Quarantine Week 6

We do quiet time on Sundays where everyone spends one hour in their room working on a quiet activity. Tessa spent her time writing songs this week. This is one that she wrote for Mrs Smith. It broke my heart.

We made it through another week of school. It was a little rough for Rockwell to learn how to use a protractor to measure angles on the computer. The assignments on paper were much easier.

We spent a lot of time outside this week. It was great! We rode bikes over to the churches and played there for a while. There are two churches with a big grassy area between them. The kids love running sideways on the little ditch.

They rode bikes around the parking lots.


Rockwell practiced soccer.


And they love rolling down the hill.



Tessa and I planted flowers in our heart rock garden.




There were some flowers left over, so Rockwell planted those in a garden box.


Kyle drove up to Oregon for the weekend, and then Lindy and Jacob came back to Utah with him and are staying with Al's family. We met them and Mel and Grandma up at South Fork for a mostly-socially-distanced afternoon. :) It was so fun to see everybody again, and luckily the park was not crowded at all, so we had plenty of space to ourselves.





Tessa's new bike helmet was delivered this week, and she has worn it non-stop since. :)



Paul started on his new project, leveling the lawn in the front yard. First, he rented an aerator and a power raker. He aerated our lawn, and the rest of the yards in our cul-de-sac. He's a nice guy! :)

Rockwell loved helping him clean up the dead grass and dirt clods. Rock has always loved a big project to work on.

Next, he picked up some dirt to add to the lawn to level it.

All the kids have really enjoyed helping him spread it out across the grass. He will spread seed to fill in the grass and hopefully at the end of this whole process will have a nice, full, level yard.

It's always nice to have a drink in the shade. :)

Quarantine Week 5

I have been feeling like the more posts I do with the title Quarantine Week..., the more I feel like this is consuming our lives. So I wanted to do a post that wasn't titled that, and was just about something else entirely. I thought Easter would be that, and so I was getting ready to do a post just about Easter day. And then as I was looking at the pictures I had from that day, I realized that our quarantine, and all the effects of that, played into most of what our day was. I knew that even though I didn't give the post a title with "quarantine" in it, I would still talk a ton about it throughout the post, so why pretend like it isn't consuming our lives? So our Easter pictures will just be included in the Quarantine Week 5 post. :)

We woke up on Sunday and did our Easter baskets and egg hunt.

The kids were excited for their new pajamas and activities. There weren't too many eggs to find this year. The easter bunny was luckily able to get two kinds of candy from Amazon, but the candy he ordered from Walmart and from Smiths were all canceled. I'm not complaining about less candy, and neither did the kids, but it definitely did make the egg hunt super quick and not as much fun. They all wanted to get in their pajamas right away.

Tessa cracks me up in this picture. She did not like Rockwell putting his arm on her head. I love that even her hands are showing her annoyance. :)

Mrs Smith sent home an Easter bag for the kids last month, and Tessa was happy to have a fun surprise from her teacher.

We had the sacrament and our family night lesson, which were great. I did miss going to church for Easter Sunday though. I always enjoy the talks and lessons focused on Christ's atonement and resurrection. 

Tessa and Paul matched so nicely. :)

We did a few of the kids' new crafts that afternoon. 

We did Zoom family parties with the Ham and Clark families. It was sad to not get together with our families, but it was wonderful to see everyone over the computer. We even got to meet Kyle's girlfriend. Gary and Julie were on the call for a couple minutes, but then lost service since they were out on a hike. We loved getting to see EJ and hear about what things are like on the base for him.

We made sure to bring the Christmas Furbee to the Clark party. We had that as the only thing showing on our screen when the call began, but I'm pretty sure Cade was the only one who could see our screen at that point. At least Cade got a chuckle out of it. :) We all got some good laughs about Cade's and Gramps' frequent background changes too. Grandma Clark played a game of Who Gets It First. She would name an object and everyone would try to be the first to find it and show it to her. Tessa and Damon had moved on to other things at that point, but Rockwell thought that was really fun. The family also did a madlib with Rockwell. He loved that! The grandkids stayed on the call for a while after the adults left, and they all did a couple more madlibs. That definitely made Rockwell's night!

On Tuesday, Governor Herbert announced that schools would be closed for the remainder of this school year, and online learning would continue for the rest of that time. Rockwell said he was fine with that, now that he has his schoolwork figured out a little better and can complete it in less time than the beginning of this whole thing. Although that night he stopped talking to any of us, and I have no idea what upset him, so I'm not sure how fine he actually was with the news. Tessa was sad. She really misses her teacher and friends. I was fine with it that day, honestly I would have been shocked if they had let students go back that soon, but Wednesday I had a much harder time with it. I woke up grumpy, just tired of the monotony of our lives now. And then Mrs Smith cried through her morning message, and I just cried right along with her. And then cried at the drop of a hat the rest of the day. I'm not sure what my deal was, but I think I just needed to let myself feel all the loss. 

The kids are really doing well with their schoolwork. Mrs Roxi started making videos of her reading books to the kids, and Damon has loved seeing her.

She has sent home so many fun activities. This age is really hard for me to come up with learning activities, so I've been very grateful to have the ideas and supplies from Roxi.

Mrs Smith is still posting fun mini lessons and read alouds. She FaceTimes with Tessa once a week, and also does a class Google Hangout every week.

Rockwell's science teacher does some really fun lessons. He's loving learning about rocks and weathering and erosion.

We went for a family ride in the truck one evening.

Paul and Rockwell have been reading Freak the Mighty together. They're really enjoying that.

It's been a cold week, so the kids have had a lot of video game time. They love to play Minecraft and Rayman Legends together.

The weekend warmed up and they spent a lot of time outside making up games in the backyard. It was great to watch them have so much fun together.