Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Quarantine Life

We kept on enjoying quarantine life. I don't remember when they made more changes but they cancelled school until May 1st, and then later they cancelled it for the rest of the year. Church is cancelled, temples went from closed for proxy work to closed period, missionaries are being sent home from all over the world (although Josh is still out in Sweden), all sports are cancelled, including professional sports. All public events are closed, all public places are closed, you can't go to any restaurant except to get take out. It's so strange! We keep telling our kids they are living through history and nothing like this has ever happened before.

Mckinley made some fun origami as part of school (specialty stuff).

Tyler and Kallie had a fun writing assignment where they had to make creative sandwiches like Carla in a book, and write about it. They had a blast and their sandwiches were actually really yummy, as weird as they sounded.

We did some PE with some youtube videos.

Jackson is getting big. He started scooting and then crawling. He's going to be walking and talking before this quarantine is over!


The kids teachers did a parade and drove through our neighborhood. It was so fun to see them.




Quarantine life feels like a party and we pretty much do a movie night with treats every night. All the late nights are starting to catch up with Ava and she is falling asleep all over the place.



I have only done a few puzzles during this last month and a half which is strange, but I've just been so busy homeschooling the kids and having everyone around all the time that I don't feel like I have the spare time I used to.

Enjoying more good weather outside.




One day I took the kids to Ross's backyard for a lunch picnic. Ross is the only person we associated with at all during the quarantine because Karen left and went to Texas to help Chandra with a new baby and we felt really bad for Ross. It was fun spending lots of time with him.

A science experiment we did with m&m's and water.



I took the kids on 1:1 walks around the neighborhood to be able to chat with them and see how they feel about their new lives with Coronavirus taking over the world.

Kallie and Tyler do a google chat with their teacher and a few classmates every week.

Been spending lots and lots of time stretching my wrist trying to get my mobility back and massaging the incisions trying to get the scar tissue to go down. Long, slow process but I'm getting there.

Friday, March 20, 2020

Quarantine: Week 1

So we had a few days of knowing that school was cancelled but still not having any real school assignments for the kids. So it kind of felt like vacation and we enjoyed all the family time together having Brandon working from home but no other responsibilities really. We were trying to be really good and stay home and not see anyone. Here are some cute pictures of the randomness.


Mckinley was making menus and serving the kids their meals.

On roller skates even!


We have been playing with lots of legos.

The kids wanted to have food at the kids table so we brought it in and it has been really nice to have that since our regular kitchen table is usually covered in school stuff or legos.

Family selfie. We were really enjoying all the family time! (I am updating this blog over a month later so it's a little tricky to remember back to what we were thinking at the time.) I mean we are still totally enjoying the family time but this whole Coronavirus pandemic is much more long lasting and serious than we first thought.

We took the kids that Saturday evening to play at the church and boy are we glad we did because we tried to go back on Monday and we were locked out. They disabled church keys unless you are in a bishopric or stake presidency. Lame. So no more fun inside the church gym for a while.




Pictures of the empty shelves at the store. Totally eerie and so weird to live through something like this.




Brandon went to Costco and the line was out wrapped around the building. They were only letting a certain number of people in the store at a time and everyone was lining up 6 feet apart from each other.

The first bunch of Sundays at home were awesome. Mckinley and Kallie planned sacrament meetings for us which pretty much consisted of songs, and the sacrament. And that's it. But it was really nice. We gave up on church after Easter and haven't really done it since (today is April 26).


Shannon got me a diamond art kit which I finished in like 2 days. I get so addicted to these things!

We started playing games together as a family. We played a bunch of Sushi Go and kind of got sick of it. We played scrabble too.


We have been able to spend lots of time playing on the playgrounds across the street. Our sweet empty nester neighbors have given us full access to their yards and with the Coronavirus, their grandkids aren't visiting them so the playgrounds are only used by us. Which has been really nice because by now all the public playgrounds are taped off and closed.

I was feeling like I should get out and take the kids somewhere so we decided to go feed the ducks at Nelson's Grove and the entire pond was emptied! It was so weird. The whole world got shut down because of Coronavirus, Then we had this earthquake in Utah. It was a 5.7 earthquake and it shook our house even though it happened in Magna. Then I went and saw the empty pond and I was like man, it's the end of the earth! Ha ha. But really, times felt so strange.



We went to the school and picked up supplies for the kids and started online school from home. The twins get quite a lot of work from Mrs. Heaps and Mckinley doesn't get enough from Mrs. Wilbur but that's okay, I just add to hers and skip a little of theirs.