2020 Halloween Costumes

After putting on some finishing touches, the children donned their costumes this afternoon. The pictures didn't load in order, but that's alright. We'll look at the pictures in reverse order.

Here's is Miriam as Constanze Mozart, Mozart's wife:

We've got the power!

Sometimes when I read dystopian novels I think to myself there's no way society could descend into chaos that quickly. And then things like this happen and I think to myself society could definitely descend into chaos that quickly.

Our society depends on so many things to function smoothly—trust, electricity...and a few other things. 

Take those things away and life feels somewhat fractured.

Fortunately, as we've become increasingly reliant on technology in our lives, I can remember the good ol' days of my childhood when we were less reliant on technology. Take automatic garage doors, for example. It seems like everyone has one these days, though I'm not sure why...

I've been trying to remember when we first had an automatic garage door. I think we had one in the High River house, which felt so fancy because our house on Sutherland Street had a pull rope and had to be raised and lowered manually—a skill that comes in handy when the power goes out! You basically need two people to open the garage door when it's on an automatic track: one to pull the emergency release from the track and one to start lifting the garage. At least...that's how ours works. But then the nut holding the garage to the arm of the motor fell off and we were free to raise and lower the garage at will (we looked for the nut but couldn't find it so we'll have to get a new one). 

We realized this morning that our water heater is gas, not electric. Yesterday we were rationing hot water, thinking what we had in the tank was it (because our water heater at our house on Hummingbird Lane was electric and that's we experienced a few power outages there as well). Today I read a text from a friend in our ward who lives a block or so away and she mentioned her gas water heater and I was like, "Oh! We have a gas water heater, too!" So we were able to shower and wash dishes today, which was nice. 

I was washing the dishes—by hand (which really doesn't seem to take much longer than simply loading the dishwasher, to be honest, though I guess it's water usages that we're concerned about, not time, necessarily)—and was stacking them on the counter like I always did growing up (because my family did not get a dishwasher until the year 2000). Plates can be leaned against the wall to dry, cups can be engineered into tall pyramids. It's really quite fun. But there wasn't a great place to put the silverware. 

I wish we had one of those cool draining racks for silverware like we had growing up, I thought to myself.

And then I realized that I had one of those. In fact, I had an expensive, top-of-the-line draining rack right at my finger tips! So I opened the dishwasher and started loading the pre-washed dishes inside to dry. 

We were really figuring out this no-power gig. Life was no longer feeling desperate. 

We had things under control.

So we did our schoolwork again, though today we read our book (finished The Little Prince) tucked in bed rather than at the kitchen table because the chorus of all the generators running in the neighbourhood was driving me a little crazy, but the noise from our generator was worst of all (and the noise was the absolute worst in the dining room where we typically do a good chunk of our morning work). The kids didn't mind too much.

An Ironic Update!

The whoosh of the wind and the obnoxious pulsing of generators are swirling outside my window, but inside we are warm and—perhaps more importantly—dry! And (lucky people that we are!) one of the generators is ours! 

When we realized the power wasn't going to come back on any time soon, Andrew went on a quest for a generator and managed to pick up the very last one at ACE Hardware (Lowe's was out, Home Depot was out), so our situation is looking up! The contents of our fridge will survive and we've been enjoying not being completely dependent on flashlights and candles (and getting to use the internet and our computers a little bit (though I do think we should turn off the generator soon because that thing is so loud and I'm worried all the neighbours will hate us (and I'm a little sensitive to noise)).

Hurricane Zeta blew in with all her fury at around 4:00 in the morning. Andrew was still awake because he was doing a guest lecture at The University of Turku, in Finland. They've already ended daylight savings and we don't end our daylight savings until this weekend (right?), so there was a little mix-up about the time class actually began. The good news is that Andrew was definitely on time—in fact, he was an hour early! The bad new was that it meant he needed to stay up an hour later than he originally thought he would have to stay up. But it was fine.

