Gonna (maybe) make my garden grow

Our neighbour up the street has an amazing garden. He's always out there tending it. I asked him once how he keeps the deer away (there are so many deer around here) and he says he goes out every evening and sprays deer deterrent. I don't have that kind of commitment to the cause so I've mostly been researching deer-resistant plants.

Anyway, I was out walking with the kids sometime in the past three weeks (definitely within the quarantine period) and our neighbour called out to me to ask if I would like some daffodil bulbs. He was getting ready to separate/thin his and would love to share.

"Oh, sure," I said with a bit of a question-mark in my inflection. "That would be awesome."

"Was it you who wanted daffodil bulbs?" he asked, having caught my hesitation. "I thought I'd talked to you about this. Or was it my wife? Maybe I had spoken to Michele about it. Yes. I think that's what it was. She saw on Facebook or something that you were wishing for some daffodils."

I am not Facebook friends with his wife so that means she was totally stalking my profile, which I think he realized while he was talking. But, that's fine with me. I think it's more funny than anything; it's just part of the world we live in. Besides, they're wonderful neighbours and I have daffodil bulbs now!

When we were on our way home from our walk this evening (poopy flip-flops in hand), our neighbour (who was out tending his garden) called us over waving a big clump of Virginia spiderwort.

"Do you want any of this?" he asked. "I already sent some daffodils home with the rest of your crew. These will send up little purple flowers."

So the kids and I spent about an hour planting bulbs when we got home from our walk and I'm so excited to see if next spring will bring me beautiful blossoms (or if I will somehow manage to kill everything in my garden). Only time will tell...

In the meantime, we've begun constructing cages for our vegetables. We have to keep squirrels away so they don't steal the seeds we've planted, and we have to keep deer away so they don't eat the plants, and then we also have to keep squirrels away so they won't steal our vegetables (seriously—in Durham they would get into my cherry tomatoes and just chuck them all over the place and it made me so angry; like eat them or leave them, please). I suppose we'll have to worry about pollinators getting through the netting. I figure smaller bees can get through, but butterflies and larger bees certainly will struggle, so we may end up taking them off during peak bug-pollinating hours and putting them back on during peak deer-scavenging hours.

Anyway, all the kids (except) Rachel helped me put together some frames this afternoon. It was...an exercise in patience.

Here's sweet Alexander with the hammer:

Ten things I do not like

There's a little survey-thing going around in Facebook land asking people to list ten things they don't like that they think most people probably do. So I thought I'd do that here since I always feel like I need to explain myself and because today I'm upset with the dog population. So they get to go first.

1) Dogs.

Today we were walking down the street (because there aren't sidewalks in our neighbourhood) and there was a lot of old foliage in the gutter (pine needles and things like that, just slowly decomposing) that I was walking on because the other option was to walk basically in the middle of the street.

Andrew and I were talking and walking and the kids were up ahead goofing off together when *squish* I stepped in something gooey. And of course I'm wearing flip-flops because I do like those, except that they really don't protect your toes from goo so this goo squelched right onto my flip-flop and started oozing in between my toes and...instead of looking down I looked up.

I couldn't look down. I just couldn't.

Maybe it's just mud, I told myself, willing myself to just. look. down.

Easter Croquet

For family night I printed out a little booklet of the Easter story, cut it apart, taped them to our croquet hoops, and then as we played through we read the story together. It was a bit of a wild evening, but perhaps a memorable one. Mostly the older kids ended up getting schooled at croquet by Andrew, who breezed through the course, while the younger two galloped around using their mallets like hobby horses.

Here we are before starting the game:

COVID-19 thoughts

Watching the numbers creep upwards doesn't feel quite so alarming as it once did—of course they're going up. Where else would they go? The United States broke 300,000 cases yesterday and we're tends of thousands above that number today. We've had 9,618 deaths so far. Tomorrow we will break 10,000 deaths for sure, which is mind-boggling considering on March 5 (one month ago (or 17 years ago, depending on how you're calculating your time)) we had only 12 (twelve) confirmed deaths from COVID-19.

Let me take a minute to say that I had friends—at the beginning of March—comparing this pandemic to the swine flu outbreak in 2009. Now, to be fair, I missed experiencing how the US dealt with that pandemic because we were in Egypt. Schools were cancelled (including classes at AUC, though his semester was technically only "postponed," not cancelled) and they rounded up all the pigs, slaughtered them, and then burned them (because why not?). But I hear that things happened in the United States. In fact, after watching the movie Contagion where they joked about doing too much for the swine flu pandemic, I looked it up and that was the general consensus—that the government did too much, that they caused too much panic for something that ended up being not a big deal.

But fast forward a decade and I have friends talking about the botched handling of the swine flu epidemic and saying—again at the beginning of March—that the coronavirus had only killed a few people (48, to be exact, on March 13, the day we started social distancing) but 12,000 people died of the swine flu (though there were "only" 3,433 confirmed deaths). And how horribly the government handled that pandemic and what a great job they're doing with this pandemic. And I just...guys...we're going to get to 12,000 confirmed deaths (to say nothing of the unconfirmed deaths) in about one month (not a full year) so I think we can agree now that this virus is a little more aggressive than the swine flu? Please? Like...come on.

