Day 410

 Will and I enjoy doing his schoolwork outside sometimes. 

Seedlings are sprouting in the new garden. 

Lexa took some nice pictures in the yard. 

She built a Little Rock house.

Easter

We had a nice Easter at our house again.  The kids had their egg hunt and Easter baskets. Lexa wore her dress I made with the smocking. We dyed eggs. We couldn’t get dye ordered in time at the last minute, but found out that the gel food coloring I had and vinegar worked great. Hugh and Will love hard boiled eggs and wanted to eat them as soon as they were dyed. 

There they go hunting for eggs!

The lamb cake is sitting up for the first time! Not even any repairs needed. He’s a pound cake. Will did a good job criscoing the pan and it came out pretty easy. People eating the neck, face and ears: beware of toothpicks! 

Then we forgot to eat him. We ate lunch late because he was in the oven and we couldn’t put the ham in. After we finally ate a nice lunch of ham, hard boiled eggs and easy prepared sides from HEB we watched Mighty Ducks for some reason. Then we noticed it was getting late so we hurried to start playing the dungeons and dragons game we’d promised Timmy for his birthday. That lasted all evening. The kids went downstairs to grab some leftover pizza while we played. Then when we were getting ready for bed, I saw the lamb still sitting there!

 

Timmy’s 14th Birthday

 

Timmy turned 14 Saturday. That seems crazy, what happened to year 13??

He wanted an ice cream cake and pizza. We gave him some books, legos, a big transformer figure he’s wanted for years. (He’s so big but, there’s still that little boy he was in there too!) 

We let him watch all of the Wandavision show. (We’d watched it without him because he never had his schoolwork done and passing his classes on Fridays last fall.)

I told him I’d play a dungeons and dragons game with him, but we didn’t get to that until Sunday because we were watching all of the Wandavision shows. 

The ice cream cake was very hard to cut! The whole piece kept picking up from Hugh’s fork. He made a “card” for Timmy in which he was very specific about what special animals he drew on it, and he kept telling us the hearts on it are for love. He couldn’t wait to give it to him.

2nd quarantine spring break

 Spring is here. Hugh really wanted to plant a garden so we hoed up all the grass in a sunny spot in the backyard, and Patrick built some garden bed boxes and then hauled a truckload of garden soil into them. Hugh planted his seeds, and we’re all waiting anxiously for them to sprout.

Will wanted to eat lots of vegetables on planting day.

We’ve also gone on many walks in the nice weather and,also at Hugh’s urging, we went for a hike yesterday. He wore his hiking vest and brought a compass along. 

They were enthralled watching a baby bird on the sidewalk.

Playing catch at the park

They buried themselves in the sand volleyball pit.

Quarantine day 374

Just looking through what we’ve been up to lately.

Timmy made a Minecraft creeper with his 3D pen.

Lexa dressed up Hugh.

Lexa made an elaborate Lego house, adding to it over a week or so.

Hugh did his own workout while Patrick did his.

 

Hugh is always asking me what if I were different things questions lately, “What if you were a cow?” What if you were a tree, Mommy?” 

Lexa made something with dirt and leaves.

She participated in a virtual Destination Imagination group with her school this year. They had many meetings and created a video of them acting out a video game for the challenge this year, and they won 4th place! We’re very proud of them. 

I sometimes take the kids to the park to play in the trees there. 

 And finally, a Lego ice cream shop

Snowpocolypse 2021: Quarantine, but now add survival skills

It started with an ice storm on Valentine’s Day. 

It got super cold!

I made it for a last minute grocery pickup as it started.  There were icicles on the backup camera.

Patrick cooked us heart ribeyes, and Lexa made a chocolate cake. 

Apparently Hugh thought the ice looked good to eat.

This tree draped down to make a neat cave.

Frozen flag

Then the snow started. It was about a foot deep, more than I’ve ever experienced in Texas in my life. The kids bundled up and explored the winter wonderland everyday for a week. It was cold!

Lexa really likes finding big icicles.

The heavy ice tree hung way down over Patrick’s truck. Fortunately the branch didn’t break all the way through.

We had some long stretches without power up to about 8 hours. It got down to 50 F in the house. The kids were forbidden from opening the door or the refrigerator during them! I’m glad that Patrick had stocked up our pantry during the early days of the pandemic. Even when the power was on, you never knew if it would go off in the middle of cooking, so all the granola bars and protein shakes came in handy!

Will’s Headlamp that he loves to wear also came in handy! We never lost water, and no pipes broke. The first day we had the pantry door closed, and the washing machine pipe froze in there next to the door to the garage, but we were able to thaw it running one of our space heaters from cowboy town in there while the power was on. The only thing that broke was the garage door because parts of it had been glued instead of bolted together. We got that fixed after the storm. We were very lucky. A few blocks north of us in Leander had no water for days. Sara had no power at all for days and then had to boil water. That was something to not only be sequestered because of the pandemic but also to be iced in from even driving anywhere at all, and not having any warning about the electric grid’s fragility beforehand. We thought about taking the kids to the nearest little hill to slide down it on something, but it was all the down our street plus a little more and the sidewalks were so slippery, plus how and what would we bring to slide on, so we didn’t end up doing that. 

When the power was out for one of the longest stretches we put all of our food from our refrigerator in all of our ice chests out in the snow.

(Thinking of cowboy town, we were just lucky that we weren’t there for this with its complete lack of insulation and all of the pipes exposed! Our old neighbor from across the street there said power was out for days. )

Meanwhile, inside we played a lot of chess and made blanket forts. I read Enders Game to Timmy in the window light and then by flashlight. Will and Hugh slept in his tent in the living room because it was warmer. 

We had quite a lot of broken oak tree branches fall down. Then Patrick sawed off all the half broken ones.