He did his guest lecture and then inspected the house to make sure everything was ship shape and Bristol fashion. The trench we'd dug out along the side of the house seemed to be doing its job nicely, not that it mattered much because Zeta brought along more wind than rain (while Delta was wet, wet, wet). 

Here, again, is the chart of the rain we got with Hurricane Delta:

And here is the chart of the rain we got with Hurricane Zeta (only a tropical storm by the time it reached us, thank goodness):

As you can see, we didn't quite get even 1.5 inches of rain with this storm. That's nothing! Though I am glad we still prepared by digging the trench and cleaning out the rain gutters (even though the trench and rain gutters are both now completely filled with debris).

Hurricane Zeta

As unbelievable as it is, somehow...somehow...yet another hurricane made landfall in Louisiana and the tail end of Hurricane Zeta is due to hit us in the early hours of the morning. Hurricane Sally found a leak in our roof. Hurricane Delta was kind enough to point out a few weak spots in our hull foundation. 

We're really hoping Hurricane Zeta just ignores us, but we spent the afternoon getting things ready for her anyway. After all, we don't often get company these days. 

So...we cleared out the gutters, built up the ground around our foundation and dug a trench through the side yard. 

Normal stuff like that.

Acorn Ink & Quill Pens

Oak trees in our area seem to be particularly ambitious and I have a few avid acorn collections living in my house so we always have plenty of acorns about. At first Benjamin wanted to collect 100 acorns for our 100th Day of School celebration (which I think we should hit around December 8), but when he collected well over 100 acorns on one little walk he decided that perhaps he should collect 100 x 100 acorns, or 10,000 acorns!

This last number proved to be a little too ambitious because that's a lot of acorns and a lot of counting. 

Still, we have a sizable bin of acorns sitting around our house, which we figured we'd just chuck outside for the squirrels every now and again over the winter. But the kids wanted to do something with them. 

At first they wanted to make acorn flour, which is possible. Acorns themselves are too high in tannins to be healthy for humans. They have to be soaked (sometimes more than once) to leech the tannins, and then they have to be baked, and then they have to be ground up. And that just sounded like a lot of work for something that I wasn't sure was going to be very tasty (otherwise I'm sure we would eat acorns regularly because they are plentiful). 

After a bit of searching around for ideas we settled on making acorn ink. 

It seemed easy enough. You just have to crush the acorns, which is easy enough if you have an eight-year-old around who enjoys crushing things (which I do). Then you soak the crushed acorns in water, boil them for a bit if you want, strain them, and add some "rust garden" vinegar (which we began a few weeks prior to preparing our acorns—for that you just put a rusty bit of metal in vinegar and let it go to town). All in all a very passive project. The hardest part was just waiting for things to be ready, waiting for things to rust, waiting while the acorns soaked.

We started our rust garden about three weeks ago and started soaking our acorns sometime around October 9. We just let them sit and sit and sit, partly because we forgot about them altogether when the basement flooded and partly because they just needed to sit for a while. I strained the ink once a few days ago, discarded the acorn chunks, and then boiled it down to make it thicker.

It was a rich brown and, I'll be honest, I was skeptical it would ever turn black. 

Today I strained our ink once more and then we added some of our "rust garden" vinegar to the ink and it magically turned a deep black! It was rather amazing!

Our next step was to make some quill pens (because if you're into a project this deep you may as well go all the way). We watched a few tutorials (like this one) before attempting things on our own. I was a little nervous to try it with a handful of kids, but they did great (ie. no one chopped off their finger or anything)!

First we used sandpaper to scrape the membrane from the feathers. I thought this would be easier (ie. safer) than handing everyone a knife. This way even the littlest among us could feel like they were contributing to the finished product even if Mommy ended up doing most of the cutting later on.

