"Good things are coming your way in due course of time"

Week 2 of doing schoolwork at home was not as successful as week 1. No nirvana, for sure. But it still wasn't horrible. From the tales of woe I hear from other parents, I'm starting to wonder why I'm so special though. The fortune I got from my Tuesday night sushi run? My kids are just awesomer than other kids? My kids' teachers are online-teaching wonders? I've been pretty low-anxiety over COVID19, so my kids aren't as affected by it? I don't know. But I'll take it.

Here are some of Cecily's writing assignments, just for fun:

I think it was harder this week because it was cold and rainy all week. Depressing weather + no exercise = wanting to do only the things that make us happy (like play video games and eat food).


This was our yard Thursday morning:

I remember it was Thursday only because that's the day we had scheduled to have tree trimmers come and trim our overgrown fruit trees for us. I was surprised when they showed up at 8am, even though it was covered in snow.

It doesn't seem like they did anything we couldn't have done. I'm glad it was them using climbing gear to stay in the cherry tree in the snow instead of me. But I have the equipment and I'm not sure it was worth $600 for them to do it. Now I know.

Today we're fasting for relief from the corona virus with the rest of the members of our church. And it's making me not want to pay attention to this post. My stomach keeps saying, "Who cares what happened last week?? FEED ME!!"

We did manage to have a lovely meeting as a Frohlich family over Zoom as our church substitute today. 

It was Mira's birthday yesterday. I got up and made two different kinds of muffins, blueberry and pumpkin, for her for breakfast. Then she convinced her sisters to play pokemon with her because she got a new stuffed Diance for her birthday. After lunch, Steve took her shopping for her presents. She ended up picking two stuffed animals and a lava lamp. Haha! She's so funny. It was cute to check on her and Cecily last night and have it shining away in her bedroom as the nightlight.

After the shopping trip, she wanted to go out and get soda as a family, so we went to Swig N Sweets. We managed to put a hole in the first 24 oz drink they handed us and had to use 50 napkins to soak up the worst of it. It put a bit of a damper on the trip because Steve was so upset by it. We ended up having to go to 2 Crumbl Cookie shops to get cookies for everyone after our soda disaster.

When we got home, we watched Onward together, had dinner, and Cecily and Steve played a game while Mira pouted that we wouldn't tie ribbons to nerf darts and shoot them into the sky outside in the rainy 35 degree weather.

We also went to Costco this week. It wasn't overrun like a few weeks ago. We bought about 9 new board books for Jules because we were all sick of reading the ones we had over and over again. We may need to buy 9 more next week.

Oh! Monday I woke up all rearing to get my exercise on while we have this quarantine schedule. I exercised Monday and ate pretty well. I even started a stretching routine with Mira and a friend of mine. Tuesday, I was almost done with my workout (literally 2 exercises left in my last set) when Jules crawled behind me and left her bottle there without me noticing, causing me to come down on it while doing high-knees. The bottle rolled and so did my ankle. There may or may not have been swearing. I had to send the kids away so I could swear and cry without an audience. I ended up crawling up the stairs and becoming director of operations from my spot on the couch after showering awkwardly and trying not to die while hopping on one leg on the wet floor of the bathtub. It was much better Wednesday and I'm mostly back to normal today, but I don't think I'll try doing high knees for a while.

Also my awesome and thoughtful friend, Gina, sent me a gluten-free gift basket that arrived on Thursday, too, I think. I've only tried one of the items, but it was DE-licious.

Tales from isolation

Hello from isolation land! *waves across the interwebs at everyone else on the planet*

Isn't this craziness? Life as we knew it exploded. Utahans decided that the Mormon mantra of "moderation in all things" is completely out the window and started the worst panic buying shortage in the nation. My kids are at home 100% of the time and so is my husband. I'm officially a homeschool mom for the foreseeable future.

And the craziest part of it? I'm LOVING it.

Besides worrying about how other people are panicking over COVID-19, this is the least amount of anxiety over life in general I've had since before Jules was born. (Pregnancy hormones make me feel like I have a huge dose of dopamine driplined into my blood stream.)

