February 12-19th Notes: In Which We Get Sick

Our simple Valentine's Table

Friday: We had a pretty normal school day. Kids finished math for the week, language arts, and so on. Everyone chose a topic to notebook about and made a page for their history notebooks. Emma was not feeling well, and a few other kids were starting to get some congestion. My husband has had some congestion this week, no other symptoms, so we figured it was just a cold. Then my husband called right before dinner because he's lost his sense of taste and smell. Yep. He tested positive for COVID. We're now all in quarantine while we watch this run its course. Several kids are a day or two behind daddy in symptoms, with the congestion and early stages already started. Apparently February is the month of crazy medical things for us. 

Saturday: Quarantine life is pretty quiet. We played games. Watched a movie. Rested. Played more games. You get the idea. I'm sure this week's blog will be fascination variations on this theme.

Sunday: Church today was wonderful via Zoom. We were able to hear from a young man who is leaving home to serve a mission for two years, sharing the gospel with others. After church we kept to our quiet routine. I had, thankfully, picked up a few things for Valentine's Day just before breaking my foot, so we decorated the table and spent time laughing and talking. 

Monday: Snow and cold outside left us inside staying warm. Well, actually, the weather looked more like this: snow, nothing, rain, hail, rain, snow, snow, snow. We took the day off school for President's Day - or just because we can. Several older kids and I played our first ever games of Pandemic. It was really fun, but definitely a game for older kids. The irony is not lost on me as we are dealing with the current pandemic. We have 6 sick right now, most of us mild symptoms. 

Other random things that kept people entertained today:

•  Battleship
• Coding our robot Cosmo
• Laser tag battles
• Piano practice and someone composing new music
• Cooking and chores, of course.
• Reading lots of books
• Lego building
• Scripture study
• Video chatting with our college daughter
• Writing a book review (me)

Tuesday: Jason and Emma, who were the first with symptoms, and the worst, finally started feeling a little tiny bit better today. A few of us are still getting worse, but this gives me hope that this illness won't last for weeks on end! Our day was basically a repeat of Monday, lots of games, lots of rest, lots of reading. We are taking this entire week off of school, but that doesn't keep the kids from learning. They all have their own favorite things to do and learn about in their free time. 

Wednesday: We realized some of our pipes were frozen. It only happens in especially frigid weather, and such it is today. The pipes? The ones to our washer. We set up a heater to reach the area in the basement and a few hours later things were thawed out. Thankfully, we do laundry daily to keep up on things, because with this many people we have a load a day ready to wash pretty easily. 

Thursday: Some people are well on their way to recovery, others are not. It's the usual large family with illness, it drags out a bit between the entire family. Those of us who have lost their sense of taste/smell are not terribly interested in eating. As part of our Come Follow Me/family scripture study this week, today we watched A Day for the Eternities. This is a video you can watch at the Whitmer Farm church history site in New York.  

Friday: We are still in our quiet quarantine. People are starting to get along less. It feels like we are juggling kids in the house trying to get everyone a little space from everyone else. It would be nice if the weather was warmer and we could at least spend some time in the back yard. Daddy teamed up with Mason and they set up an obstacle course for Botley. Botley is a robot you can program (totally screen free, which is awesome!) to tackle different tasks. They worked through the obstacle course step by step, coding Botley. (Mason got Botley 2.0 for his birthday last month.) 

We got a few magazines in the mail today, which was a fun distraction for the kids. Our March issues of The Friend, For the Strength of Youth, and The Liahona came. These call all be read free online or on the Gospel Library app, but we also love getting print copies in the mail. 

Well, I'm going to go rest some more until dinner time. Have a lovely weekend friends!

