September 2020

We began September with renewed Oakland Zoo memberships. They're one of the only places open tfor a family outing, and it's been a couple years since we had a membership, so we felt it would be well used and appreciated. Our first day back did not disappoint. The crowds were scarce and the animals were active. We even saw the pack of wolves! That never happens. We sneaked our buddy Jonah in as my fourth kid and had a blast. Hazel fell in love with the ring-tailed lemurs. Jack, as always, wanted to watch the tigers all day. Gemma loved everything but wanted her picture next to her friends, the giraffes. The red-butt baboons were the hit of the visit, however, thanks to their feisty new baby. She was hilarious to watch! The mama and aunties were constantly spotting her and holding her tail to keep her in safe spots while she wiggled and sneaked all over the place. 

Jack's latest culinary experiment: macaroons. This boy loves a challenge and an opportunity to learn. 

Turns out Covid did one thing right: the DMV was a breeze to work with! Todd and I each went in to have our licenses renewed - on separate days - and (drumroll, please) were in and out of the place in under twenty minutes, including vision tests. Twenty minutes, people! At the DMV! I'm not even joking. It was mind-boggling. And I must say, my new picture is even kind of flattering. Definitely an upgrade from the previous mugshot. 

We got to meet Jonah's new baby sister, Ellie. This was the first time I actually wanted to hold someone else's baby since Gemma was born. I still wanted to give her back, mind you, but it felt kind of nice to not have to pretend to think she was this wonderful miracle. She really was. (Having two out of my three babies with a husband in Afghanistan kind of ruined me towards babies, I really think.) 

We had awful, orange smoke-filled skies due to the wildfires all along the west coast. Like, there was this orange-brown tint and not a whole lot of sunlight filtering through the windows. It was eerie. My camera didn't do it justice, either. I looked it up later and learned that it was self-adjusting the lighting. The picture below is the best I could take, but it came nowhere near capturing a true picture of what it was like. The image below that (which I stole off the Internet) shows a much more accurate representation of what it looked like outside for several days. 

We continued to slog along with distance learning, but the kids were so unhappy. The house was thick with tension. Jack would lay his head on the desk and say, "I hate school," (my boy who loves to learn!) and everyone was frustrated. Todd tried to convince me I should homeschool the kids. He'd been talking about homeschooling since the spring. I looked into the logistics several times over the summer, but it overwhelmed me and I just kept hoping school would be better in the fall. Sadly, it's been worse so far. 

I tracked down a few friends who had a bit of experience with homeschooling, dedicated a day to fasting and praying about it, and was blessed to stumble upon a curriculum choice that brought a feeling of peace to my heart. The kids were overjoyed when Todd and I announced to them that we were withdrawing them from the school district and would be homeschooling while things are so unsteady. We gave them a long weekend to detox before starting our journey, and lucky us, Grammie and Poppa came to visit that very weekend. 

The air was just about as bad as it could get. You could see ash falling through the sky. But Grammie and Poppa had come out in their new convertible, so we donned face masks, hoping that would help filter the air, and I took each of the kids for a joyride. 

We had planned to be on a camping trip that weekend, but due to the fires, California closed all of their national parks and campgrounds, so we had yet another cancelled event to be disappointed about. We probably would have spent the whole weekend moping if Todd's parents hadn't been there. Instead, we got to have tinfoil dinners and s'mores with them, and spend hours playing the new board games we had bought to bring along. 

Jack tried an experiment where he soaked a raw egg in vinegar for 24 hours, which dissolved the shell but left behind the membrane. 

We took the kids to Barnes and Noble and let them pick out two new books each. Our poor kids, six months with practically no library. It's been rough. All six new books were read cover to cover by bedtime on Sunday. 

We had a Treat Fest. Jack and I tried a new recipe for chocolate mousse, and Gemma and Hazel made a pumpkin kitty cake. 

Grammie and Poppa brought boxes and boxes of apples from their yard, which we whipped up into 71 - yes, you heard me right - 71 quarts of applesauce. And, ladies and gentlemen, we did it all in the course of five hours. Canning is madness over here, but it is so sweetly satisfying to look in the pantry when we are finished. 

Long weekend done, we began homeschool. We named ourselves Trailblazers Academy, in leu of both the trail behind our house that we love and overuse, and our pioneering spirit in this undertaking. 

We wanted it to feel like a fresh start, so we took first day of school pictures again, and we made our traditional first day of school giant cookies. The kids were home to help me make them, so they ended up with darling animal faces. 

We're a good two weeks into it now, and everyone is loving it. Each kid has their own language arts and math courses, and we're studying science and history family style. We've already made some good memories. 