Who knows? Maybe in 3 weeks I'll be singing a different tune. But maybe not. Maybe homeschooling is like my nirvana. :)

The kids didn't have schoolwork Monday and Tuesday. Those days were pretty much free-for-alls where I was just trying to keep them from consuming 70 hours of television in 1 day. But Wednesday they started classwork and it went really smoothly. Emilia and Mira can do everything independently. Cecily needs my help reading the assignments and figuring out how to get to them and such. Some of the things I need to do with her. Like she's supposed to read out loud to me for the reading portion of her schoolwork.

After a couple of days of this, Jules decided she'd had enough of being ignored for 1.5+ hours a day and threw an enormous fit. So she got her screen time on Friday while her sisters did their schoolwork.

She loves Baby Signing Time, just like Emilia did. She's added hot, cold, water, ball, and dog to her repertoire this week.

Some fun things we've done together this week:

Had a magnetic tile building contest.

Played frisbee golf. Mira and Cecily and I played all nine holes on the greenway behind our house. Jules came along for the ride and ended up walking (while holding my hand) for almost 1/2 the route.

Played games. I've played Star Wars Yatzee with Cecily and Mira, War (card game) with Cecily, Splendor with Emilia and Steve (Emilia and I tied, beating Steve!), and Ori and the Will of the Wisps with the whole family watching (video game).

Played basketball (horse). Me and the girls went down to the park during one of Jules' naps and played horse. It was a pretty poor game as I think the basketball standards were at regulation 10 feet so Cecily couldn't make any baskets. Emilia only made two. And Mira opted out in order to rollerblade instead.

Watched home safaris. Cincinnati Zoo does a home safari every day where they feature one of the animals at the zoo. The keepers feed them and exercise them and tell you about them. They answer questions live through facebook. It's really fun. We've learned about their hippos, sloths, ocelots, and lions. Yesterday was penguins but we forgot to watch, so that will happen tomorrow.

Supported local restaurants. We got Chubby's (a local diner) and it was AMAZING. We will definitely be going back. We also had Chick filA and Wendys. (I don't know if those count as local restaurants.) I think we'll be buying gift cards for some of our other faves soon, too. Especially if we get a kickback from the government we don't need.

Did a photo scavenger hunt. We found this scavenger hunt online and then went to downtown Pleasant Grove and took pictures. It started off as a contest, but we ended up just going through everyone's pictures and commenting and oohing and ahhing. I absolutely loved this activity. It kept us outside for almost 2 hours (the kids played at the playground after we finished with the photos), we talked and laughed and were creative together, and we ended up with some really fun photos. Also, just before we left, Cecily got herself stuck on the slide and Steve had to help her get down (or up):

My cover business is finally picking up steam. I got two new custom clients in the last four days. Yay! I'm so excited for this business to take off. I love doing the work so much it doesn't feel like work.

Jules had a doctor appointment this week, too. She is in the 91st percentile for weight, the 98th percentile for height, and the 92nd percentile for head circumference. She's also way behind in her gross motor skills, though she's fine for everything else. I think it's mostly because she's terrified of falling. She doesn't want to walk on her own because she doesn't like the feeling of falling down. She doesn't climb onto furniture because of the same thing. She climbs up and down our 2-story stairs just fine, but they have walls on both sides, so it doesn't feel like she can fall. But if I take her to the park and ask her to climb the 3 steps to the slide, she freaks out on me--like screams at the top of her lungs and demands to be picked up and taken away from the horror.

So....we're a little behind on that. But I'm not too worried about it. Yesterday Steve got her to take 5 or 6 steps on her own. But the second I walked into the room, she dropped to the ground and cried every time he let her go. Turkey butt.

A good week despite corona virus madness

This week started out with a day with Nana. All my kids were out of school for a regularly scheduled teacher training day, so I took them all down to my Mom and Dad's while I went to counseling and then we hung out until we had to leave for a dentist appointment for Cecily. She was just getting the sealant put on that we couldn't do at our last appointment because she had two adult teeth that hadn't grown in far enough. Steve worked from home that day because he wasn't feeling well.

