May 2020

The girls begged to keep the fort up from read-a-thon day so we let them keep it for a few days and then they ended the week with a sister sleepover in the fort. We made sure to take them to the park first to let them run around to wear them out and surprisingly they went to bed relatively quick!  At the park they found a stash of cattails and had SO much fun discovering that they could be pulled apart and had endless amounts of fluff to play with.  They were all covered in it!

Brooklyn has been a big fan of makeup lately and frequently asks to put it on herself but sometimes she will let me do it.  I did her makeup and then she got some accessories and she looked so grown up! 

 Especially when she hit me with this look: 

We continued to explore places around Columbus and we are blessed to have plenty of them to check out!  We had been to this park up towards the zoo years ago, before Brooklyn was even born, but had almost forgotten about it.  We decided to take the girls there one Saturday and found a new place in the trees that we had never been to before.  It was one of the most peaceful spots and something we all needed so badly right now in this quarantine craziness that we sat and played and enjoyed it for hours! It was the perfect place to be on an extremely hot day. 

For my birthday we decided to do a scavenger hunt around the city.  The one we chose to do was really hard and unless you already knew a lot about your city, it would be impossible. We only finished 9 clues out of 23!  But it was still a lot of fun and it made us feel even better after we figured out a clue because they were so hard. I wanted Cafe Rio salads for my bday dinner but pork was one of the things that I hadn't been able to find at grocery stores. My sister was so sweet and had some pork sent to me and it arrived just in time to throw it in the crockpot so that we could have it for dinner. Richard and the girls made it a very special day and we even had some friends do a fun drive-by parade for me! The day ended with games for almost 3 hours over Zoom with my parents and siblings!  It was one of the most fun birthdays I've ever had. 

McKenna lost her first tooth in a really long time and left this note for the Tooth Fairy.  I thought it was really sweet and she was very excited when she got a response from the Tooth Fairy the next morning!

One of our next extended family fun activities was doing something that would make someone laugh or bring joy.  Mom gave me a great idea that I passed onto the girls who turned it into something great!  They made sock puppets and then did a show where they told jokes. The story they came up with, their delivery, and their cute little laughs as they made the puppets laugh at their own jokes were adorable and they had us all busting up!  

Richard and I used some songs we had seen on YouTube where they changed the lyrics of Broadway songs to have quarantine lyrics. We thought they were hilarious and tried to recreate them but it didn't work out super great. We were still glad we tried something though!  Scott and Rachel made a DuVall News show that was super hilarious.  It has been so fun seeing what everyone has come up with!

Mother's Day happened to be on our anniversary this year. The kids put so much effort into their gifts and cards this year and I loved them all!  Usually you can tell that they are just giving something that their teachers came up with for them to make at school but this year they brainstormed ideas and spent a lot of time making them special for me.  I especially loved this flower picture that Kenna made. I thought it was such a cute idea!

We also told the girls that we were going to eat dinner alone to celebrate our anniversary and they would eat in another room.  McKenna immediately told us that we needed a more romantic setting and took charge of dinner.  She decorated, chose our outfits, did my makeup and got my accessories, and all of the girls became our waiters.  They took our orders and filled up our plates and drinks.  It was really cute to watch them be so excited about helping us celebrate and we were laughing so hard when they kept telling us they were going to stop interrupting us and then proceeded to interrupt us every 2 minutes! 

We have an art teacher that lives in our neighborhood and he started drawing these gorgeous chalk murals every few days to show his students.  It became a fun tradition for us to go on walks and see what new creation he had done. They were all incredible!

I kept thinking McKenna needed more color in her room and I saw these butterflies on Amazon that I thought would be perfect.  It was a fun creative project for me to decide where to put them and I think it turned out beautiful!  It is a fun pop of color in her room.

Richard and Kaylee finished building their bench!  I was actually super impressed that it came together so well and it looks fabulous! Kaylee chose the color and it is a nice bright spot in front of our house. 

Richard had a fun idea to try a reverse video.  So he and Kaylee threw a bunch of stuff down the stairs and then we reversed the video so it looks like they are using the force to clean it all up. It turned out really well and has been so fun to watch over and over!  He did another one with Brooklyn throwing books off of her bookshelf and it inspired some of their cousins to come up with fun reverse videos too.  I am loving all the creativity that is coming out of extreme boredom!