Feb. 1-Feb. 11: Mama Out of Commission

 February has been eventful in a not so fun way. On February 2nd I broke my right foot. There is never a good time for a mom to be out of commission, is there? The break is pretty bad, the fifth metatarsal broke in a 'jones fracture'. This kind of break doesn't heal well, due to poor blood flow in the area. My doctor said I have to be completely non-weight bearing for at least 5 weeks, and possible up to 3 months. Even then, it may not heal. If it doesn't, I will need surgery to put a screw in. The placement of my break would put the screw in a place that would cause pain to walk for the rest of my life. Yuck! So I'm being super good at following the doctor's orders about staying off my foot, and we will check it by x-ray every 2 weeks. 

As you can imagine, this makes daily life complicated. Friends let us borrow a wheelchair they have, so I'm able to get around the main floor of our home somewhat. The kids have all had to pitch in and help with nearly everything. They are doing really well, and so grateful that chore have always been a regular part of their day. They are running the house pretty well. Our church families have been bringing us dinner each evening, which is a blessing! My husband is gone from 3:30am-6pm most work days, then heads to bed at 8pm so he can get up again for work. 

The hardest part is the afternoon medical care for Mason, which I still have to do because none of the kids can do it, and bedtime, when I'm crawling around upstairs between bedrooms getting the little two kids to sleep. They won't go to sleep for a sibling. Oh well, it's great to be wanted, right? We're doing it, and we're finding a routine that is working. 

The one constant has been homeschooling, and I'm so grateful for that part of our day feeling normal. I can sit at the table in the wheelchair and teach just fine. I think a few of the kids were a little bummed to realize that - ha! However, the routine is good for everyone.

Yesterday the kids decided we needed to do our art project early this week. We pulled out the salad spinner and did spin art with paint dripped onto construction paper hearts. Our table is now covered in pretty hearts. We are still doing Beginning Chemistry. This week we've been studying the clues to a chemical reaction, which was a perfect time to make elephant toothpaste. In history today we reached the Battle of the Alamo. The kids had never studied this before, so it was fascinating and sad to learn about. Next we'll move into stagecoaches and the Pony Express. 

I think that's enough of an update for now!

November 2020-January 2021: Catching Up On Life

It has been months since I blogged. I found this post sitting in my draft folder and decided to add a few more notes and post it. Enjoy!

Sunday, November 22 was home church and family time. Rest and preparing for a trip to pick up the college girl.

Monday and Tuesday we did a couple of art projects. There were nutcracker drawings, gingerbread houses drawn with glue/white paint, and paper mittens cut out and painted. We used burlap to do some yarn weaving (aka. embroidery). 

Wednesday - At 5:00am Emma and I climbed into the car and started driving to Virginia. We had a whirlwind day to go pick up Makayla at college and bring her home for the holidays. She will do online classes/exams for the last two weeks of this semester, and will not head back to Virginia until mid-January when next semester begins. It took us 14 hours to get to Makayla and back home, a long day of driving. 

Thursday was Thanksgiving. Our morning and afternoon were pretty laid back, just enjoying time as a family. In the evening my sister's family and my mom and her husband came over for dinner. We had a great, noisy time talking, eating, and laughing together. 

Friday Jason was back at work. The kids and I played more games today - Gubs, Farkle, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, and Harry Potter Headbanz. We ate leftovers, so there wasn't even a lot of cooking to do today. 

Saturday morning was just relaxed family time. In the early afternoon Grandma came over and we all headed to the zoo. We had a plan - see lots of animals and stay long enough to see the holiday lights show. It was a great trip. Favorite animals seen today according to the kids were the elephants, seals, red pandas, a silver variant of the red fox, and the rescued baby manatee. 

Sunday November 29th it felt like I was in the kitchen more than usual, though I really wasn't. Lunch was beef fajitas. Yum! Dinner was potato soup made in the instant pot. We also put up our Christmas tree today. 

Monday it rained and snowed all day. It didn't change over to only snow until evening. Today was our last day of Thanksgiving break. We played a lot, cleaned a fair amount, and finally moved the last of the kids' shorts out of their drawers and into the attic. Dinner tonight was pancakes, because we finished off the batch of pancakes in the freezer last week. We make up a giant batch, eat what we want, and then freeze the rest for easy breakfasts. 