We were supposed to hold activity days at our house on Tuesday evening, but since Steve had a fever Monday, and things were starting up with Corona Virus, I cancelled it. And now all church activities have been cancelled for the foreseeable future. I wish I was more broken up about this.

Emilia did have Young Womens that night. They taught each other their favorite board games, which I, of course, thought sounded like a super fun activity. Emilia was excited to share Lords of Waterdeep. After dropping her off, I headed to my friend, Gina's house to help her get her house prepped for having her parents come stay with her. I always feel better after spending time with her, so it was totally beneficial for both of us.

Wednesday, (I think it was Wednesday--this week has felt all time-warp-y like the Twilight Zone) the governer issued a press statement shutting down all large group meetings. And later that day, President Nelson announced church meetings worldwide would be suspended until further notice.

Thursday, it was announced that the schools would close for two weeks. I was feeling very calm about it all, very peaceful. Like we were doing all the right things at the right times to keep things from getting out of control. And then Jules ran out of whole milk, so we needed to run to the store.

I was dumfounded by the state of the Smiths down the road from us. Photo evidence:

Everything was wiped clean. There was no produce. No meat. No pasta or canned fruit or staples like rice, flour, and sugar. There was not an ounce of any bread-like substances. I'm really grateful our church has advised us to have a year's supply of food storage. I haven't been as diligent in following that advice as I should have been. But we could survive for a month at least on what we have stored. There are things like laundry detergent and TP! and hand sanitizer and children's tylenol that I wouldn't have thought of in relation to *food* storage. But now I know.

It freaked me out a little bit though. How much people were panicking. I was more afraid of people's reactions than I was of the actual virus. Why are people stocking up like our food chain is broken? I really don't understand. It might break if people don't calm down, but right now, things would be mostly normal if people weren't freaking out. *sigh* I'm just praying they stop freaking out before we go through our two packages of Costco toilet paper, or we may have to start using our showerheads as bidets.

The kids also had parent-teacher conferences on Thursday night. It's always such a pleasure to hear how awesome my kids are. I'm so proud of their efforts. They aren't straight-A students, but they do well in most subjects and their teachers always love their attitudes and respectfulness.

I'm going to be sad if schools are shut down for the rest of the school year. Not only because we will probably all go crazy if I have to monitor their school work for that long, but because they have awesome teachers who are really good for my kids. Emilia's teacher especially is blowing me away. During her conference, he mostly talked about how she's working to overcome her social anxiety and the things she can do to be a happier human and what steps she needs to take to achieve the goals she's set for her future. He's teaching her way more than math and English I would be sad if she couldn't interact with that kind of positive reinforcement anymore.

Friday was a minimal day because of PECs and the kids mostly entertained themselves because I was determined to get some work done on book covers. I hadn't had a chance to make any yet this week and it was making my brain itch.

I got to see one of my roommates from my second go-round with college on Saturday. She was in town for a symposium. She was my favorite roommate then and we've kept in touch the entire 18 years since then. It was lovely to see her and kind of sad that we couldn't hug hello or goodbye. It was actually super awkward. I wish I would have been introduced to the elbow bump before then! :D

Today, me and my parents and Alison and Ben (and families) got together for our monthly birthday dinner. My mom and Mira and Dylan all have birthdays this month. We had ham and funeral potatoes and asparagus and jello and rolls. Mmmm. It was actually sunny and warm and all the kids ran around outside and got some of their cabin fever out.

And of course, to end my post, some obligatory cute Jules pics.

She was just so intent on "reading" this book. I thought it was adorable. She would turn the page and just stare for a minute, and then turn the page again. Until she realized that I was taking a picture and then I had to read it to her. Along with all the other books in the living room.

Jules was sad one day, so Mira pulled her up on the couch and Cecily found her favorite kitty stuffed animal and Emilia found her blankie and she calmed down. It was so sweet.

Turning on Baby Signing Time helped, too.

