids, but some of the big kids ended up there while the littlest girl kept busy by walking back and forth across the blankets.

On Wednesday the Activity Day girls returned to paint their pinewood derby cars.  They've loved building the cars and it has been fun to see their creativity.  We're looking forward to the derby next week!

 Brandan went with the Young Women for their mutual activity this week.  The girls met at a food bank and packed food boxes for families in need.  The food was collected at a variety of canned food drives during the holidays.  Clockwise from the lower left are Nina, Emma, Rachel, Eliza, Emily, Haylee, Jamie, Mackenzie, Brooke, Taryn, Mia, Renna and Helen.

 Brandan, Helen and Gibson drove up into the mountains on Saturday for the cub scout Snowcapades.  The stop signs look a lot bigger when you're standing next to them.

 The kids practiced building fires.

 They walked a course on snowshoes and went on a lot of sled runs.  Helen and Gibson are easy to spot with their bright orange hats under their helmets.

 Here's Helen standing under snow falling from tree branches.

 We had dinner Saturday night with Masood and his daughters, Ari and Desi.  We enjoyed a delicious Persian meal that ended with Sholeh Zard.  It's a rice pudding flavored with rose water and saffron.  It's served with elaborate designs of cinnamon, pistachios and almonds on top.  Mason's daughters had fun with their designs.  This is a Pokemon ball.

 Gib's pudding had the symbol from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on top.  

15 January 2017

Becky found this in a book she checked out from the library.  She thought it might be a hoax, but she turned it in just in case.  It was a real golden ticket and her prize was. . . a $2 gift certificate to the Friends of the Library bookstore.  Yup, two whole dollars.  It was more fun to just have the golden ticket and imagine what it might be worth (library fines erased, a free book, a trip to Hawaii).

 As Activity Day leaders, Becky and her partner, Ranae, have talked for the past couple of years about holding a pinewood derby race for our activity day girls.  It turns out our ward's pinewood derby track takes about 2 hours to set up and no one is interested in setting it up just for fun.  This year we finally figured it out.  We're going to hold our derby after the cub scouts finish on the same night.  Since the derby is at the end of the month, we're spending our meetings in January helping the girls build cars.  We had 8 girls over Wednesday night.  Five other girls met at another member's house.  Clockwise from the top are Ranae, Sarah, Annie, Georja and Ayla.

 We pulled out some of Abe's and Gibson's old cars for inspiration.  There are hundreds of photos of cars on the internet, but we didn't want the girls to be discouraged with images of perfect cars.

Once the girls decided on a design, Becky helped them cut their cars out.  

 Brandan helped them use a power sander to take the saw marks out.

Gibson got started on his car the same night.  We love trying new things.  The first night was a success.  Next week we'll paint the cars.

 On Friday we put Abe's portable ping pong net on our dining table and held a family ping pong tournament.  In this photo Brandan keeps score while Helen and Gib play.

 Here's Abe returning the ball.

 Here are the results of the tournament.  After Brandan won, we played around the world for a long time, which was great fun since all 5 of us could play at once.

8 January 2017

Our kids were supposed to go back to school on Tuesday.  However, school was canceled because of snow.  Our kids enjoyed playing outside in the snow all day.  Here's a photo of Gibson defending his snow fort.  

 Kids in Oregon don't necessarily dress for the weather.  Here are Tate, Colton and Abe.

Packs of kids roamed the neighborhood all day, looking for snowball fights and enjoying the unexpected free day.  Back row: Lily, Hannah, Sophie, Nayha and Clara.  Front row: Lucy, Shraya and Helen.

Here's a photo of the same pack down by the creek.

Some of the girls went back to Sophie and Clara's house to warm up.  From the left are Helen, Sophie, Hannah, Lily, Clara and Lucy.

It continued to snow all through the night.  We woke up Wednesday morning to almost 8 inches-- the most snow to fall here since December 11, 1919.  The wet snow pulled down branches on two of our trees.  Brandan cut the broken limbs off.  We'll wait until Spring to decide what to do with the trees.  School was canceled again.  Brandan had a day of meetings scheduled for work and they were canceled, too.

Thursday and Friday brought freezing temperatures.  Our area only has a few snowplows so the ruts of snow in the roads froze into solid ice.  The schools had no way to clear their parking lots and driveways so school was canceled for the rest of the week.  For Abe, Helen and Gibson, the week went something like this-- sleep in, get work done as quickly as possible, play outside until you are frozen (or in Helen's case, past frozen), drink hot cocoa, watch superhero movies, The Flash or The Arrow, stay up far past bedtime.  This extra week of vacation may have been the most fun for the kids.

 Our neighbors' driveway is the nearest sledding hill.

 The kids loved sliding on the ice.

Abe and Gibson finished the puzzle we started before Christmas.

We celebrated Brandan's birthday on Wednesday.  His clinic closed Thursday and he spent his days off doing some of the things he likes best, checking in on friends and neighbors, spinning doughnuts in the car with the kids and talking late with Sofi.

Becky created a new math puzzle for Brandan's birthday.  Here's a little background information first.  Sofi took an astronomy course this semester and learned about the Arecibo telescope.  The world's largest single-dish radio telescope scans the sky for signals from faraway galaxies.  In 1974, it sent the first intentional message into outer space with the purpose of contacting extraterrestrial life.  The message was a series of alternating tones that could be interpreted as binary code (ones and zeros.)

If an alien could receive the transmission and if they realized the tones could be represented with ones and zeros and if they drew the ones and zeros on a grid, they would obtain this image.  And if they had extraordinary skills of perception, intuition and many lucky guesses, the aliens would learn about counting to ten in binary, the most common elements on earth, the building blocks of DNA, the population of the earth, what humans look like, a map of the solar system, what the radio telescope looks like and a bunch of other things.   We think the scientists who sent the message were wildly optimistic.  Sofi's professor prepared this website that describes the graphic in detail.  This website also has a good description of the message. 

With the Arecibo message as inspiration, Becky created a code for Brandan.  The code is shown on the strip of paper at the bottom of the photo.  Brandan successfully decoded the message which resulted in the image on the graph paper. 

While Sofi was home (she's back at school now) she got her mission papers ready to turn in.  She'll turn them in later this month.  We started our Book of Mormon club.  The members of the club are going to read the Book of Mormon before Sofi leaves on her mission.  She put her eligibility date as May 19 so we read 4 pages a day to stay on track.