Phys Ed

We had a great first day back at (home)school! By the time I dragged myself out of bed in the morning the kids had all had breakfast and had cleaned up the table. Rachel and Miriam had mostly finished with their daily math section and Zoë was sitting at the table with her math workbook (Benjamin was playing Lego in the basement and Alexander, though he had had breakfast with the kids, was now with me). Further, Rachel had started a load of laundry, had put away the clean dishes and loaded all the dirty ones into the dishwasher. It was pretty remarkable!

We started reading The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which all of the children seem to being enjoying so far. They did their writing responses with little complaint and then we all finished up math (most especially Benjamin, who had to go from start to finish). Then we headed out for PE.

Rachel wanted to explore the new playground we found (since she was too cool to go out with us last week). It turns out that Monday in the early afternoon is a much less busy time for the park than Friday mid-afternoon. I even managed to park in the parking garage.

Miriam's 11!

When Andrew asked Miriam what her favourite part of being 10 was, she didn't say me (rude). She said everything was good about being 10, except for March. Considering yesterday, her birthday, was March 238th, that's a considerable amount of the year she took an exception to! We jokingly asked her how she enjoyed having her birthday in the spring, rather than in the fall, like it usually is, and she replied that it was wonderful because she usually has a more autumnal cake but this year she felt justified in picking a more spring/summer flavour. 

She went with what Rachel called a "basic" vanilla cake, with raspberry filling. And it honestly was the most delicious cake Rachel has made to date. Miriam also requested that the cake be decorated simply and elegantly. So here it is:

Birthday buddies

Miriam turned 11 today, which is breaking my heart a little bit. I have enjoyed being her primary activity leader so much and I'm going to miss her when she graduates into the Young Women's program in January (it still blows my mind that all the girls move up together because when I was that age you had to wait until you turned 12 to graduate from primary, a policy that came with its own set of challenges). But it's not like she'll be entirely gone from my life. 

I mean, we're homeschooling and are in the middle of a global pandemic so tend to just stay home a lot, so I'm going to see her frequently, and I'm sure she'll enjoy getting to spread her wings a little bit, assuming we ever get to a wing-spreading stage...which...I mean...I dunno.

This afternoon I did get an email notifying the young women and their parents that all in-person activities have been cancelled through November and will be replaced by virtual activities (three cheers for that because...hello), due, of course, to the pandemic and the rising numbers we're seeing now. While I'm happy about this change, I do find it confusing because our numbers are still lower than they were when they originally started pushing for (and holding) in-person activities while Rachel and I were raising a big fuss about...you know...the pandemic. And now that the numbers have been, from my perspective, holding steady, they are suddenly deciding to not have in-person activities. 

Nationally, our numbers don't look great so I imagine Georgia will spring up there soon. But I think this call has less to do with Georgia's numbers (or even our county numbers) and more to do with the fact that there are "a few" cases within the ward, though I don't know that we'll ever know who.

But none of that has much of anything to do with Miriam's birthday and more to do with just my overall feeling of being crushed alive. It's fine. I haven't been finding the time I'd like to write (here or elsewhere) and so I'm going to squish my "October Birthday Buddies" into one post, which really isn't fair because although they are born within the same month, their birthdays are farther apart (11 days) than Zoë and Benjamin's (10 days), though not by much. This is just one more way for them to learn that life isn't fair (and that it can't be fair)—sorry and you're welcome.

First we'll catalogue our birthday balloons. Here's Alexander with his birthday balloons this morning before we finally took them down. We meant to get around to making more for him but his birthday ended up being a little busier than we expected—with re-stretching our carpet and putting our basement back together.

Baby love

Alexander has always been very touched by music. Whenever music comes on—be it in a movie or video game or session of General Conference—Alexander will turn to his nearest sitting companion and whisper, "I like this music!" Sometimes he can't help but wiggle to the beat, or, if it's really getting to him, he'll hop up and dance. 