She's picking up on the signs so quickly. She knows hat, shoes, bubbles, thank you, more, milk, food, me, you, stop, bird, and probably more than I'm forgetting. She tries to sign most of the things she says even though she's not saying words and she doesn't know any more signs. But she's always moving her hands while she jabbers now. I find it adorable.

Also, if you haven't seen the videos of her dancing on Facebook, you are missing out. You should find someone with a Facebook account and make them show you. :)

I actually did a post 2 weeks in a row. Throw roses. Or chocolate. Money would be acceptable too. :D

I tried hard to take more pictures this week. Aren't you proud?

Mondays I usually have counseling and my mom watches Jules for me. But my mom and dad were in Colorado visiting Megan, so I skipped a week and the two of us hung out at home that day. I continue to work on book covers every day, so that's what I do while she naps and after the kids are in bed. When the kids got home from school, we spent a couple hours straightening the house. I even vacuumed and scrubbed the kitchen floor.

That evening I got a surprise visit from my new ministering sisters. They brought me these flowers and chatted with me for a while. My other ministering sisters hadn't spoken to me once the whole time we'd lived here, so I was excited to have a few people in the ward show they care.

Tuesday, Jules and I braved Costco. Around here, Coronavirus hysteria has reached epic proportions. Most Costcos and Walmarts were sold out of TP and water bottles over the weekend. I wasn't sure there would be any when I went, but there was, so I picked up some TP. Not because I'm worried about Coronavirus, but because I was worried when we ran out of TP, there wouldn't be any left to buy.

Then when I got home, Jules went down for a nap and I worked on book covers until she woke up. We had lunch just before the other girls got home from school.  I still had to put the groceries away and some of them needed to go in the fridge. But our fridge chaos had reached epic proportions. And when I took everything out to organize, I realized how dirty it was too. So I cleaned the fridge and rearranged it. When I put everything back in, it looked like I hadn't bought any food!

I took the fruit and veggie drawers out to clean the glass on top of them and while I was doing that, Jules found them and decided to dump all of our shredded carrots on the floor and the smooshy celery still in the drawer. She is too adorable to get upset with though.

Wednesday morning, she had a bath. She wouldn't drink her bottle until she got in the tub, little stinker.

Mystery was curious about the bath.

Oh, fun note. While she was in the bath, she started grunting and I knew she was trying to poop. So I rushed her out, grabbed the portable baby potty we have and stuck her on the toilet. And she pooped in the toilet! The next day, she was grunting for a good long while, so i was like, "What the heck, we'll try again" and plopped her on the toilet again. And she pooped there again! She's done it one more time since then. I hope this means she's going to be super easy to potty train.

Wednesday was a pretty normal day until the kids got home from school. I knew Steve had game night and wouldn't be home until late. So I told the girls that when they got home from school and they wanted to do something fun. They suggested going out for ice cream, but I didn't want to spend nearly $30 on a normal-without-daddy evening. So we decided to make cookies and rent Frozen 2 instead.

Before we could start our fun, Mira had activity days and Emilia had to go over to the junior high to register for classes and get a tour of the school. Me and Cecily and Jules and Emilia walked the 4 blocks to the school, realized we'd forgotten the paperwork, the 3 of us waited while Emilia walked back to get it, then spent 45 minutes getting a tour and asking questions. When we got home, it was around 5:30, but we decided to start the movie and make the cookies. So we ate cookie dough and cookies around 6:30.  At 7:30 when the movie was over, Cecily kept complaining that she was SO starving. Finally, after 5 minutes straight of this, I realized maybe she'd gotten when Jules had last Sunday and told her to get a puke bucket.

**don't read this paragraph if you don't want to read about yuckiness**
She got the bucket and went to the bathroom anyway. She was in there for about 10 minutes. Nothing happened, though, so she came out and made it almost to the kitchen before throwing up. Luckily she still had the bucket with her. So I only had to clean some of it off the kitchen tile and not the entire contents of her stomach. She didn't throw up again until Friday morning. So she got two entire days off of school, during which she watched inordinate amounts of TV. Heaven on earth for Cecily.