Brooklyn loves this song from Frozen 2 and, because the mom strokes her daughter's nose as she sings it in the movie, Brooklyn always has to do that too. Her little voice is so sweet and it always makes me smile.

We had a very long rainy week the last week of school.  The kids were so over online learning at that point and we were all pretty done being stuck in the house.  I usually don't do much for the end of school because they always have parties and fun activities with their classes.  But this year I made more of an effort.  I made a poster and decorated the kitchen and their chairs but the plans I had wanted to do for the evening didn't work out. We decided to just go to a park. I think we were a little desperate to be outside in the perfect weather because the kids played on this baseball diamond for probably an hour and a half!  We never wanted to go back inside. We finally went home so we could make giant ice cream sundaes (we let everyone pick a flavor of ice cream and a topping so they had to try everything of course!) to celebrate making it through e-learning!

Memorial Day ended up being one of the best I can ever remember. We went to explore yet another Metro park (Highbanks).  We drove almost 30 mins to get there and as we all hopped out of the van, we discovered that Brooklyn hadn't grabbed any shoes!  Richard ran with her to a nearby Walmart where he purchased the most hideous bright pink shoes that Brooklyn is in love with and wants to wear constantly now!  Ha ha.  But with our problem solved, we started down a trail and found some beautiful wildflowers, a great teepee building spot, and a gigantic tree that held our interest for the next hour!  Kaylee immediately shimmied up as high as she could go and Brooklyn and Kenna slowly got more and more brave the longer we stayed. We came home and put the sprinkler underneath the trampoling and the girls jumped for a few more hours.  After that, McKenna and Brooklyn played in the bath for a full two hours (!) while Kaylee, Richard and I played board games. We ended the night with a movie and ice cream- it was pretty much perfect!

I bought a few things to bring out during the summer because I knew that we would be very bored without traveling, friends or a lot of places to go. I was going to wait to open most of them but we had such a perfectly windy day that I busted out this kite the first week of summer!  It really was such perfect kite weather that we didn't have to put in any effort at all. We literally just held the string and watched it soar!

A lady in my ward was getting rid of a gorgeous dress and asked if I wanted to try it on. Unfortunately it was too big for me but McKenna fell in love with it and didn't want to take it off.  She kept saying, can we keep it for me? It fits perfectly! Despite the fact that she had it pinned in the back, and in the front, and it was twice as long as she is... She was cracking me up with how much she loved it. She did many fashion shows to try to convince me that it was made for her! 

We really wanted to take the girls to a frisbee golf course to try it for the first time.  Unfortunately, we didn't realize that that would be yet another thing closed for Covid-19.  They literally took all of the poles out of the ground so people couldn't play!  But we tried to make the most of it and explored the park where we would have played. And then we headed over to our favorite spot in the river to see how much it had raised from all the rain.  People in kayaks could literally just paddle all the way up onto the riverbank because it was so high! 

April 2020

Life in quarantine continues. The weather has stayed pretty nice and we keep exploring Columbus.  We went to Homestead Park to ride bikes and I was impressed with how many laps Kaylee and McKenna could do. 

We had another lip sync battle with my family.  This time we decided to imitate a music video for the song Ashes.  Logan sent me a video of Kristi laughing so hard she couldn't breathe while watching it so I think it was a success!

The next thing we did for our weekly family Zoom meeting was recreate old family photos.  It was so hard to narrow it down to just a few and the girls kept wanting to do more. They ended up being very creative and fun!

Any chance we had to get out of the house, we took it. Richard wanted to grab a few things from his office since the lockdown went from 3 weeks to 3 months pretty quickly.  We decided to grab some Chinese food and eat it in his office.  We got the food and got all the way up to the building when he realized that he had not grabbed his office key. So we had a little picnic in the car and ran around the empty campus.  It ended up being a fun adventure and gave us a chance to get out of the house again the next week to actually get the things he needed!

Sharon sent us a fun surprise in the mail and the girls were so excited to see what characters she made for them.  She has had lots of time on her hands with her new job on pause and I was impressed that she used that time to make things for her grandkids.  She is so talented!

The girls enjoyed Battle Darby Metro Park so much that we decided to head there again. This time we got to explore a little further and only turned back because Brooklyn couldn't walk any further. My little explorers never seem to tire as long as they are the ones leading the expedition. Walking around the neighborhood is a different story however ;)

Easter was definitely different this year without any big events to go to.  But we still made sure to dye Easter eggs and did our traditional Resurrection Egg Hunt on Sunday.  Brooklyn's Primary teacher even dropped off some see-through eggs that she had put glowsticks into and compared searching for the light in the eggs to finding the Light of Christ. 

We went out to eat again and were planning on just eating in the car since the wind was a little chilly.  The kids wanted to sit in the trunk so we pulled down the backseats and popped the trunk and they thought it was the coolest thing ever to eat back there. In fact, they have asked us many times since if they could eat in the trunk again! Silly kids.

Richard really needed a fun project to work on. He and Kaylee decided to build a bench from scratch and they spent many nights working hard on it.

The girls were supposed to have their piano recital but since it was canceled, I had them get dressed up and perform for me anyway. They both had worked really hard to memorize their pieces and did fantastic!  Kaylee had a harder song than she had played before and was frustrated many times at the beginning saying she would never learn how to play it so I was very proud that she kept working at it and played great!

Our next family activity was recreating famous paintings.  This was harder to find ones to do but it was pretty fun trying to find things that would work. Some of the kids were more into this one than others but Kaylee and I had a blast and she kept asking if she could do more of them. I have loved doing these with my family and they make me laugh so hard every time!

Brooklyn wanted to paint some rocks and luckily she has a big rock collection in the backyard to choose from so we spent a morning doing that while her sisters did school. 

I also wanted a project to do and decided to paint Brooklyn's bookcase that I had in my room growing up. It was a lot more frustrating than I thought it would be but it turned out pretty well and I love the way it looks in her room. 

McKenna, Brooklyn and I went on a bike ride one evening and saw these ducks in the grass off the side of the road. Of course McKenna had to stop and see them and I was shocked at how close they let her get. They barely moved at all no matter what we did and she spent a good 15 mins just checking them out. I love how much she loves animals.

Holly had a brilliant idea to make a music video with both of our families. The original music video for Beautiful People shows a regular, awkward couple going to Hollywood and being surrounded by glamour and fame and not fitting in. So we decided she would be the glamorous family and we would be the awkward normal family. It turned out so amazing!!

I saw these cute chalk drawings people had done where they draw a scene or character and then have their kids lay down and it looks like they are part of the scene. We decided to try it out but it didn't really work out how I was hoping. It was way harder than I thought and the sun was so bright the kids couldn't even look at me to take the pictures. Guess we won't be trying more of these in the future... ha ha!

McKenna and I went for a long bike ride on a trail that winds through a park, and through a fun little area in between neighborhoods. It was the most gorgeous day and I had to stop at this lake and take some pictures. McKenna really seems to need one on one time more than the other kids do so it's been fun to have a bike big enough to go with her on these little rides.

The elementary schools had a read-a-thon day which my kids were so grateful for!  I think they really needed that break from schoolwork. Richard built them a pretty sweet fort and they spent the entire day in it.  Except for lunch, Kaylee and McKenna did not move from that fort from 9:00-4:00ish! 

I needed a break from constant noise and chaos so I went on a little drive and parked somewhere to just listen to the silence.  I think it was really good for my mental health and I came back very much refreshed. Sometimes the many rainy days in a row here can really get to me and it's hard when we can't get outside to escape the house when we literally can't go anywhere else.

While I was gone, Richard came up with a genius way to play the floor is lava.  Instead of just saying the floor is lava every time, he would change it up so they had to listen to what he said and race to get on that thing before time was up. We did have a little mishap where the kids collided and McKenna's tooth cut right above Brooklyn's eye. Luckily the blood made it look worse than it was and she was up and running again in no time. She is the toughest kid! It was a great way to get some energy out on a rainy day and we have used this trick many times since!