This afternoon he was listening to primary music on his "phone" and he came to me, rather weepy, and blubbered, "I found a new song for me and for you, Mommy. It's our song. It's about how you're my dearest, dearest mother, and I love you! And I do! And that's why it's our song. And it's so special to me and..."

He kept talking but was crying so hard I could hardly understand what he was saying. Tears were streaming down his sweet little face. 

I pulled him onto my lap and we sat there and listened to (and practiced singing) the song while he hit the "play again" button over and over again. He had me sing it for him at bedtime, while he stroked my face and hummed along. 

He's the sweetest, most tender little thing

The song is "Dearest Mother, I Love You," a song that I somehow escaped primary without learning (but a song I think Alexander will have learned before he gets to primary (in about two short months—how is that even possible?!)):

Gentle words I hear you say.
Your kind hands help me each day.
You’re my mother kind and true;
Dearest mother, I love you.

An outing

It's our last day of fall break. So for a special treat I decided to take the children to a new park. We have hardly gone anywhere the past seven months, so a new park would be a real treat! It's a park I've seen people posting pictures of but somehow we've never managed to find (in our defense it only opened last year, so I guess it's fairly new to . Finally I pulled it up on the map and figured things out. 

It's really the "city green," a little social area behind some shops. There were signs directing us to park in the "parking deck," but I just couldn't find a spot I thought I could pull into, but after a little bit of a panic attack I managed to find this spot that was close enough to being in the parking deck that I thought it counted as such:

Yes, I know there are several spots visible inside the parking deck but...I left them for someone who feels like they can park in a parking garage. 

Bye-bye bushes

Our neighbour was lucky enough to score a couple loads of fill dirt and when I went to ask her where she got it (because we desperately needs some fill dirt over here) she said someone was digging a pool and wanted to get rid of it so she told them to come dump it in her yard) since she has some low areas she wants to fill). She also said that she probably has more dirt than she could possibly use so we're welcome to some (since her husband is feeling keen to get their driveway back). 

So today we prepped our front yard for some DIY landscape work. The house had some scraggly bushes out front that we just didn't love. Plus we need to raise that entire area of the house so that it slopes away from the house rather than towards it, for basement flooding reasons. 

Here's a look at our house in July (after our new windows were installed):

Pumpkin pop-in

We've gotten very used to having an empty calendar the past few months. The last time we had a primary "activity" (earlier this summer) I accidentally put it on the calendar for 10:00 PM instead of 10:00 AM so we ended up missing out on it. We had a "pumpkin pop-thru" this weekend and I made sure to put the correct time on the calendar so we would get all the correct reminders and we remembered to go!

Good thing, too, because I needed to distribute craft supplies to my primary girls for our next couple of activities. Here I am reppin' the Bulldogs (Andrew likes to laugh at me because I legitimately can never remember what school I go to (or its acronym)—not GSU, UNC, AUC, UVU, BYU...UGA! That's the one):

Well-child checks

I took three of the kids in for their doctor appointments today. Our doctor's office typically only allows two children at a time but I asked for an exception to the rule because—and my doctor agrees and was the first to suggest it—it makes no sense for me to come in three times for five kids when I could just come in twice. Right? Sure. 

Added to that policy (that I'm skirting around) are some new COVID rules, including the fact that only one caregiver is allowed to accompany children at their appointments. So I chose to take Rachel, Zoë, and Alexander, thinking that if either one of them got too scared and out of hand there would still be a grown-up type person to help with the not-so-scared one? 

It didn't work out that way because they wanted Rachel in her own private room and had me going back and forth between the rooms and it ended up being rather awkward. At one point I was with Rachel and the doctor said something like, "You'd better get back to your other two because our nurses have better things to do than babysit all day," and I was like, "Ummm...okay?" because the little plan of me ping-ponging between the rooms was her idea, not mine. And the nurse, who was doing vision and hearing screenings on the kids and wasn't even finished when I got back. So it was a little awkward, but I'm sure it was fine...

One day I'll figure out the right combination of children to take to the doctor. Today was not that day.