It wasn't until I was thinking about the day later that I realized that my kids had cookies for dinner, I hadn't done dishes for 2 days, and I could say that Frozen 2 literally made my kid sick. :D

So Friday Cecily was home all day watching TV and Jules took a really awesome nap, so I worked on a book cover for a lot of the day. After the kids were in bed, I worked on a second in that series and Steve fell asleep next to me on the couch. Super exciting stuff around here.

Saturday was a little better. We rented Frozen 2 through VUDU, so we had it for 3 days instead of the 1 you get on Amazon. Steve hadn't even seen it once (Wednesday was #2 for the rest of us), so they kids begged him to watch it with them again Saturday morning. He was kind enough to oblige. And it didn't even make anyone sick. Heehee. I went grocery shopping with Jules while they watched, then Steve and the girls cleaned bathrooms while I did our taxes. Then Steve and I got ready and went on a double date with my friend Gina and her husband Josh. We had dinner and played games at Good Move Cafe, then got a treat at Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory on the way home.

It was a good week. It felt like a non-depressed week for the first time in a long time. So !hooray! for hormones calming down. Stupid hormones.

February in summary

Monday, I went to counseling. After counseling, my mom agreed to watch Jules longer so I could get my hair color touched up. It ended up taking like 3 hours and I still didn't get my hair trimmed properly. 0_0

That meant I was late getting home so the girls were here by themselves for a while before I got home. Luckily we have a garage key pad that works, so they can get themselves in on occasions like this.

On Tuesday, Steve and I had our first activity with the 7-8 year old boys from church. That's our calling in our new ward and neither of us is excited about it. But, it went about as well as I expected it to. Nothing was destroyed, there were only a few fart and burp references, and we entertained them for the entire hour. The important part is that they seemed to enjoy themselves, we survived, and we'll do it again in another couple weeks.

On Wednesday, I needed to do grocery shopping, and I took Jules to the discovery museum for an hour or so before her nap. Around 1pm a couple ladies from the ward came over One of the lady's sons is getting married in a few weeks and and we made boutonnieres for the groomsmen and mothers/grandmothers out of fake flowers. There aren't many ways I can serve while taking care of a 1 year old, so it was nice to have the opportunity to do this. I also went that night to visit the lady I'm assigned to minister to. I've decided that it's really hard to minister to anyone you don't know, so I'm going to try to visit her regularly so we can get to know each other better. We did discuss one thing I know how to do that she'd like to learn--photography. I just need to figure out how to schedule that sort of thing.

Thursday, I didn't have anything on my schedule, and when I woke up, I felt like I needed to spend time with my kids. I don't know if I should have, but I let them all play hookie that day and we had a blast together. We went and got donuts (and a muffin for Mira) for breakfast. Then we hurried home, got ready and went to Thanksgiving Point farms. We got to feed a cow, a bunch of goats, a llama, some chickens, some ducks, and some sheep. Cecily and Mira rode the horses 3 times each. And Cecily, Jules, and I, went on the tractor ride. Jules was ready for her nap after that, so we headed home and it was such a nice day that Cecily and Mira played on the trampoline for the entirety of Jules' nap. Then we colored/draw/played legos downstairs for a while before starting The Croods. After our movie, we had a tasty dinner and kids took showers before bed.

Friday, we volunteered to clean the church. There is usually only like 5 people that show up to that sort of activity, but I was surprised to see like 5 families there (so like 12 people). It only took about an hour. After the kids went to bed, he and I watched Ford vs. Ferrari. I knew I would like it and I did. But the ending was hard for me to get over.

Yesterday was a weird day, but it turned out good. Steve worked on my website for quite a while and was able to get the shopping cart working. Our friend Camber's girls were dancing at the State competition just 10 minutes from our house and she texted to see if I wanted to come watch. So I went for a few minutes in the morning, then went home and fed the kids lunch and took them to Thanksgiving Point discovery museum again while Jules napped. We picked up Camber's youngest, Cassie, on the way, and she ended up staying the night and going to church with us this morning. The girls were in heaven. They love Cassie. Steve had to run to Orem to pick up his new glasses, and get some filters for our furnace. When he got back, we had dinner and then I went back over to watch the last 3 1/2 hours of competition. I wish we'd had ballroom dance at our high school growing up. I would have LOVED it.

