We did some things

I am forcing myself to write this blog post so I can stop feeling bad that I'm not doing them. Haha. I have no inner drive to do them lately, like I said before, because our lives are so mundane.

On May 4th, we had a family Star Wars day. It was really fun. We all wore Star Wars T-shirts, even Jules.

Mira and Cecily and I painted our nails.

Mira got BB8 hair.

Cecily got "Darth Vader" hair.

And wore her Star Wars necklace from Nana.

Cecily begged for galaxy donuts, so we tried. They were tasty, but not pretty. :)

Another family activity we did was a taste test. We got 4 large pepperoni pizzas from local pizza places we hadn't tried before and 5 different flavors of "cream" soda. We gave a rating from 1-5 stars for each.

Not surprisingly, the most expensive pizza was the favorite by far. And the least expensive ones were so gross that we will probably never eat them again.

Mother's day happened. It wasn't a great day. We got a good picture of me and the girls though. They sure are gorgeous. Steve was a good husband. It was mostly the kids that were terrible that day.

Jules found a container of sprinkles one morning and it was adorable to watch her try to eat them.

Last weekend, the Coombs family came to visit us. They stayed Friday night to Monday morning and it was amazing to have other people to interact with. The dinosaur museum at Thanksgiving Point just reopened so we all went and enjoyed the outing social-distancing style.

The kids played all weekend and we played a lot of games, including Drawful. This is all of us gathered to play that.

One night Steve, Joe, and I were playing Castles of Burgundy and we rolled doubles like 16 times. Three times all three of us rolled doubles at the same time. It was crazy.

Yesterday was Cecily's birthday and we decided to go to Thanksgiving Point gardens to feed the fish, see the flowers, and do another photo scavenger hunt.

After the Gardens, we went out for lunch, went home and bought Minecraft for Cecily (which we are already regretting), relaxed for a few hours, and then went out for ice cream and french fries. Yes, ice cream from Farr's Fresh and French fries from 5 Guys was our dinner. It was a lovely day.

We have some family visits planned over the next month and we are super excited to get out of the house and to host and see people who aren't ourselves. I hope everyone who I don't get to see is doing well, too! Love you all.

Activities from quarantine

I'm afraid my posts have slowed down during quarantine because I generally have very little to report. We have done a few interesting things lately though, so here you are with a post. The pictures are in order, but I'm just going to talk about the pictures as they come.

This is a picture of a fish that Cecily made for math. They were learning about fractions so she had to make a picture with fractions of a circle. Sorry about it being sideways.

This is often how I find the kids watching TV during their screen time for the day.

When we made our crystal shapes a few weeks ago, only a few of them turned out. The ones that we used borax on worked, the rest didn't. And since we put alum on Mira's and *then* put it in borax water, the crystals were weird and flaky. So last week we finally got around to trying again. I forgot when we started that we had to glue borax granules to the pipe cleaner and let it dry before we put it in the borax solution. So we microwaved the borax solution right away and then had to let it sit for a few hours. I left the spoon that I used to mix in the borax in the jar and when we came back, it looked like this. So fun!

Jules is really hard to entertain while I help her sisters do school work. Sometimes I just let her watch baby signing time because I just need to focus on her sisters or on my cover work. But I have tried to find other things for her to do if I can. I discovered that she REALLY likes stickers. If you look closely, her hands are covered in stickers. I would put them on, then she would pull them all off and stick them other places. It kept her entertained for hours one day.

Since it's warmed up, everyone has been outside more. We've discovered that Jules loves the slide and the trampoline. In this picture, Mira is on the swing, Jules is at the bottom of the slide, and Mystery is on the upsidedown kiddie pool.

The week it warmed up, I went for a walk with Jules almost every day. She LOVES being outside and it entertained her for an hour or more. I took this picture to show you the view. The lake and the mountains and Jules drinking out of a water bottle. :)

At the end of our walks, she was usually ready to get out of the stroller and walk herself, so I would follow her for a couple of blocks. We found a ball one day and she was so excited to push it along the sidewalk.

We play board games a couple of times a week. We played Disney Headbandz one night. Jules thought we looked so cool in our hats, she needed one, too.

Our governor announced two weeks ago that in-person school was not going to be resumed this year and it made all of us very sad. So we decided to to come up with quarantine-approved activities and schedule them each week so we have things to look forward to. One of the first activities we picked was going to Antelope Island. I dont' know why it's called that, since it's known for it's large herd of Buffalo. Steve picked this activity, and even took a Wednesday off for it (because it was supposed to be the warmest day that week at 70 degrees) so we headed up around 10am. It takes about an hour to get there from here. What we didn't know is that Antelope Island is also known for it's biting gnats between April and July. So we got there during prime gnat season. But we weren't going to let a few little fly-thingies stop us.

Yeah, right.

We chose a hike that would take us up, instead down near the water (Antelope Island is in the middle of the Great Salk Lake), and made it to the top alright. Jules was adorable because she WOULD NOT get in the hiking backpack. She was bound and determined to hike that hike without anyone's help. She would not even hold our hand unless there was a rock too big for her to walk over.

She would not even be bothered to stop for a photo op. This girl really does crack me up every single day.

We made it to the top with only a few minor run-ins with the gnats. The view was nice. It was great weather.
 

And then the gnats killed it.

