This was the first year that Tessa really, really wanted to know if the Easter bunny was real. I tried the whole trick of saying "What do you think?" when she asked and that worked for about a year but this year she begged for me to tell her until I finally did. She did pretty good with not telling Jenny.
We usually do Easter at grandma and grandpa's house in Nephi but we did it on our own at home this year.
The girls seems to have had a lot of fun with it.
We had a lot of fun getting ready for Easter leading up to it. Here Tessa is in the fun bunny ears she made.
We made and played pin the egg in the Easter basket.
We also colored eggs.
Then we also learned about the religious reasons behind Easter and Passover. We made resurrection roll and talked about resurrection. We also learned about Passover and made matzah and watched The Prince of Egypt. Then we also did a humanist Easter tradition where we wrote kind notes to each other, put them in eggs, and hid them for each other to find. So we had a really enjoyable Easter.
We've been staying home with the Covid-19 pandemic. We've been trying to keep busy to stave off boredom. The girls have been doing a lot of playing particularly playing pretend and dressing up. Jenny is dressed up as a rockstar below. She picked the outfit herself and I think she was feeling pretty cool in it.
We've been staying busy by getting really into chalk art. Instead of just randomly drawing, we'll pick a whole scene that we want to draw and then the kids will play pretend in the scene. For instance, we'll draw a beach scene.
Another popular scene has been a castle scene complete with throne room, dungeon, and moat.
We even created a chalk art obstacle course that was nearly a block long.
There has been A LOT of taking apart of the couches to make something fun to do. Here the girls have made a royal throne to sit at.
Most commonly, we'll take apart the couch to make a fort.
Lately, we've added themes to the forts too. The other day we made a haunted house fort and cut out paper bones, rats, spiders, and bats to decorate the fort with. Crushed forts are fun for pirate ships or gymnastics courses or sometimes they're set at slope and turned into slides or pretend treehouses or climbing walls.
We'll also take the couches apart to make obstacle courses. Here Tessa is running an obstacle course David made for her. He'll time her too just to make it a bit more fun.
Tessa has been doing school online. I like her set up she arranged for herself here. It kind of reminded me of myself.
She's been doing really good working hard on her schoolwork everyday. When they first announced school closing, I was nervous because she had been making so much good progress since starting kindergarten and I was afraid that would stop but I was happy to find that the online school has been great she has been making a lot of progress still.
We've been playing boardgames and card games. Here I am teaching Tessa how to play Set.
We've been doing puzzles.
I've tried to keep busy with coming up with fun activities to incorporate practicing writing. In one, we pretended that Tessa had lost a favorite toy (I hid it). She then had to make a missing poster for the lost toy. Then after completing the poster, I walked by the poster and pretended to be someone who had seen the toy and pretended to call Tessa and told her where I had seen her bear.
We also did playing pretend restaurant where Tessa made the menus to practice writing
Then just for something fun to do, we went backyard camping. It was too cold to spend the night outside but we did the rest of the camping stuff. We set up the tent.
We hiked up the to big house at the top of the hill near our house just to have a bit of a hill to go up and a destination to make it to.
And we roasted hot dogs and s'mores in the fire pit in our back yard.
Desperate for something new and fun to do, when the girls asked if they could sleep in the hallway, the other Friday night, I relented. They wanted to be right next to each other and I wanted to make sure they didn't block access to my room causing me to step on them on the way to bed. The solution that everyone was happy with ended up putting Jenny part way into the laundry room - LOL.
The Lehi library announced that it would be closing so right before it closed I checked out as many books as the library allowed - most of them kid's picture book. A month after it closed, we had read all of them and were itching for some new books to read so I actually wrote a few little books and printed them. I printed them in black and white and used clipart images so the books doubled as coloring books. So that was kind of fun.
The kids have found other random little ways to stay entertained too. Here are a few:
