Our Life at Home these Days...

Well, we are almost two weeks into this new phase of life and we are finally starting to get into some sort of routine.  Things have started to get a little easier for all of us as we are adjusting to this new way of doing things.  In addition, I finally have just accepted the fact that everything and anything has been or will continue to be cancelled on our calendar.  At first, I was so mad and frustrated by all of this that I found myself emotionally fighting against everything that was cancelled.  After so many disappointments, I finally realized a few days ago that there was no point in fighting against any of this as I would never win.  So, I have just accepted this new way of life as our new normal and with that acceptance has come a new found sense of relief.  As disappointed as I was to cancel our Spring Break trip to Hawaii in just a few days (after the governor of Hawaii declared that all visitors arriving after March 26th would have to self-quarantine for 14 days in their hotels/condos) and to learn that Spencer's wedding is completely cancelled for the time being due to all LDS temples being closed, I have started to see some silver lining in this awful situation.  There are actually some good things that have come as a result of our family lockdown that never would have happened at this time of the year otherwise.  These include Logan starting to read chapter books for the first time in his life, Ella learning how to ride a bike without training wheels, Ron working less hours a day which always puts him in a better mood, family movie nights happening on school nights, and baby Emmett getting to try out his bucket seat on the swing set for the first time.  NONE of these things would have happened had we been in the throws of our busy, hectic, middle-of-the-school-year schedule.  So, with that said, I am grateful for the 'positives' that have come out of this global pandemic.
Here are some random pictures from this past week in quarantine...

After a first week home of no set schedule (due to some items on the calendar that had not been cancelled and beautiful weather that pulled us outside for afternoon outings), I finally established a daily routine at the beginning of this week for Monday through Friday.  I intentionally did not put a time limit on each activity which allows the schedule to be flexible throughout the day which has been helpful.  This is how our daily schedules goes as of right now:

Breakfast, play time/get dressed, school time (during Emmett's morning nap), reading time, lunch, exercise time, TV time (during Emmett's afternoon nap), activity time, dinner time, scripture time, and bed time.  'Play with Emmett time' gets fit in whenever it can as the poor, little guy has kind of gotten lost in the shuffle with all of this change.  I no longer have the time to sit on the floor and play with him like I was trying to do on a daily basis while the kids were still in school.

Although we have managed to get outside for exercise time almost every day since school was cancelled, there has been two days when it was too cold and rainy.  Luckily, YouTube has an abundance of children's exercise videos to choose from which is what we did for our exercise time both of these days.  Lia and Ella loved it and Logan not so much.  Emmett had a good time wandering around the room while his siblings completed their cardio workouts.

It has been fun to have a family, movie night on a school night two evenings this week.  We rented both of the new Jumanji movies to watch and just laughed our way through both of them.  Since Ron and I have been big fans of Kevin Hart and Jack Black for years, we even found the movies entertaining.

After missing out on YW for three weeks in a row, Lia's class president decided to start hosting a virtual, weekly activity for the first time this week.  Here she is playing a game of charades with her class while her younger brother and sister looked on.

Although Logan has always enjoyed being read to by either Ron or me, he has never really read chapter books to himself in his free time.  Luckily, a few weeks ago, he came home from school telling me about a book series that he was interested in due to a few of the books being in his classroom.  Within a few days, I ordered the entire series from Amazon with the plan to give him the first half of the series for Easter and the second half for Christmas.  After reading his library book within the first few days of being home, I secretly pulled out the first book from my closet to give to him.  He was so excited that he read the entire book in one day!  He has now read five books in five days.  Thank heavens I have 14 books in total to give to him as the public library and his school library are both closed.  It has been so fun to see Logan getting in touch with his 'inner bookworm.'

After 2.5 days of working at school last week, Ron came home last Wednesday and set up the 'command center' for his high school in our home office.  Although he works a full day in the office with a short lunch break, it has been so nice for him to start work later in the morning and end work earlier in the evening.  Plus, I just love having him in a happier and more helpful mood each day.

The biggest bonus of this second week at home was finding the time to help Ella learn how to ride her bike without the training wheels on.  Although she totally was ready to learn last summer, we just never found the time to teach her between all of our trips, a newborn baby, and just being too exhausted.  After her request, Ron took off her training wheels this past Sunday and spent some time with her in the backyard on our sport's court.  I then went out with her during our exercise time on Monday and helped her practice some more.  By the third day, it totally clicked and Ella rode several laps around the large track at the junior high right up the hill from our house.  It has been so fun to watch her learn this skill this week!

Lastly, Ron found the time to swap out one of the big kid swings for the baby, bucket swing yesterday.  Today during exercise time, the kids asked me to put Emmett in it for the first time and he LOVED it!  It was so cute to watch him smile from ear to ear while Lia pushed him and I took pictures and video.  After Logan took over, Lia started pretend-jumping out of the way every time Emmett swung to the front of the swing set.  He thought this was the funniest thing and he just laughed over and over and over again.  We were all dying at how adorable this was!