We're studying marine biology in science. We added food coloring to water and oil and talked about the different amounts of light that filter through the ocean water, and the types of animals that live in each pelagic zone. 

Mostly we work at the table, but the kids are welcome to work wherever suits them best. Sometimes they get creative. 

We start the school day at 9 am, after I've had a chance to workout and shower and we've all had breakfast. The kids do their morning chores and their piano practice before school. It usually takes us about three hours to complete our course work for the day, and then we're free. Often that means we spend the afternoons outside. One day we took our scooters to Sycamore Grove, where the kids climbed trees to their hearts' content. 

Gemma loved writing her spelling words in sugar. She licked her fingers between each letter, took far longer on the activity than I think she should have, and totally made a mess all over the counter, the stool, and the floor. Next time, I will use cornstarch instead! 

Jack made flowers out of fruit and veggies and then wrote a how-to paper about it. 

We've been studying ancient Greece in history. We took the kids out for gyros and baklava and watched Hercules for our family movie night. Also, we did a very cool art project. The kids drew vases on cardstock paper and colored them in with red crayon. They cut the vases out and then painted over them with a mixture of black paint and shortening. When the paint was almost dry, they used toothpicks and paper clips to etch drawings into the paint. It was satisfyingly interesting. 

The kids have lots less stress and much more free time. It's been interesting to see what they've been drawn to. Jack has been learning how to do computer coding. He and Jonah spent hours together with his Ozobot one afternoon, but mostly he's using an online program to learn new tricks. 

Hazel has been teaching herself how to play the guitar. I love it! She's a very intuitive, play by ear musician, and this has been right up her alley. And she said the cutest thing to me: "I'm wearing jeans because it just doesn't seem like a guitar player would be wearing yoga pants!" She's been watching YouTube videos and I overhear her strumming chords and humming Taylor Swift songs. 

Gemma has been reading up a storm and happily playing outside a ton, riding around in the green kid jeep and jumping on the tramp. 

In other, picture-less news, we signed the kids up for a two-week tennis camp the moment the Rec Center offered it. Sadly, the first week got cancelled due to poor air quality, but the second week was a blast. Jonah and his brother James signed up as well, and the kids just loved it. The first day was euphoric. It had been months since so many kids had been together outside, taking an organized class. They were wild with the feeling of normalcy! 

Our stake president decided it was time to start officially holding virtual church, so I had to figure out how to have virtual Primary. We've held it twice now and I think it's going well. We meet first thing on Sundays, before Sacrament Meeting, while the kids are fresh, and keep it quick, just fifteen minutes. We're having singing time one week and a lesson from a team of primary teachers the next week, alternating. Considering how much I agonized over what to do, I'm quite pleased with what we've come up with. 

And it was my birthday this month. Todd and the kids absolutely spoiled me. I didn't have to lift a finger in the kitchen all day, but still got lasagna and chocolate cake with coconut frosting. I found love notes around the house everywhere I turned. Gemma wrote me a book, Jack sewed me a hand-shaped heat pack because he loves to hold my hand (be still, my heart!) and Hazel made me a whole jar of coupons for things like foot massages and game passes, and my very own batch of cookie dough. Also, the kids were inspired by our ocean color water bottles we'd made in science and made several ombre mason jars, which they sold on the side of the road, intentionally to earn money with which to buy me new purple workout pants. I mean, they were planning stuff for me the whole week before my big day! Todd had flowers delivered in leu of the massage I traditionally get on my birthday. (Stephanie, I miss you so much! When will the CDC and the darn county let you reopen your spa so I can see you again?! Covid, you are awful!) And since nail salons can operate outdoors, I went and got myself a pedicure. It was a good day. 

August 2020

 August was a weird smorgasbord of events. I'll try to provide you with a snapshot. 

Jack created an escape room, complete with rhyming clues and codes to break. 

We cancelled a trip to Maui that we had booked in April, back when we thought things would be normal by August 

The kids took naps so they could stay up til midnight and watch a meteor shower. We set up a movie on the projector in the backyard to give us something to pass the hours after it got dark, waiting for the action to hit the sky. Then we spread out a blanket on our back patio, laid on our backs, and just chatted as we watched for shooting stars. It was a simple, but beautiful, experience. I loved hanging out with the kids making memories. It made me want to book a camping trip for the next one, so we could see it all away from the city lights. 

We had several hot days over 100 degrees. Thankfully, we escaped the heat at the beach a couple of times. We met up with our ward friends the Mullens at Crown Beach in Alameda. We packed lunch, brought our boogie boards and sand toys, and passed a good four or five hours together playing hard. Everyone loved it and said it was one of our best days at the beach in a long time. 

