Life in Quarantine

During our stay at home order, the boys have really fallen in love with video games. They will play LEGO Harry Potter, Minecraft, or Halo all day if I let them. They were so excited to play Minecraft with Uncle Daniel while he was in the other room. They kept yelling back and forth to each other and sometimes the boys would run down the hall to see his screen and then run back. 

While my mom and Daniel were visiting, they brought their two cats. Their two plus our three made for a lot of cats in our house!

The boys started their Zoom classes online with their teachers. I set them up on the computer in my room, so his class always got a view of all my laundry on my bed. The entire school year there was always clothes on the bed! LOL!

Rett had a zoom class once a week and a microsoft teams one on one video chat with his teacher once a week to do assessments. Watching the kindergartners happy to see each other on their screens was so stinkin' cute!

James had a zoom class every day with either his Math/Science teacher or his Reading/Social Studies teacher. On Fridays they had Fun Friday where each kid gets 3 minutes to talk about whatever they want to. It always turned into show and tell with everyone's pets. 

While everything was locked down Kona-Ice started coming around and delivering in the neighborhoods so that you could still get a treat without the crowds. The boys thought it was so cool to get a slushy from our driveway.

Swimming in the river:

Every day the kids were supposed to do something different for specials, so on Yoga day I put on a kids yoga video on youtube. I tried to take pictures and send them to their specials teachers, this was what I sent to their yoga teacher. Rett takes great pictures doesn't he?

STEM assignment to find things with batteries and take them apart to find out what different kinds of batteries they use:

Another STEM assignment to take apart a pen and put it back together:

We took advantage of the boys not having to get up early for school and spent a few nights shrimping while Anthony had off of work. It is always such a late night waiting for the sun to go down and for the tide to turn. The first night we went out we didn't leave to head back home until 3am! The boys had a blast helping us spot shrimp in the water and helping us dip some of them. We ended up with around 2 gallons of shrimp.

I guess everyone else was looking for something to do during the shut down. Our boat ramp was the only boat ramp open nearby and this was the line to put your boat in the water. It took us an hour before it was our turn!

I thought this was so funny and so true!! We have sooooo many eggs and with us not going anywhere where we usually sell them they build up fast!

James brought our snakes to his Fun Friday show and tell zoom. The principal happened to join in the zoom class right as it was his turn to show the snakes. They were all grossed out by the snakes, which just made James more excited to show them!

The boys were being so cute watching something funny on youtube together. I wish they were this happy together all the time!

 

Picking blueberries together! The blueberry farm had a short season this year, so we only went once but we were happy that they were open at all.

I ran a virtual 5K and was so happy with my time!!

Baymax and flamingo snuggling as usual:

James helped Anthony change the oil in the cars:

Time for shrimping round 2! This time we brought the kindles for the boys so that once they started whining and complaining that they wanted to go home they could watch a movie while we kept on getting shrimp. But first we had to make it through the long line at the boat ramp! Luckily the boys were playing nicely with each other while we were waiting.

Eating snacks and waiting for the sun to set:

Getting the lights set up in the water:

Movie time!

Finally time for shrimp!

That night we ended up with more shrimp, around 3 gallons worth. We headed back home around 12am and there was so much boat traffic at the boat ramp, we decided this would be our last night of the season. It was so aggravating to try to find a spot at the boat ramp around tons of other boats at night in the dark with the wind blowing the boat around. Not worth it! I was surprised there weren't more boat accidents, lots of boats didn't have their lights on and drove around at high speed. Crazy!

Easter during quarantine was interesting. It was so strange to not go to church on Easter Sunday! We've been having sacrament at home and having everyone wear church clothes for it (even though we aren't leaving the house) but otherwise it has been difficult to make Sundays feel different from any other day. Since every day looks like the day before!!

The Easter bunny came and left a scavenger hunt for the boys to find their baskets and hid some eggs out in the yard. The requested that next year the Easter bunny put money in their eggs instead of candy. We will see about that one...

It seems like there is always a turkey hen sitting on eggs, so we constantly have turkey chicks hatching. They are so cute when they are little!

Extended Spring Break/Beginning of Quarantine

On the teacher work day before spring break, the county announced that they would be extending spring break by an extra week because of COVID-19. So we went into spring break knowing that we had a full two weeks with no school work. The boys were excited, but I was nervous knowing that we couldn't go anywhere or do anything with everything shut down! I ended up having to go into work all week the second week to help make paper packets for distance learning once the governor announced that school was closing for 4 more weeks. Thankfully my mom and brother were staying with us so they could stay home with the boys while I was gone.

At first I tried to do a bunch of projects. This was one of them: putting all of our board games into zipper pouches. It was awesome to get so much space back on our game shelves!

I took the boys to the park so I could go running while they played and rode their bikes. This was before the playgrounds were closed, they were loving not having to be in school!

Working on our schoolwork at home:

My pace car/bike while running:

Rett decided to hide some things for James and leave him a map to find them. He was very excited for James to discover the map.

While we had so much time isolated at home, I remembered the previous owners of our house telling us that the property across the street had a large pond on it that they would go fishing on. The property was purchased by a big developer last year with the plans to build a neighborhood on it (yuck!) but so far the project has stalled. Since no one really goes there anymore, we decided to do a little exploring. Imagine our surprise when we discovered the "pond" is really a huge lake! It was so fun to walk around and find this hidden gem right across the street from us.

Doing some geocaching with the boys:

The nature trail the geocache was on must have had a wild fire recently, you could see the burn marks everywhere!

The boys had fun scaring up tiny toads. They started a competition of who could find more of them, because why not?

On another geocaching adventure, we explored a nature park that used to be a working cattle ranch. Some of the old buildings are still preserved there and the walking trails are through current cattle pastures. You definitely have to watch your step for cow patties!

A caterpillar landed on Anthony:

Love these cute boys! Since quarantine started they have been obsessed with wearing matching shirts.

Sand hill cranes:

Saying hi to a gopher tortoise:

Found the geocache!

While we were searching for our second geocache under these trees, a line of cows walked right by us to get a drink of water in another pasture. It was so cool to see! One of the cows stared at us the entire time while the rest of them walked by, almost like he was making sure we didn't get too close.

Feeding our turkeys some apple slices from the back porch:

While the teachers were all at school prepping for distance learning, one of them brought her new puppy with her. I got to take her for a walk, she is sooooo precious!!

Watching a rocket launch from our backyard:

The school district has been giving out free breakfasts and lunches for all kids for the rest of the school year. You just have to go to a pick up location and they hand it to you. This was on a weekend, so they gave us three days worth for each boy! It was so much food!! The boys think it is really exciting to open it and see what they got, like a little surprise every day.

Doing some science by looking through the internal organs of this model I bought from amazon:

Oobleck experiments:

I decided to try sewing some masks for Anthony and really liked how they turned out! I was so happy with how easy they were to make, I offered to make them (for free) for anyone at the school who needed one. I ended up making and mailing/dropping off over 100 masks! It definitely took a lot of time but I felt good contributing in some way.

More geocaching!! This time it was on a bike trail and there was a geocache every .2 miles. It made it really fun for the boys to have so many chances to find them.