Another Little Chatt

The little kids wanted nothing more than to go back to the Chattahoochee today with their big sisters, who were free from things like birthday cake baking and basement restorations and were happy to take a break to go rambling in the woods, so things worked out well for everyone. They were all hoping to get to splash around in the water a bit but, like I mentioned, things were a little more floody than yesterday.

A Little Chat

We're in the middle of our fall break right now. It was supposed to be a lovely, relaxing week. Instead it was...well...the week that it was...so we'll be taking next week off, too, to recover from this week. And that's one of the reasons I love homeschooling—we can just do that if we want to (and we do). 

Yesterday for his birthday, Alexander wanted to go to the Chattahoochee. I didn't pack extra clothes for kids because I knew the river would be too high to play in. I did not account for tributary streams in my plans so the kids ended up soaking wet, of course, because the tributary streams were at just the right level for splashing in. Today I took the kids to the river again and this time I packed extra clothes for Benjamin, Zoë, and Alexander and although they 100% were planning on playing in the stream, even that was too high to play in today. The lovely bank we played on yesterday was absolutely flooded, river water was rushing from the river upstream and things were a little crazy. So the kids didn't get wet at all. 

I may have just discovered a way to keep my kids dry at the river—packing a change of clean clothes for them! It's Murphy's Law, right?

Anyway, here are the kids (yesterday) tossing some stones into the river from some stairs that were fairly well dry:

Alexander is three!

Alexander has been planning and counting down to his birthday for a long time, and this morning he woke up to execute his plans. Here he is giving me his final two-year-old goodnight hug:

And here he is in the morning, with spiky hair (he loves spiky hair and keeps saying that when he grows up he wants to have spiky hair, so I pulled out some hair gel this morning and gave him some spikes):

Another smashing success

When I broke one of our glass measuring cups, I didn't break the huge 4-cup measuring cup (which we hardly ever use because rarely do we ever have to measure four cups of something), nor did I break the 1-cup measuring cup (which we use more often than the 4-cup measuring cup but still not that frequently because although we measure one cup of stuff frequently it also feels a teensy bit like maybe it will spill if you only use a 1-cup measuring cup). I broke the just right 2-cup measuring cup—the one we use the most often of all.

Thus the reason it was sitting out to dry on the edge of the counter (though in all honestly it should have been sitting out to dry more to the middle of the counter than the edge...I'm just saying).

Anyway, Andrew decided to order a new 2-cup measuring cup because we immediately began to feel like we were missing it. It arrived the other day, dropped off unceremoniously on our front porch...

...In a plastic-bag envelope. 

When I peeped out the window to see what package had arrived I whispered, "Oh, no," because I already knew what it was we were expecting that day. 

When I picked the package up and it...jingled...in my hands, I started cackling...because isn't that just the most 2020 way for a package to arrive? Shattered to bits?

Tickled pink (or blue or brown)

Alexander loves to name his toys. His owls all have names—Bluey, Hedwig, Spot, Brownie, and...I can't think of the other one—his doll is named Tom. The other day he was having me draw pictures and he asked if I would draw a picture of his puppy, so I did. And then he asked if I would draw a dog house for his puppy to live in, so I did and decided to put a sign on the dog house, so I asked Alexander what his dog's name was. 

"His name is...he doesn't have a name yet!" Alexander panicked.

"Well, you'd better name him then!" I said. 

Alexander scanned the room, finally settling on some bottles of glue the kids had left on the counter. 

"Gluey!" he said. "My puppy's name is Gluey!"

I thought his naming process was so cute, so I was telling my family about it on a group video call. When I announced that his name was Gluey, Rachel snickered, "That would be a good name for a horse."

My family rather appreciated her dark humour. 

*******

Today Benjamin agreed to do a difficult job for me (squeezing between the wall of the downstairs bathroom and the foundation to get some trash left back there (by the previous owners)), which he was rather reluctant to do but which when it came right down to it he found he rather enjoyed it.