A couple of days later, we met Suzanne Hope and her kids at Twin Lakes Beach in Santa Cruz. It was another amazingly fun day with friends in the water. Hazel, Jack, and Nova caught waves on the boogie boards and Gemma, Griffon, and Ezra mostly played in the shallow and warmer water further up on the beach. Everyone found something fun to do with the seaweed. 

It was a bittersweet day for me. It was my last hurrah with Suzanne because she and her crew moved to Colorado at the end of that week. Suzanne has been one of my very best friends for the last decade, in and out of deployments and moves. I'm so happy for her and Dan that they've found an opportunity to buy a house and settle into a bigger space for their family, but I'm just heartbroken not knowing when I'll see her again. It's especially sad for me that we didn't get to have our annual girls' weekend with me and her and Chrissy this year before she left. She was a friend that I literally prayed into my life, and she'll be a friend for life. I just wish we were next door neighbors. 

We had scorching temperatures above 100 degrees for multiple days in a row. Infuriatingly, they were combined with "coincidental" power outages. We had no power from 4:30-11pm two days in a row. Three hours into the first outage, Todd pulled out our never-before-used generator and hooked our fridge and extra freezer up to power to save our food. The second night, we realized we could plug in a lamp as well so we didn't have to spend the whole evening using headlamps. 

In the midst of the heat wave and the power outages, on August 16th, we had crazy wind storms and a TON of dry lightning that lasted for hours all across the Bay Area. There were so many lightning bolts flashing across the sky at once that they woke me up a couple of times in the middle of the night. For an area that usually doesn't get any thunder or lightning, it was an eerie sight. 

The lightning set off multiple fires across the state, some of which became pretty large, and a couple of which were close to home. We spent about a week keeping a close watch on evacuation warnings, preparing to gather up our most important belongings and seek safety elsewhere. 

The fires brought in terrible air, smoky and orange and brown and ashey. 

Between Covid and everything else, it kind of felt apocalyptic. 

We tried to get excited about school starting. Our school district waited until just a couple of weeks before the start of school to finally announce that they would be starting the year remotely, with a complicated path leading to the possibility of hybrid learning later in the year. I still bought everyone new water bottles, pencil pouches, and notebooks. Everyone also got new headphones in preparation for hours of online school. 

Todd works with a guy who is originally from Liberia. He goes back every year with donations of medicine and clothing to try to help the people living there. A weekend without power really awakened us to how privileged our lives are and made us want to share of our bounty. We gathered a huge assortment of medicine to send over to Liberia and reflected on our blessings here at home, despite our challenges. 

The girls decided to try dying the ends of their hair in Koolaid. The results were unpredictable. We dipped Gemma's hair in purple, but it came out turquoise. Hazel's ended up burgundy. It smelled really good!

Gemma and Jack got to meet their teachers and pick up supplies the day before school started. Both Mrs. Tabaracci and Mrs. Lockhart were nice enough to let me get the kids out of the car for pictures. 

We've been watching Great British Baking Show as a family. It's inspired all sorts of projects in the kitchen. Most recently, Jack wanted to make soft pretzels. They turned out way yummy! 

Our first day of school was certainly untraditional. We woke up to a blood red sun in a smoky sky. We thought it would be fitting to take pictures in pajamas and masks, although for reals the kids got dressed for school and didn't leave the house. I'm pretty sure no one brushed their teeth until lunchtime. 

It was a very dull day full of unmet hopes and dreams, and largely spent touring the communication app the school district chose to use, which we had already received about ten emails about how to use from every single teacher, administrator, and secretary. My kids each had a chance to say about five words to the class.  Gemma and Jack were in class from 8-11, and Hazel had her school day from 11:30-3. 

Luckily for us all, we had our giant cookies to look forward to when it was all over. 

The kids and I helped my friends Elaine and Katie decorate April's house when she had her baby. After three boys, having a girl was something exciting to look forward to! Sweet baby Ellie weighed in even bigger than Jack, at 9 pounds, 12 ounces. (This is Jack's best friend Jonah's family.) 

Joann finally opened up for in-person shopping, so the kids and I went and picked out scrapbook paper to re-decorate their name letters and freshen up their bedrooms. It's pretty cool to have kids big enough to trace and cut and mod podge themselves!

Just when we thought we were safe from the fires, one broke out just a few blocks from home, right in our neighborhood. Luckily, it was pretty small and firefighters had it all out in a couple of hours, but man, Mother Nature sure has kept us on our toes this month!