The ants ate my internet

Rachel was in the middle of a zoom class session (and Andrew was in the middle of working but wasn't in a live meeting) when the internet cut out. It was on one minute and out the next. After checking all our equipment Andrew gave the internet company a call and they gave us an appointment for tomorrow—at 7 PM! That would mean we'd have to make it through an entire day without the internet, which under any other circumstances might have been inconvenient, but which under this specific set of circumstances sounded rather horrible.

We're doing everything remotely these days so the internet has become more of a necessity than a luxury. Not that it was necessarily a luxury before; we depend on the internet for a lot of things. It's just more necessary these days and living without it for a day and a half seemed pretty close to a crisis.

Andrew had to run out to pick up some things from the hardware store this afternoon. Turns out we're going to learn how to reglaze our windows (oh, boy)! When he went to leave the house he noticed that there was an internet repair vehicle on our street so he wandered over there to see what was going on.

Lucky us! They were already fixing our internet (and not because we called them so I'm not quite sure how they knew to be working there). Apparently a colony of ants decided the neighbourhood junction box would be a good place for a home and they chewed through all the cables, cutting out internet to our street. It took several hours to fix but clearly we're back online!

And I would write more but...I have to go put Alexander to bed again.

In all honesty, I've been enjoying this quieter time at home with our kids without any pulls from schools or music lessons or other activities. But right now I'm a little finished with these kids. Zoë didn't fall asleep until after 11:30 today (she has not been going to sleep well lately (she has not really been sleeping in either (she is super grumpy))) so when Alexander got up the first time (around 11:00) she asked what he was doing out of bed (and had clearly not yet been asleep, herself). I got them both back in bed and asleep and now Alexander is here again.

I'll probably put him back to bed three or four more times tonight and eventually we'll end up in an exhausted heap together only to peel ourselves out of bed at an hour that feels far too early (but is probably quite late).

So, like, I love having my kids home. I love homeschooling. I even love quarantine (never leaving the house is the dream, right?). But I would like to just spend, like, half an hour not being touched.

Just...that would be neat to maybe see what that's like.

More Homemade Face Masks

When we realized what day we'd hit 180 days of schooling—Tuesday, May 12—the kids quickly suggested we work extra hard the next couple of weeks and finish up on the 8th instead. Honestly, what are we even finishing? We finished our math and science curriculums weeks ago and I've just been cobbling together our language arts and social studies units so they're pretty flexible. We're still plugging along, though, reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, writing essays and working on vocabulary, doing daily math problems, and learning about pandemics (which is an easy way to work in both social studies and science). Anyway, since we decided to finish two days early we've been putting in extra long days—we were working on school work from 9–5 yesterday and about as long today—in order to cut those last two days out.

Pandia Press put out a pandemic study unit recently so we've been working our way through that. Today we read about The Black Plague and made some plague doctor masks, which the kids really enjoyed. I have no pictures from the actual construction since I was simultaneously using a hot glue gun and was acting as the bumper for Alexander's little roller coaster thing. It was...a lovely combination of activities. But after the kids traced and cut out pieces for their masks (except the littlest two, who needed more than a little help with the cutting) I helped get them assembled and then sent them outside to paint.

Here they are hard at work:

COVID Cockatoo

For science and physical education today we took a very long walk and made some more observations in our field guides. Beyond "The Loop," our walking options jump from manageable to very, very long, so that was the length of today's walk. But we needed something new and seeing anything beyond our little block was so exciting for the kids that they hardly complained about their legs getting tired.

Home haircuts

Evidently this isolation thing was getting to Rachel and she started begging me to let her cut her own hair. She said it was the perfect time to do it because if she royally messed up it wasn't as if she'd be seeing any of her friends any time soon.

The school year is online for the duration of the year. Young Women Camp was cancelled. We have literally nothing on our calendar for the foreseeable future (though Miriam might be visiting the orthodontist eventually).

It's her hair, so I let her.

Sunshiney souls and shivery snakes

I knew we'd have to sing In Remembrance Of Thy Sufferings for the sacrament hymn today because it popped into my head while I was preparing our little primary lesson and I'd been humming it all morning. And the best way to get a song out of your head is to just sing it through all the way, right?

But Miriam chose the opening hymn—There is Sunshine in My Soul Today—which she hadn't practiced beforehand so we took it a little...slower...than it's meant to be sung. Alexander didn't mind, though. He was pretty sure he knew all the words and sang along with us (except he was singing You Are My Sunshine):



And, no, he doesn't have any clothes on (except for his unders).

Sneaky Little Hobbitses

We went for what shall here on after be known as a "Hobbit Walk" this evening.

It was a little chilly and windy and no one felt like doing "The Loop" so instead we went to the stop sign (or "there") and "back again"—thus, the name "Hobbit Walk" (for "there and back again")—which is only half as far as "The Loop."

Alexander wanted to walk on the way home; he often wants to walk these days. He wants to pick flowers, and chase butterflies, and hide in the bushes to pop out and scare mom and dad, and stare at the anthills, and so forth. He doesn't want to be strapped into his stroller (though we've been mighty particular about making sure he is strapped in this past month (and his teeth are once again quite tightly fastened in his gums, for the record)). He also loves to make people swing him.

