Social Distancing

A little virus has brought the world to its knees. We had heard some things while we were on vacation, like March Madness was cancelled, and spring break was going to be extended another week, but it was truly amazing how quickly everything changed. We got back from Florida late at night, so the next day we needed some food essentials from the store. We were shocked to see the apocalyptic state of the grocery shelves! I had to go to three stores to get some tomatoes, and the guy next to me at the third store was buying multiple produce bags full of them! What in the world?

Since we'd been gone, we were sort of excited to have another spring break around our house for a week. We started off our mornings slowly with puzzles. The kids are pretty good puzzlers; we did two 500-pieces, each over 2 mornings, and one 300-piecer that we knocked out in one morning. 

We played games and watched movies.

We even went swimming at the neighbors' pool before social distancing became the norm.

But after another school delay announcement of two more weeks, it soon became apparent that we might need to attempt some home schooling before the kids became fully feral. They do love to read, but I found some other activities online (museum tours, celebrity read-alouds, and mini-projects) to round out the other subjects, like math, social studies, and science, where we figured out that mayonnaise and ketchup do the best job of cleaning off pennies and that Borax makes cool crystals on pipe cleaners overnight.

For art, we doodled with Mo Willems every day, which has been super fun!

We dabbled in kitchen science, one of Hadley's favorite subjects, even if she doesn't always like the result. However, this time we were making cookies. Yum!

It's also loquat season. We have a pretty good sized tree in the backyard, so we've been learning about those fruits and what we can do with them. We were helped along by the utility crew that hacked most of the upper tree limbs down for power line clearance. They laid the branches out by the curb, and we were able to grab so many that we couldn't have possibly reached before. We made a crumble and a few jars of jam, since they were pretty tart on their own.

At least spring weather has made PE and recess easy. It's also a great way to get some fresh air, whether by bike or backyard.

Our neighbors even let us swim in their pool when they were out. And another neighbor gave us a tee for baseball practice.

Of course, there is lots of free time when we don't have piano lessons, soccer practice, or school schedules to contend with. Social media is good for finding out about time wasters like when we had some unexpected house guests.

As Week 2 of no school came to a close, the school district posted some "official" activities online for the kids to complete for each grade for the following two weeks. Luckily, we were able to check out a school Chromebook for Owen, and Hadley can get by with an iPad. It makes it much easier when they can each stay contained on a device and not have to log in, log out, clear browsers, etc. like when they were sharing. I've really enjoyed seeing how much they can do online for their classes on their own. Hadley misses school desperately and loves checking off items from her to do list, taking pictures/videos of her assignments, and submitting them to her teacher through an app online. All by herself, at age 7. There is hope for the future; we will survive!