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. :|