The week prior to this one, both Steve and the girls had Presidents' Day off. Steve made us an eye appointment at 9 am, so we all had to be up early (for us) to get there on time. The optometrist was late and it ended up taking 3 hours to have our appointments, pick out glasses, and get them ordered. Ugh.

We'd planned to go to the Nicklecade as a family after, but Jules really needed a nap at that point. We decided to drive around for a while to see if she would fall asleep in her car seat and we were in luck! She conked out after only about 10 minutes. So we went to Little Ceasars and grabbed a couple of pizzas and drove to a park to eat. Everyone but me thought it was warmer than it was, apparently. They all got out of the car to eat on the picnic benches and within five minutes were back saying, "It's cold out here!" Sadly, opening the door woke up Jules, so she only got about a 20 minute nap. She's such a laid back baby, though. She was perfectly happy for our trip to Nicklecade.

Nicklecade has moved from using real nickles to using pass cards, and then they doubled the price of all the games. So it took us 1/2 the time to use up our money. I think the kids were disappointed and I don't think we'll be going back anytime soon.

The rest of the week, I don't remember too many details. I always have writing group and Emilia has a YW activity each week on Tuesdays. Wednesday, I went to the lady's house who I made boutonnieres with and we figured out what we wanted them to look like so she could get the supplies. Mira also had an activity days activity that day. I think Steve had a game night that night. Thursday I went to a book club I'd never attended before. The group only reads YA novels with some romance in them, which is totally up my alley. They invited anyone in one of my big Facebook writing groups to join, so I did. It was . . . weird. They had it at a crepe place that actually had gluten-free crepes. And they were very yummy. I also enjoyed the book we read. But the lady that "sponsored" it was a YA author herself and she seemed--what's the word?--self-important, maybe? She brought questions she'd prepared about the book and after she asked them, she'd give her answer, and then let one of us give about a one-sentence response before moving back to what she thought and then moving on to the next question. *eye roll* Of the four of us who made it though, she was the only one who'd been before, so I'm going to give it one more chance. If it's just as bad next month, I don't think I'll go again. I don't need to drive for 30 minutes to hear that chick's opinion on a book.

Friday, our dishwasher stopped working. Luckily, we still have our home warranty in effect. So I contacted them and they had someone out replacing it with a (used) unit by Saturday afternoon. Now our kitchen appliances don't match. :( But at least we only had to hand-wash dishes for 24 hours!

Oh! There was one more thing that happened that week. Steve started his new job! It was funny. He came home from his first day (Wednesday), and said he felt like he was in a season of the Office. Not because his boss was utterly ridiculous, but just because everyone was so eagerly sincere about EVERYTHING. Like they were all play-acting the part for a sitcom. He says it's still sort of surreal a week and a half later. But he's getting used to it. :D Haha.

The week before that, we had Valentine's day. That Monday, I took the girls to see my mom after school. She played with them and had Emilia make a Valentine's card. Cecily and Mira had already made theirs when my mom babysat them at the beginning of February.

Emilia had a sleepover with her friends ON Valentine's day and she had the whole thing planned out again. One of her friends gets out of school 45 minutes earlier than Emilia and her mom works full time, so I go down to Springville and pick her up. It's so funny to see her jittery excitement for the entire ride back to Saratoga. They, of course, had a blast. They made and decorated cupcakes, played hnefatafl using hersheys kisses, played Stardew Valley co-op, had baked chicken, broccoli, and grandma's rice for dinner with us, ran around outside for a while. Not in that order obviously. But it was a fun way for her to spend the holiday. I ended up taking everyone home on our way back to Springville for haircuts for all the girls. Emilia wanted to get bangs, but the other two just had a trim.

I don't really remember anything about the first week of February. But here's a cute picture of three of the girls getting ready for church one Sunday. They're just so cute.