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.
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