"You're a good man, Charlie Brown," I told him.

Alexander looked at him—Benjamin was wearing all blue today—and said, "He's not Charlie Brown! He's Benny Blue!"

*******

We had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner this evening, cooked up by Rachel and Andrew, and while we were talking, the topic of Alexander's birthday came up. Alexander is very excited about his birthday and has all sorts of plans for his special day. 

"That's right," Andrew teased for some reason (because...he's a tease), "You're going to be four!"

The aftermath

Last night, in a very short amount of time, the heavens unleashed over 5 inches of rain on us. In fact, between 10:30 PM and 10:45 PM—shortly after we noticed the house had begun to...uhhh..."wet" itself and while we were outside desperately trying to build up a berm and convince the water to take a path that didn't include my basement—we received 1.24 inches of water! By 11:00 we had accumulated 0.75 inches more for a grand total of 2 inches in a half hour! 

I've included the precipitation chart below, but you can see a table with more detail here, if you're interested:

It was an almost unfathomable amount of rain, so let's see if we can fathom it, shall we?

It was a dark and stormy night...

...and I had only just tucked my little ones in for their tornado-warning tent-sleepover, turned out the light, and crept up the stairs (and wrote a quick blog post) when I got a text message from Rachel (at 10:18 PM).

"Heyyy," she wrote.

"'Sup?" I asked.

"There's a wet spot on the floor by the bathroom?" she frained.

This is not technically a valid scrabble word. Whereas refrain comes from the Latin re+frenum and means to bridle or restrain oneself (or from the Latin refringere, which means to break up, as with a refrain in a song), frain is a rather Scottish way to inquire about something. But Rachel was desperate, so we allowed it this afternoon. 

Anyway, she asked/told me that the floor was a bit wet.

"Oh?" I said.

"Can you come look at it?"

So I went back downstairs to look at it and...oh, no. 

Everything was not fine, as I so erroneously claimed in my last blog post, which I had finished (at 10:14 PM) mere minutes before Rachel made her discovery. The carpet was wet all along the outside wall as well as the wall between The Lego Room and the rest of the basement. The Lego Room was also wet. 

Good night, Hurricane!

We still haven't fixed our roof from Hurricane Sally and now we're being bombarded by Hurricane Delta. It was quite a ride for me when Andrew first sent me a warning about the wicked weather "Delta" was bringing us. 

"Tornado watch...from Delta," he texted me. 

"Better than a warning," I said and then I wondered what he meant by "from Delta."

Delta Airlines? They bring tornadoes now? Delta, Utah? That's quite the distance for a tornado to travel. Oh, Hurricane Delta! I mean, clearly it was raining outside but I didn't know when it was due to hit us. Apparently it was today.

So it's been raining heavily all day with tornado warnings popping up all around us but never for us. We had scriptures and prayer and I was just ushering the children upstairs to their beds when...it was finally our turn for a tornado warning!

Simply smashing

For the first time since...March? Literally for the first time since March, I have an errand to run today. I need to go to the library—to drop off our books that are due, to pick out new books, and to drop off our ballots (seriously, VOTE, guys!)—and this time I checked and they're not closed to the public (unlike the last time I was going to run an errand but then didn't). So I put on a nice outfit today—jeans and a (new!) shirt that I go on clearance in the early spring when we were buying new flip flops from Old Navy for Rachel and wanted free shipping but didn't want to spend enough money on flip flops to qualify for free shipping (like, may as well buy a shirt, right?), but which was on clearance because it was from the winter collection (it has long sleeves) so I hadn't had an opportunity to wear it until now.

Part of me was like, "Why wear a nice shirt? It's just going to get dirty/stained/ruined!" because motherhood is a, uh, messy affair, okay? But then I was like, "It does me no good just sitting in the closet waiting to be worn and I'm going in public today." So wearing a nice shirt is completely justified. Right?

