March was definitely a roller coaster and it turned out to be very very different than we ever could have imagined. It started out pretty normal. Brooklyn had Wacky Wednesday day at preschool and she loved wearing a backwards dress, two different shoes and socks and having her hair crazy. She kept saying, "Get it? It's wacky because normally ponytails go down but mine goes up!"
She also has been fighting me a lot more on doing her hair and getting dressed. I push a little harder on days that she has preschool but other times it's just not worth it. One day we headed to the library with her dressed like this:
A nightgown over too-short pajama pants, Olaf socks and church shoes. Sometimes I wish I didn't care this much! Ha ha
We have had the most beautiful March weather and one Saturday early in March was one of those days where it just felt perfect. We spent most of the day outside together as a family and loved every minute of it. Kaylee and I spent some time drawing with chalk and we played lots of lawn games and went on a walk. Why can't every day be this perfect??
Brooklyn has really gotten into makeup. Usually she wants to do her own but she will also do makeup on anybody willing. So we traded off and I did her hair and makeup and she did my makeup. She looked so grown up to me!
The girls got sick and had to miss a few days of school. Richard was nice enough to build them a big fort and they hung out in it all day for the few days that they were sick.
Unfortunately, we had no way of knowing that that was going to be their last week of school. Kaylee ended up being able to go back on the last Friday but McKenna was still too sick. We had heard of a strain of coronavirus that had spread quickly in China and had killed thousands of people in just a few weeks. It soon spread to other countries like Italy and many countries had to go on lockdown. In order to not overwhelm the hospital systems here, many states started to take action. OSU had already decided to cancel the rest of their semester and be online only; they were one of the first schools to do so. Later we heard that all the schools in the state would be closed for two weeks (and then a third for our normal spring break). We were so shocked but I wasn't too worried at first. We have done Mom school before in the summers and have had some fun with it and two weeks didn't sound like a long time. Little did I know what was to come!
Over the weekend we headed to the river, which has become our go-to place when we need to get out on Sundays. It was a little bit colder and Richard was starting to feel sick so we didn't stay long but it's always nice to go there where it feels nice and open and the kids are always content to play in the dirt and rocks.
We started watching a new show with the kids called Lego Master. They were so inspired, they spent days creating their own little Lego worlds. I was very impressed with what they came up with and their creativity.
After working on it for a few years, I finally finished Kaylee's stocking! I rushed to finish it before Mom came so she could take it home and sew it but then she ended up not being able to come with all of the COVID-19 restrictions.
To be funny, I had the kids tie me up and posted this picture on Instagram and Facebook with the caption, "Day 1 of homeschool. It is not going well. The kids have tied me up and taken over the house. If you get this message, send reinforcements right away. I'll try to get another message out soon but I don't know how much time I have left..."
And then Brooklyn wanted a turn being tied up too. I was happy to return the favor!
But really, our first few days of homeschool went great! The schools took a couple of days off to let the teachers figure out how they were going to translate their teaching to all online. I used that time to do some fun learning activities using books I had grabbed from the library before it closed. We read silly poetry and then wrote our own silly poems. We read about Picasso and painted our own Picasso style portraits. We learned about Rube Goldberg and drew crazy machines to do a simple task. We read about how our bodies work and did some exercises. And we did a few other art projects that imitated famous artist's styles. We had a lot of fun!
Then online school actually started and the kids did so great. Sometimes they would even be up and already working on it before I even got out of bed. I think they loved being in control of their schoolwork and then having the rest of the day to just play.
We did a LOT of projects in those first few weeks. I think the thought of not being able to go anywhere was hard even though we are homebodies anyway for the most part. I did a lot of art therapy and after Kristi and I jokingly talked about how we felt like the creature in the Scream (handling things on the outside but internally screaming! ha ha) I decided to try to paint my own. I was quite proud of myself for how it turned out!
Kaylee also helped me make this collage rainbow which took way longer than I thought it would! But it turned out pretty cool and we hung it up in the front window for a couple months.
Mom was sweet enough to send us a package because she felt bad that she didn't end up coming. It had lots of fun things for us to do and one of them was face paint crayons. The girls wasted no time putting those to good use and Kaylee was kind enough to be the first victim.