We finally finished listening to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire! We started the first Harry Potter book in March at the beginning of quarantine. We have now ready the first four books as a family. We won't read the rest of the books aloud, as they get a bit dark for our younger kids. Now we need to choose our next read aloud.

Tuesday morning we woke to a couple inches of snow. It was beautiful but cold. We did a morning of school work. The kids doing geology decided to add in an art project after learning about agates. Out came the watercolors and salt, and beautiful agates were painted. 

In the afternoon we voted on our next read aloud. We had 5 options:

• The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang
• Enola Holmes: The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer
• The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

We had each person rank the books in order from 1 (want to read next) to 5 (not interested in reading). Then we did some math with the votes and found out which book won. Actually - we had a tie for first place, with The Hobbit and The Reluctant Dragon each receiving 19 points. That meant looking at how many #1 votes each received, and The Reluctant Dragon slid into first place. As that book is only 53 minutes long, we will then quickly move into listening to The Hobbit after that. 

Wednesday was school work. Kids wrote, drew, read, computed, and explored topics they love and topics they are less enthusiastic about. In the evening we had a surprise delivery of snowman soup packets (hot cocoa with marshmallows and candy canes). 

Thursday we trudged through school as quickly as we could, before I took Emma to the orthodontist. She is getting ever closer to finishing her time in braces. In the late afternoon our new freezer arrived, replacing one that was 20 years old and falling apart. Lots of minor rearranging commenced, in an attempt to find a good place to put things. 

Missing weeks! Lots of them. I know we did school, had holidays, and so on

A few December notes:

Our month has had simple home-centered moments of fun. I'll just list a few:

• Roasting hot dogs and smores over a fire.
• A lot of board games and card games.
• The last birthday of the year - Emma turned 15. My kids officially will begin 2021 at the following ages: 2, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19. Of course, not even two weeks into January we start the birthday rounds again. Ha!
• Baking days: muffins, banana bread, cookies, scones, cakes, peanut butter pie, cinnamon rolls, bread, rolls, and more. 
• Decorating the tree. And redecorating it daily as the younger kids remove all the ornaments they can reach, and put them back on. 
• Christmas was wonderful. Some family members send gifts for the kids from other states, so we were able to spread out gift opening a bit, which the kids find much less overwhelming. 

JANUARY NOTES

In January we sorted our games. We love playing games.
We now have more than 130 games, all of which we 
play at different times.

 Mason turned 9 years old. He had a fun birthday and got some neat gifts that give him lots to do, like this magnet lab and a book in a series he likes.

We soaked up every moment of family time we could with Makayla. She bought a car. That led to a crazy trip to take her back to college with 2 vehicles (hers, plus ours so we could get home) with Daddy, Daniel, Makayla, and me. Each car had 2 people in it, one driver and one person to keep the driver awake on the drive. At every stop we rotated drivers or vehicles or both. It was a safe and uneventful trip to Virginia and back in one day. 

We started back up to school after our two week Christmas break. We've moved into a new unit in history (westward expansion) and are reading Redwood Pioneer aloud. The non-high school kids are doing Beginning Chemistry from The Good and the Beautiful, having finished up the Geology unit in December.

We also decided that for the winter we need Art Project Fridays. Basically, we will work on mom-led art projects on Fridays. There is a lot of art going on outside of that, but the kids like the Deep Space Sparkle art projects I have filed away.

This month we focused on learning about graffiti, studied different well known graffiti artists and their work, discussed legality of art on public property without invitation, and learned about typography.

This project took three Fridays to complete. On the first class we sponge painted the spray painted the background papers. Then the kids chose their word to draw in pencil.

On the next Friday they used paint pens to graffiti the backgrounds. 

The final Friday they used oil pastels to color their tag (big feature word), cut it out, and glued it to the graffiti background.  

Emma got her braces off. Three kids have now made it through the braces process, with more yet to go.

The other thing that has been happening a lot is Lego creating. I snapped this picture of a UFO beaming up a cow that Daniel made this month. 

I'll share some February updates soon.