Guys, the shirt already has a snag in it and I don't know how. Ugh. 

This is why I can't have nice things.

Zoë, at your serviette

We've been doing far too much reading lately, which might not be a thing you'd think would be possible but in our case...it just might be. Because we're planning on taking our fall break next week, the older kids have been pushing to finish reading The Scarlet Pimpernel so that we can have a movie night. This has made for some long mornings of reading, which can be difficult for Zoë and Alexander, who aren't following the story quite as well as the big kids (though still Zoë is able to recall a surprising amount of information; even when I'm struggling to recall character names—the other French girl...whatever-her-name-is De Tournay—Zoë can come up with the names in a snap—it's Suzanne).

This has led to some perceived naughtiness on their part (perceived because they aren't trying to be naughty, necessarily, but are being so rowdy that they're driving everyone else bonkers). They won't leave to go play elsewhere, though, because they want to listen to the story, too. So it's been a little tense the past couple of days, just trying to balance everyone's needs and personalities. 

And we've just been juggling so long, you know. 

Thus the need for a break.

Anyway, we finished reading this morning and I gave the kids their writing prompt and set them loose and Zoë and Alexander went into the living room to...read some more!

Zoë is a very fluent reader and will read anything she can get her hands on. She's also a very expressive reader, an indefatigable reader. 

Tonight she tried to read the entire 48 verses of 3 Nephi 12...even though we told her that she wasn't allowed to read the whole chapter by herself because other people wanted turns. She aggressively read the first 12 verses (yes, aggressive reading is definitely a thing) and then aggressively followed along and anytime anyone paused to take a breath or swallow she would cut them off and aggressively begin plowing through more verses.

She's got fluency, expression, and endurance.

The only thing she can't quite manage is to read in her head. 

This works out well for us, though, because she can usually find a willing listener. 

Here she is reading to Alexander, who moments before was so exhausted from listening that he couldn't manage to sit still or keep quiet (in his defense, there were no pictures):

Park time

We are gearing up for fall break over here, I think. I can just tell we're at a...breaking point...if you will...the point where we just feel like we're slogging through...the point where we haven't taken a day off since June, practically. That's the point we're at. I don't know what we'll end up doing—perhaps probably nothing—but whatever it is, it gives us something to look forward to for the next few days.

The promise of...sleeping in (we do that, anyway)...of not having to coach Benjamin through his math work (though yesterday when we wrote about heroes he said that I was a hero for helping him so perhaps it's not so bad after all)...of playing more games and watching more movies (we're hoping to finish The Scarlet Pimpernel before we break) and lazing about at the park (outside of "prime time" so we don't have to be around other people). 

And that's about it. 

We've considered driving somewhere and staying in a cabin, but haven't committed to that idea yet. It might be nice...but it might be nicer to do that not when we're in the middle of a pandemic, which (just as a reminder) we are. 

I did take the kids to the park today, specifically for science so we could look for examples of weathering happening in real life...but also so that they could just play for a while. We found plenty of weathering going on at the park (enough that most of the walking paths are closed for resurfacing right now since they've been weathered to bits (the kids are going to miss the "roller coaster" the tree roots have made in one section of the path; they loved hitting that with their scooters)).

Here are Zoë and Alexander by the sign warning about the trail being closed:

Best meals, best blankets

Somehow it's October, apparently. 

It's been quite the week at our house with a few work deadlines for Andrew and my regular homework load along with compiling a (23-page) family newsletter. Dinners were scanty: nachos, pancakes, frozen pizza, that sort of thing—which is the very reason I've always said that both of us couldn't do grad school at the same time. Thank goodness neither one of us is actually in school full time or we'd never remember to feed the kids!

We ordered pizza on Friday night and when the delivery guy dropped them off he asked if we were having a party. "No," Andrew told him. "We just have a lot of kids."

The guy looked a little shocked but, like, it's the truth. 

*****