House O' Sullivans

One of the few things that works in disciplining Hallee is to send her outside.  If she is out of control, I'll put her in the backyard and tell her that she can re-enter the house when she is calm, ready to treat everyone with respect, apologize, etc.  In the winter, I make sure that she is wearing boots and a coat before she heads out.  It works amazing well, and it is always her decision to come back in and she is always totally normal when she does.  It is like the reset button for her.  Often she'll just wander around the backyard for a few minutes, go check on her chickens, then come back in the house like nothing ever happened, calm and pleasant and sweet. Tonight she was torturing Sophie after I'd put them to bed.  She has a little swan that honks when you press its abdomen and she had it on speed-honk.  I told her that she'd lose it for the night if she made it honk one more time.  Of course, being Hallee, she immediately made it honk a...

It's been an interesting week.   We started things out right with a Yakimandu Fest.  My dad lived in Korea for a year and a half while he was stationed there with the Air Force back in the 1970's.  Instead of living on base, he elected to live among the Korean people, gaining an appreciation for their culture and their food.  It was there that he learned the fine art of yaki mandu making and instilled the yaki-love into his children.  Growing up, we regularly gorged ourselves on it.  We've made it a few times before at the Sullivan house, but this week Sophie, Hallee, and Zeke joined in the actual production. We produced and consumed sixty of these puppies. Sophie made a respectable contribution, making dozens of yaki mandu, but as soon as I heated up the oil, she wanted to be part of that action.  Hot oil and 6-year-olds aren't particularly compatible, but she was so adamant about helping that I reluctantly allowed it on the condition that...

To define what it is to live in a haze, here are a few stats for January in Salt Lake: The average temperature was 18.8 degrees--the fifth coldest January since 1874.  Since 1874!! Last month we experienced a whopping 22 days of red alert air quality in the Salt Lake Valley.  Yuck. We pretty much all have black lung and will be filling the hospitals in a few years with our lung cancers. AND, we've had tons of snow that hasn't melted.  It just keeps piling up.  As I write, my front yard sits under about two and a half feet of it.  (It was the 13th snowiest January since 1874--when someone started keeping records.) On the frigid days, when the air is thick with particulates, we sequester ourselves inside and make our own fun.  Any day with clean air, we get outside and find something to do.  On two occasions over the past month I've barbecued in the backyard.  Why?  Because the air was clean and it was above freezing and it FELT like su...

The yurt was COLD when we arrived on Thursday afternoon.  Sophie, apparently not noticing how cold it really was, thinking that now she was INSIDE of something that SHOULD be warm, threw off all of her warm layers and sat there shivering and bewildered.  Casey quickly lit a fire in the wood burning stove, and while he stoked it, the kids huddled under "Bucky," one of the sheepskins that we'd brought along.  (Bucky was a sheep that Casey raised in high school.  There ARE benefits to marrying an FFA man.)  Every frigid expedition should have a few Buckys on hand. Zeke, Soph, and Hal with Casey's beloved "Bucky" Zeke cocooned into a down sleeping bag with his "Bear-Bear" while we waited for the yurt to get toasty After the yurt was sufficiently warm and circulation returned to our extremities, Casey and the girls started in on the card games that our friend Ginny gave the kids for Christmas.  (A boxed set including Snap!, Go Fish, Me...