First Cecily and Jules got attacked. Jules doesn't have thick hair yet and the gnats climbed up in it and started biting her scalp. When we went to get them off, she had bloody spots all over. Cecily got swarmed and it made her cry because they terrified her. We got them all off and kept going, but then Cecily got attacked again, Steve got annoyed that she couldn't keep it together and hauled her and Jules back down the mountain while Mira and I finished the hike. On *our* way back down, Mira and I encountered the gnat swarms. Usually you can just swat them away from your face, but there were like a million of them (literally). I could swat a few away, but there were thousands more that would land on my hoodie and when I swatted the ones in my face away, it bothered the ones on the hoodie and they swarmed. And when I ran, they just followed me! It was so bad that I couldn't hold my breath long enough to get away and had to breath some of them in. I started yelling at them and running at one point because I thought it would get me away from them, but instead I just scared Mira and made her start crying. I finally realized that they were congregating on mine and Mira's hoodie, so we pulled them off and started flinging them around like helicopters trying to get the little buggers off and keep them off. This finally got us away from most of them and we high-tailed it down the mountain. It wasn't until we reached the car and were ready to go that I realized that I'd had my phone in the pocket of the hoodie that I'd been flinging around like a helicopter. So I had to hike all the way back up the mountain, fight off another swarm of gnats and hike back down again. Luckily, it had fallen out when I'd started running and not when I'd started flinging the hoodie around. It landed safely in a bush. At the top of the mountain. It was pretty much the worst hike I've ever been on. Cecily called the gnats deadly and she and Mira claimed they were too traumatized to do anything else that day. So we drove home.

Jules usually naps between 11 and 1. This was her at 4pm on our drive home. She was SO tired. And she just put up with it all. She's such a little angel. The funny part of this picture is that she was being a little cranky so I gave her a few skittles to see if it would help. She eagerly took them, and then just held them until all the candy coating melted and started dripping off her fingers. She was just too tired to remember to eat them. Haha!

We went to visit my mom the next day. The kids all enjoyed that WAY more. And there was a gorgeous double rainbow on our way home.

Another activity we picked was an ice cream bar. We bought ice cream and any toppings the kids requested and made huge bows of treat-covered sweetness. The kids thought it was even better than Farr's Fresh and that's saying something.

This spot of dirt was covered in rocks when we moved in. I made the kids help me pick them all up. Then last Saturday, I rototilled it, twice, bought wood, and made garden boxes. This week, I planted flower bulbs around the boxes, took the kids to Cook's greenhouse to pick out veggies and flowers, and planted all of it. Hopefully it will be worth the effort.

I also got ambitious and made homemade ravioli and strudla this week. Apparently I was feeling in need of comfort food, because tater tots and chili and shepherd's pie also made it on my list. Thankfully I wasn't motivated to make all of that in one week.

Cecily is so good and regularly takes Jules onto the trampoline. This particular time, she just laid there with her blankies and Jules alternately laid down next to her and ran around her in circles for at least an hour. It was a lovely break for me.

And last, but not least, random sideways pictures of Mira and Cecily spelling each others names in food. :) Have a great week!

projects and spring "break"

Two weeks ago, we had a pretty rough week. Everyone is getting cranky around here. And the kids were not feeling cooperative about school. I honestly don't remember much of what went on. I have pictures of us making crystals from borax and pipe cleaner. So we obviously did that. It was an experiment I wouldn't have tried (too many things to gather and buy), but we wanted to put something together for our activity days boys and for some reason, this is what we decided on. I  wanted to try it out first to make sure it worked like the tutorials said it did. It's a good thing I did, too, because it totally didn't work the way one tutorial said to do it. There would have been 5 very disappointed boys.

This week was spring break for us, so--thank heavens--we didn't have to do school this week. It was a really nice break from that much of the stress. And even though we didn't do anything particularly different or exciting, it was a good week.

Since we've been isolating for over 2 weeks and none of us were sick (with me being the only one who goes to the store), we decided it was safe to see my parents this week. Jules actually took a nap while we were there and she was super cute when my mom went to wake her up.

Another activity the girls worked on this week was making a stop motion video with legos. So far it is super cute and I will attempt to share it when they finish it. Cecily was easily bored with it, and we still needed to entertain Jules, so we got out the duplos and played with those when it was Emilia and Mira's turn to record. Cecily built a lovely castle and vehicle.

I've been working hard to keep up interactions in my facebook group for my cover design business, so I ran a contest this weekend: guess the number of jellybeans in the jar. I'm announcing the winners tomorrow, but surprisingly, nobody went *over* the number. All the guesses were too low.

Saturday, Steve and I tackled the four other lilac bushes in our back yard. So here is what they looked like before:

Here is what arms looked like after:

And here are the bushes after:

Sadly, I don't think they'll give us many flowers this year. But hopefully by next year they'll be recovered enough to give us some nice blooms. I think they are as old as the house, so they're some very mature lilac bushes (about 18 years old!). We also have 2 chokecherry trees, 2 apple trees, a cherry tree, and an apricot tree. It'll be interesting using all that fruit!

For Easter, I decided to make my kids a small crocheted item. I wanted to do something other than make book covers for a minute, and this seemed like just the distraction. Cecily got a unicorn, Mira got a llama (which she wanted photographed on a "cloud"), and Emilia got Ori from a video game we like to play.

I also crocheted a baby yoda. I was going to give him to Emilia, but she wanted Ori more.

We had Easter dinner and an egg hunt at my parents' house, too. My mom decorated a lovely table with cute little bunny butt decorations and daffodils from her yard at each place-setting.

We had church together and Jules squished in between Nana and Grandpa and ate homemade raisins to keep her quiet. :)

Tonight, I FINALLY finished the wall-hanging I started making for Cecily months ago. I ran out of white yarn, so it went on hold for a month or two. The lighting isn't great because I just hung it up (at 10:30 pm), but I'm really proud of how it turned out. It's so fun.

Here's to another week of school at home and more social distancing! Woot. :|