This is a hectic week. Actually, it feels like most weeks are hectic during this phase of our life. Sean and Kathy and the boys arrived last Saturday for a weeklong visit. They also offered to watch our children so that we could get away for a night! This was very generous, and it took some persuasion, but they talked us into it. We went to Ogden on Saturday afternoon and came back on Sunday about midday. This is the first time since the twins were born that we have spent the night without taking care of them. It was a great trip, and it felt like we were away for a much longer period of time. We had a fantastic dinner at Hanamaru and stayed at the Alaskan Inn. We were surprised to find that the other two sushi restaurants we considered were completely full. On one hand it was Saturday night. On the other hand, we didn’t expect to find so much going on in Ogden.

Sunday night was cold and incredibly windy. There have been a few days since we moved here in which we experienced strong winds that can make the east-facing rooms very cold. On Monday morning we noticed that the temperature in the house was about 10 degrees below the thermostat setting. Chris is too overwhelmed at work to troubleshoot these problems anymore so we called the home warranty company and they sent someone to the house in the afternoon. The repairman discovered that the air intake from the outside was obstructed by a tennis ball, along with some sticks and dirt. The air intake is a PVC pipe that is slightly larger than a tennis ball and is coincidentally at a height that is easily reachable by all of the children. It is also coincidental that the twins went to Discovery Gateway last week and thoroughly enjoyed playing in a room where you put balls into pipes. However, this isn’t proof of the culprit(s), and we are planning to line up the six suspects to get to the bottom of this.

Sean left Sunday afternoon for a conference at Sundance which wraps up about midday on Tuesday. Amy Silliman, a close friend of Chris’, is visiting Salt Lake from New Zealand and we went to the zoo with her in the afternoon on Monday and then she came over for dinner. Chris left Tuesday morning for a conference in Cologne, returning Sunday. That means that for the next few days the ratio of children to adults will vary between 2-3 to 1. To put this in perspective it’s useful to think about how many different groupings are possible among 6 children: 56. And each child wants some interaction with each adult, which increases the number of possible interactions by a factor of 4 if all adults are home. This doesn’t include adult-adult interactions because these generally aren’t possible while the children are awake. It’s useful to view it this way to quantify the constant buzz of activity that occurs when the children are together. It is never dull, and we feel a deep sense of gratitude that we can spend this time with our friends and family.