"One, two, three...swing!" he'll command.

He especially loves when he can convinced Daddy to swing him because Daddy goes a bit wild and takes him all the way around.



Anyway, because Alexander was walking home we got a bit far behind the rest of the kids and because Alexander wanted to swing we charged the kids with taking the stroller home.

Quarantine camping

I bought a small pop-up tent during spring break (when I realized we would not be able to go anywhere for the foreseeable future) and it finally came, so this weekend I asked if the kids wanted to sleep in a tent (our official camping tent, you see, is ginormous and requires stakes to put it up and I didn't want to deal with that sort of hassle to have the kids camp out on the back deck). The bigger girls didn't seem too enthusiastic about the idea so I pulled out the play tents and popped them open in Alexander and Zoë's room so the little kids could camp out in there (these tents are fun but provide no protection against mosquitos so we don't sleep in them outside).

After I did this the bigger girls decided that sleeping outside actually did sound like fun, so we got the tent all set up and the girls finished their evening activities while I went out in the tent with the little kids to have story time. Alexander was the first to fall asleep and was the only one asleep when Rachel and Miriam came out around 10:00. Shortly before 11:00 I got this series of texts:

Drumroll

I received an email in the midst of our quilt-tying on Monday, which congratulated me for my recent acceptance into the MA in Education (Literacies and Children’s Literature emphasis) at UGA. I had been impatiently checking the mail for a letter every day, thinking that's how I would be informed, but an email was fine as well. In a bit of a shock, I went to show Andrew the email and then I went outside to help finish the quilt while I thought about everything I suddenly needed to do.

At dinner we began asking our traditional question: What was your favourite part of the day?

"I liked quilting outside with my kids," I said.

"I liked quilting outside with you, Mom," Alexander quickly parroted (I'm always his favourite part of everything).

"Quilting was your favourite part of the day..." Andrew asked. "Not...getting accepted to grad school?"

"Oh, yeah, that!" I said. "That was good, too!"

Grandma Quilts

A few months before she passed away Grandma took Miriam and Rachel to the fabric store to pick out some fabric for some baby quilts. She had more or less kept up with delivering a lovely baby quilt to each of her grandbabies over the years. Sometimes she had the quilts ready before the baby was born. Sometimes she didn't have the quilts ready until the babies had been around for a little while (I believe Miriam and Benjamin received their baby quilts at the very same time), but always there was a quilt from Grandma. My kids call their quilts their "Grandma Quilts."

Poor Grandma had amassed quite a backlog for herself the way her children had been reproducing like rabbits. She needed a quilt for Carter, Arwyn, and Alexander, so the girls helped her pick out fabric for all those babies and then Grandma let them choose some fabric for themselves so she could help them make pillowcases. Rachel chose some Doctor Who fabric (or perhaps it was Harry Potter (I don't know; it's in her room somewhere) and Miriam chose a lovely yellow floral print (her favourite colour).

But then life got busy. School started and we had those crazy wildfires and Grandma got sick and then she died and the quilts never got made.

I asked Aunt Dorothy if she would finish the quilts for us since none of us knew how to quilt and she said she would be honoured. But then I never got the fabric to her and it was time for us to move, so I bravely decided to take Alexander's fabric with us. I prepared the fabric and the batting for the three quilts, folded up Alexander's and put it in a box, and folded up the other two and put them in a pile for Grandpa to get to Aunt Dorothy (or, probably more accurately, to get to Aunt Linda to get to Aunt Dorothy).

He told me on the phone the other day that he had gotten the quilts back from Aunt Dorothy and that got me thinking that perhaps it was time for us to pull out Alexander's Grandma Quilt, so we did. And, boy, was it an adventure!

I sewed a very simple quilt that required no edging (though I'm sure Dorothy's quilts have a beautiful edge to them not all of Grandma's quilts did—Rachel's was edged and Zoë's was edged but Miriam's and Benjamin's were not) and then the kids and I tied it with yarn to finish it.

Here are Rachel and Miriam just starting out with the yarn tying (on Grandma's quilting frame):

Bubbles with the littles

We had a fairly busy day at home with schoolwork and other projects, which I will write more about tomorrow. Right now I'm tired (just waiting for Andrew to be ready for bed; he's working on a chapter for a textbook and I just finished editing the first half of said manuscript) so I'll write about a light, fluffy part of our day: bubbles!

The kids all got bubbles in their Easter baskets. 

Actually, that's not quite true. We did not include bubbles in Rachel's basket because I'd gotten a pack of eight bubbles containers but then we did a birthday parade for Zoë's little friend Kate's birthday so I broke into my Easter stash and gave (ie. dangled a gift bag out of our car window for) Kate some of our sidewalk chalk and four containers of bubbles (one for Kate and each of her siblings), which left me with only four containers of bubbles left. I figured Rachel wouldn't be too downtrodden if she didn't get bubbles in her basket since she's reached the age where she gets more enjoyment over blowing bubbles for other (littler) people than she does blowing bubbles for herself.

And also Alexander can't blow bubbles very well and is more than happy to share that job with the bigger kids so he can pop them. So there were still plenty of bubbles to go around!

Here's Alexander trying to chasing (and admiring) some bubbles: