2020 week 16: Quarantine week 5

There isn't much to write home about, though we were surprised by the snow last Tuesday. Charlotte played with some new nail polish from Easter, she and I got all her stuff put away (ish) in her new room. Also we've gotten past some of our aquarium issues and are enjoying our clean tank and our happy and hungry fish.

2020 week 15: Easter

We're still here (Where would we go?), doing our usual things like school work, real work, house work, yard work, and the occasional craft projects. Friday the 10th and Monday the 13th were technically the kids' spring break so they've had slightly less work to do lately. S'mores continue to be a highlight!

2020 week 14: Zoom meetings and painting

We must be relatively accustomed to this stay at home situation now, because we survived and were even able to fit in a project over the weekend. After a couple weeks of no scout events, the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts both decided to start Zoom meetings. Gabe's fourth grade homeroom also started optional weekly meetings. School work went much more smoothly the second week, both from an organizational perspective and a motivational one. For the boys, who are mostly on their own, they are challenging themselves to complete the workload in few days. For Charlotte I realized that copying text from the computer and printing "worksheets" was much easier and quicker to do than reading from the computer. Frank seems to be able to work pretty well from home, even when kids go down to the basement to play.

Other activities included making tracks for hexbugs (or as Charlotte says, "hex-a-bugs"), video game and phone time with friends (see photo of Zach), and searching the neighborhood for Easter eggs. Participating families get three eggs to hide in their yards, visible from the street, and a few who find and photograph the most by Easter will win prizes. We also had a movie night to watch Onward. It was pretty good...you can always count on Disney/Pixar to make you tear up!

Thursday and Friday we moved everything out of Charlotte's room to paint. Saturday I painted the ceiling and primed the walls, Sunday we painted the walls, and by Sunday night we had Gabe's bed in his new room. Yesterday I moved the rest of his stuff, and Charlotte is still working on her gigantic room, but there will be pictures. In between coats of paint we planted flower seeds we'd been collecting from Gabe's plant since last summer. It was nice to get a bunch of stuff crossed off the list!

using up leftover paint and primer!