A friend of mine had their baby today, at 33 weeks (as early as Benjamin). His mom tested positive for COVID-19 and is so terribly ill that they took the baby via c-section because they were worried they would have to intubate her (or, alternatively, let her die). Her body simply couldn't fight the virus and harbour a baby any longer. So they delivered the baby and rushed it off to the NICU so that the mother's body could concentrate on getting better. But she can't go to the NICU because she has the virus, so she's in isolation, away from her baby (which I imagine is the worst). My friend (her husband) also tested positive for COVID-19 so he also cannot go see the baby. So now their brand new baby will just be raised by NICU nurses until the parents get two negative tests in a row. Thank goodness for wonderful NICU nurses...but what an awful situation!

They have other children, too. And I'm just exhausted thinking about it.

Applesauce math

Between sessions of conference Rachel and Miriam helped me make some applesauce to fill our little reusable pouches. It's super easy! Sure, step one is "have a baby 10+ years ago so they can do all the work and you don't have to," and the next step is "spend a literal lifetime turning that child into a useful human being," but once you complete those two steps, making applesauce is a breeze!

The girls washed and cut all the apples and boiled them down. I vrrrrr'd them up (this is the technical term) with our vrrrrrrr-er (also a technical term (the non-technical term, I believe, is immersion blender)). Then we filled our pouches with piping hot applesauce, let them cool, and then popped them in the freezer for later consumption.

An afternoon sprinkle

On Friday while Andrew was out shopping I took the kids for a walk around the block and then (because we'd seen the neighbours splashing in their kiddie pool) I let them talk me into pulling the sprinkler out. It's still a little chilly for the sprinkler, in my opinion, but I don't have to get in it so I figured if the children wanted to play in freezing cold water they were more than welcome to. 

I was reminded of little Auntie Josie, who wanted to play in the sprinkler one day when it was probably too chilly to actually play in the sprinkler but Auntie Abra set it up for her anyway. She ran into the water then just stood there crying, "It's cold! It's cold! It's cold!" (just as you'll hear Alexander squeal in the video below). "Then step out!" Abra said. 

"Oh," Josie sniffed, taking a step away from the sprinkler. 

She had been a little too close to the project to see the solution, I guess. 

Anyway, here are a few pictures of the kids enjoying the spray:

Sew what

Rachel completed her new pyjama bottoms with minimal help from me (not that I have a clue what I'm doing). She, at least, took a sewing class from a talented young woman in our last ward so she had a little bit of an idea of what she was up to, but not much. I guess that makes us pretty good pretenders!

Asleep (not asleep), Asleep (not asleep)

This little guy still routinely comes to climb into our bed. Some nights he prefers to fall asleep there to his own bed. Last night bedtime was especially tricky because the evening session of general conference overlaps with bedtime on this side of the world. I tried to watch it with Andrew and the girls, but Alexander did not want to stay upstairs without me even though Zoë and Benjamin were obediently having quiet reading time in their beds so he had plenty of company.

"I berry miss you!" he told me, so I let him watch the rest of the first half of that conference session with us and then put him in his bed and sat in the hallway listening to the second half of the session while he fell asleep (he kept a close eye on me to make sure I didn't move from the hallway).

He got up again while I was finishing up a family newsletter with the same little plea, "Can I sleep in your bed? I berry miss you!"

So I let him climb into my bed to fall asleep to the sounds of my fingers pounding on the keyboard. Here he is passed out on my pillow:

I put him back in his own bed before Andrew and I went to bed, but where do you think he woke up this morning? In bed with us again, of course...

Bedtime FTW

I finally finished Alexander's baby blanket—the one that he asked me to make for him when he realized I'd made one for all his other siblings, the one that I told myself that I wouldn't start until I had finished my paper for my graduate school application (which was due today) but which I started immediately when I got the yarn because apparently I needed some constructive procrastination in my life.

The pattern for the blanket itself (here) is worked in the round, which always feels fantastic when you first start out—"I've done ten rows and I've only been working on this thing for fifteen minutes! I'm going to finish in no time!"—but which feels much less fantastic when you're on the outer rim—"I've been working on this single row for the past two weeks and I'm never going to finish this thing!"

Power outage

The power went out this morning and since we're on spring break and it was raining most of the day I was so busy trying to keep the kids busy that I forgot to look at COVID-19 statistics until the evening! They were not a pretty picture when I looked at them. I remember when we first reached 100,000 confirmed cases (Saturday, folks; it was Saturday) and it felt so surreal. We are well prepared to reach 200,000 cases tomorrow. We had 748 confirmed deaths today (tying with Spain and right on Italy's heels) (edited to add: when I checked the statistics in the morning, the day's confirmed deaths numbered 912, beating out both Spain and Italy). Just a week ago we were still dying by the 100s. Soon I fear we'll be dying by the thousands.

But we press on.

Usually in our pyjamas.

Rachel, who is most committed to the cause, calls it "the pyjama challenge." She admitted she's not even sure if that's a real thing (it probably is) but she's doing her best to remain in pyjamas at all times (though I am occasionally successful at coaxing her into actual clothes). She doesn't have many pairs of pyjamas, honestly, so this morning we decided we'd be brave and would make a pair of pyjama pants for her. After all, I've sewn napkins on the sewing machine—and just this week I hemmed a curtain that was too long—and Rachel made a skirt once. So, we're, like, totally qualified to sew a pair of pyjama bottoms, right?

Sure.