Kaylee's birthday was very different than she had imagined it would be and that was really hard for her. She was planning on having a late over with her friends and had bought sleeping masks to decorate and we had planned on pizza and treats, movies and games. She had been looking forward to it for weeks and we had to cancel it. She was understandably not in the best mood in the morning on her birthday and was not enjoying the day. It was a little chilly but we decided we needed to get out and do something different to make her feel like the day was special somehow. We went to this little hike in Dublin and even though everything was still dead and not very pretty, we ended up having a great time. The kids explored and climbed on as much as they could and we made potions and made up little games the whole way. You could tell a huge difference in Kaylee and she was much happier when we came home and had her favorite brownies. What a strange time to turn 10!
We started to get a little more creative in our boredom. Richard even let Brooklyn paint his finger and toenails bright purple and pink. Brooklyn was so excited to have a guinea pig to try out her skills on.
We also started exploring new parks that we had never been to before, or places we hadn't been for a long time. We tried out Prarie Oaks Metro Park which was a fun place to explore. We are not sure if we got lost or not but it seemed like we walked a lot further than it told us we would. It was also very very muddy but that didn't bother the kids at all and they had tons of fun running through it.
Holly had a brilliant idea to do a virtual Lip Sync Battle. At first we were going to do it with just the two of us but we decided to see if we could get the rest of the family involved as well. We made this little clip to get everyone pumped about doing it and had SO much fun filming it. Our kids kept asking if we could do this again and again and they have played this song on Alexa many times since then. Some classics never get old!
The day of our actual Lip Sync Battle came. We had decided to do a theme so that the songs would be more similar. But only half of the family got that message so Holly, Mom and Dad, and us did a song from musicals and the rest of the family did random songs. It was so much fun! I loved seeing how creative everyone was and it brought fun, creativity and laughter to us during this time when we need that so much. The only downside was that Holly and I chose to do the exact same song! No wonder people think we're twins ;) But she did an amazing job with the song and it was so fun to watch even though I know she was super sad we did the same one.
Brooklyn's birthday came and the same thing happened as with Kaylee- at first Brooklyn could only think about what she wasn't getting to do on her birthday and that Grandma didn't end up coming so the day seemed pretty ordinary at first. Richard took off work early and we tried to do a scavenger hunt that someone in our ward had set up. The problem was that the houses were so far apart that it didn't end up being as much fun as it sounded and Brooklyn was the most bored of all of us. We weren't going to go out to eat but she was so sad and I asked her what would cheer her up and she said chicken nuggets! So we went to Wendy's (although we had to take it home since all the restaurants were closed). I remembered the games we had done for McKenna's princess party a few years earlier and decided to throw together a family bday party for Brooklyn. We played kiss the frog, mermaid race, and hot potato (with an apple for Snow White). Oh and she also really wanted to do the tape ball candy game so we did that as well. I'm really glad we ended up doing that because Brooklyn had so much fun and when people asked her about her birthday, that was all she talked about.
Our next metro park to explore was Battelle Darby Creek. The nature center was obviously closed but we still stopped by and saw the bison before going on to explore the trails. The girls loved this place! They didn't want to stay on the trail and were trying to go all over the place. We even found a little frog friend that they played with for a bit. They kept begging not to go home- it was really nice to explore a fun new place that felt kind of like we were hiking in the mountains back in Utah. It even has a lookout point that is up high and makes us feel like we aren't in a completely flat place! We will have to come back when everything isn't dead and see how beautiful it is.
We also went back to Antrim Lake, which we haven't been to in years. It was the most gorgeous day ever and I couldn't believe how blue the sky and the lake looked! It is only a mile or so around the lake but it took us hours to go around the whole thing because the girls kept wanting to go up to the water and look for cool rocks and sticks or throw things in the water. We even saw a couple snakes, and a really huge bird (I think it might have been a heron?) that I had never seen before so that was kind of fun. It felt like spring was really here!
My next art project (can you tell how busy and bored we were??) was these deconstructed princesses to put in Brooklyn's room. She loves princesses and I thought it would be cute to draw a picture of her with her 3 favorite princesses. I searched online for these princess patterns and tried to copy them. I loved how they turned out and I did Brooklyn without any pattern to look at so I was pretty proud of that.
Kaylee had an assignment for art to take pictures of spring. We walked around the neighborhood and she took a ton of pictures of the beautiful flowers and trees we saw. I thought she did an amazing job and captured some really great shots!
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