We had sunshine this week! Elizabeth was so excited to get out and talk to Hannah, even while they social distanced.
I got sick of Tommy pulling at his hair while fighting with his sisters, so I started cutting it with the craft scissors. That made him stay still for a good half hour.
We finally sat down last night and taught Elizabeth how to play Terraforming Mars. She handily beat the Tommy, Derek, and me, though we all managed to tie for second place!
I found flour at GFS last night, ordered it online, and picked it up today. Elizabeth celebrated the end of our flour shortage by baking cookies!
Lots of reading going on. With the libraries closing and the kids having already read through the few hundred books we brought along, we invested in a new Kindle Fire to expand our ereader capabilities. But the little girls are still going old school with actual picture books. Annie’s current obsessions include Goodnight Moon, Ten Little Babies, and Fox in Socks. She’s actually reciting Fox in Socks while reading Where the Wild Things Are:
Everyone is reading the paper these days. Tommy goes to sports, I usually only make it through the op eds, and Elizabeth admits she only pays attention to the weather. But yesterday Susie carefully looked through the whole section on stocks while eating her breakfast. We’re certainly a very up-to-date family!
We’re taking advantage of all the online tutorials and free streaming activities! We’re watching Met operas a couple times a week, Tommy listens to Andrew Peterson reading his Wingfeather Saga on facebook every night, and we’re watercolor painting with Let’s Make Art. The big kids are writing a Chubby Baby story on a google doc with the Ragland kids (not surprisingly, the main characters are named Lucy and Annie), the girls are having a virtual book club with the Fishers, and we’ve had a lot of video chats with family.
Virtual church. I always liked the *idea* of Family Integrated Worship, but it’s really hard in an actual building. Now we get to try it out every Sunday! Since our church back home is three hours off, we’re watching Alistair Begg’s church service and enjoy singing all the Getty hymns. Annie is semi-disruptive but kindof gets that she needs to at least fold her hands while she prays. Next we just have to get her to stop telling everyone, “Shhh! I’m praying!”
I don’t have any pictures of me shopping because it’s happening so infrequently. I made it nine days before we were out of butter (we could have lasted another day before running out of eggs and milk), and it felt so surreal to don gloves before heading into Aldi to find no flour on the shelves (is everyone truly baking bread???? one friend messaged me saying that the store was out of yeast, so she was “making her own” and what were the proportions to substitute for dry? I sighed as I explained that sourdough is a totally different animal than yeast bread and pointed her to the King Arthur Flour blog for my best sourdough recipe.) I also found it pretty crazy that we’re expected to only grocery shop every 1-2 weeks, yet we’re limited to two gallons of milk and two packages of meat, total? That goes a lot further with a family of 3-4 than a family of seven. But I did stretch two chicken breasts into chicken scala for seven. Rice fills kids up! Fortunately I already have a lot of low-meat meals in my rotation, so the kids didn’t mind too much when I made white bean pasta last night and saved the other half of our chicken breasts for dinner tonight. It’s hard to stock up since we’re leaving in 6 weeks, but I think we’re now in a good place of canned goods to stretch the meat and veggies and will hopefully only need to pick up fresh dairy and produce in a week or 10 days. I just have to ration the flour, so Elizabeth’s baking activities may drop off until the stores happen to be restocked while I’m shopping. Oh, and I totally wiped off all of our packages when I came back in. I was a little disturbed to see only one other shopper at my Aldi wearing gloves and a mask, and the cashier was not wiping off the checkout, wearing gloves, or social distancing as she checked out me or the people before me. I don’t trust other people (especially in the lower income, less educated area where my grocery store is located) to take common precautions against spreading their germs, and with Annie’s weak lungs and compromised immune system, our family has to be hyper vigilant.
Janie’s birthday was filled with lots of cooking and baking of treats. Chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, followed by presents (seven books for seven years, of course, plus her own ESV Bible and lots of legos!).
Then for school we did read alouds and played an antigen binding game to go with our immune system study in human anatomy. We saw how having the vaccine makes the fight much easier!
In the afternoon, we had a heavily sanitized birth-tea party with the Romine girls and Ella. I’d been really torn all week about whether it was safe and wise as we are moving toward more restrictions in Indiana, but Thursday night I discussed it with Kristin and Leslie. Our families had all basically been self quarantined since the previous week when we had our homeschool classes together, so we decided to do one last get together. Much sanitizing and handwashing before, during, and after. The girls had such a lovely time giggling together over their tea and scones and cupcakes, and it was so bittersweet to think that this scene may not happen again in this house. Janie adores her South Bend friends, and it’s hard to lose half of our time with them (will we ever live two doors down from a homeschooling family with three kindred spirit girls ever again?!). But we’re committed to keeping Annie safe and flattening the curve for everyone, so we’ll stay away from our South Bend people until we go back to Malibu, if that’s what it takes. We’re so glad that we’ll only be four hours away come fall, and we’re already planning road trip visits when it’s safe again.
And of course we had cake again with Daddy, after his homemade spaghetti for dinner. Janie said the King Arthur Flour Black Forest cake recipe was her best birthday cake ever!
This photo really tells it all…even in a tiny room, Elizabeth’s bed is made neatly, and Susie’s is just a cozy heap. I had originally had Elizabeth’s bed along the wall, but that left the egg chair awkwardly sitting in the middle of the room, so they rearranged to have a cozy reading corner. And if they’re not in here listening to an audiobook and painting their nails, they’re reading.
Today Janie finished her phonics book! I have been using The Ordinary Parents’ Guide to Teaching Reading nonstop with one kid after another for the past eight years, and I loved it just as much the fourth time through. Simple presentation, no distracting pictures that make kids guess instead of sounding out, and steady progress through a roughly fourth grade reading level by the end. It works! Finally putting it on the shelf to rest for a few years before starting up again with Annie, and next week, Janie and I commence with spelling!
WordPress finally let me upload pictures from last week! We invited our little neighbor Hannah over for a homeschool art afternoon and did our first official watercolor tutorial. Our teacher told us to have fun and be kind to yourself instead of comparing to everyone else.
We have a teenager in the house! In case you don’t follow me on instagram, where I do most of our visual logging of our daily life these days, here’s what I wrote to Tommy:
Tommy! You are fun to hang out with. I like your sense of humor–a combination of Dad’s and mine, with a special emphasis on ridiculing SoCal pretensions. You are so capable of being gentle with your little sisters, especially Annie. I am touched by how much have you have embraced being a special needs brother. You are a faithful friend. I love discussing our favorite fantasy novels and characters (Eugenides forever!), I’m glad you also get geeked out about diagramming crazy sentences, and I will never get tired of reading your research papers on obscure facets of World War II. I love that you’re spending your birthday party board gaming with your homeschool buddies. You are truly our son! Most importantly, you are God’s son, and I love the man He is shaping you into.
The birthday books were heavy on the Megan Whalen Turner this year, due to the fact that her 6th book is coming out in a few months, and Tommy and I both *need* to reread the series a couple more times before the finale. One of the most fun developments of this past year was discovering The Thief, falling in love with Turner’s fantasy world, knowing that Tommy would love it, too, and devouring the series together with him in the space of a week or so. I love sharing quality obsessions with my son!
For his birthday, Tommy asked for a gaming party with the Skeens boys. Aidan, Liam, and Ian Michael came over for four hours and feasted on “healthier snacks” (pretzels and chocolate hummus, which we all agreed was interesting, trail mix, dried fruit chips, carrots, and popcorn) while playing Codenames, Blokus, Star Wars X Wing, and a few other games. Much fun was had by all!
Yesterday Annie had puked three times by 8 am, and I decided to declare a sick day. The big kids watched nature and Egyptian history documentaries in the morning while I cleaned up vomit and snuggled with Annie (she just has a cold that is causing her to gag, not a stomach bug), and then in the afternoon while Annie napped, we pulled out a new subscription box that Inspire had bought for us and did a watercolor lesson! Let’s Make Art has tutorials on youtube and then sends you a box with all the supplies. We all grabbed a paintbrush and gave it a try–and we had a lot of fun! The kids can’t wait to do another one. Actually, I was up at 5:30 and 6:30 am feeding a now-very-sick-Annie and comforting a coming-down-with-the-cold Janie, so we might have another documentaries-and-art school day today.
The weather broke (temporarily) yesterday, and the above-50 temperatures sent us and many of our neighbors outside. Annie walked around the block (the longest distance she’s walked since Malibu), and the girls discovered that our neighbors two doors down are a classical Christian homeschooling family with four kids (who love baking, crafting, and reading)! Everyone rushed through their schoolwork today, and my girls have been playing over there since noon.
Today I took Susie back to the doctor to have her ear checked (she had swimmer’s ear last week–never in all our years in CA, but something she picks up in the frozen, landlocked tundra of Indiana?!), and before announcing that her eardrum has ruptured and she now needs oral antibiotics for a middle ear infection, the doctor noticed that we were doing schoolwork while we waited and told us that his wife had homeschooled their kids and loved it. Crazy! (The secondary ear infection is crazy, too.)
We’re also just a few minutes up the road from Leslie and Brad and their crew, so Tommy and Aidan have enjoyed lots of reconnecting after being baby BFFs. Janie and Ella are kindred spirits and have been having so much fun together, too, especially while their six older siblings attend a martial arts class together at a church in between our houses. I usually drop the big kids off, then Leslie and I have tea while the little girls play, Brad picks everyone up afterwards, and we all go to bed happy and socialized.
And we’re going to church with the Raglands, so all of our kids are instafriends and begging for playdates as often as possible. Silly dancing, pillow fighting, or talking intensely about quality children’s literature? We’ve got it covered. The kids are hard at work on a joint newspaper–comment if you want a copy when it’s published!
Kindred spirits abound, we have Target, Walmart, Aldi, Chickfila, and Culvers just down the street (not to mention Hungry Howie’s, which is the kids’ new favorite pizza, lol), and even on days like today when I have to get up at 5:40 to take Derek in to work so that I can have the van for the day, I’m still home by 6:05 am (and he’s been able to catch a ride home at night with another law professor friend who lives a few blocks away). Yeah, the house is small and not up to my cleanliness standards, and I miss my kitchen, but we’re making do. It’s not even summertime, but in the Midwest, the living sure is easier!
