Saturday, April 11, 2020

Staying home - staying busy

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:









Tuesday, March 10, 2020

French Immersion Program

A throwback picture from nearly 16 years ago - my sister and I at the top of the Eiffel Tower.


Why this random picture, you ask? I just found out that Tessa got into the French immersion program at Belmont. She'll spend 50% of her day totally immersed in a French classroom. I'm so excited for her. I can't wait to take her to this same place where this picture was taken when she can speak some French. I've been studying French on Duolingo so hopefully I'll speak some too at that point. I can't wait. Deux croissants au chocolat, s'il vous plaƮt!




My Silly Girls

My girls discovered the original funny faces app - playing dress up with the potato head parts!










Kids Say the Darndest Things IX

(The girls' cousin, Annabelle, was at our house and she was showing Tessa and Jenny a new toy - a makeup brush like for applying blush)

Annabelle: I have a brush!
Jenny: Sharing is caring.


----


(Over dinner)

Mom: Jenny would you like your hotdog plain or on a bun?
Jenny: Plain, but with ketchup and not ketchup.
Mom: Do you mean mustard?
Jenny: Yeah, mustard!





Christmas

We had a really good Christmas this year. We started it as usual with our tradition of setting up and decorating the Christmas tree after Thanksgiving and doing our normal family picture in front of the tree.


I couldn't resist including this one, Jenny, looking so excited in front of the tree.


We also had fun with cousins sledding.



And having snowball fights.


Also, this year, Terry and Anah invited us over for making Christmas cookies so we enjoyed doing that with them. Jenny, my cooking cutting fiend, especially loved it.


I'll give you one guess on who put the sprinkles on the above cookie.

We also did our normal decorating gingerbread houses tradition as a family.


Our last year's winner was dethroned this year ...


...by this beauty:


And pictured with it's proud owner and yes, that is a tumbleweed Christmas tree table center piece.


Fun was had by all and much candy sneaking!


We did our usual pictures with Santa at Adobe.


Tessa did great!


And this year, Jenny actually let herself be pictured alone instead of just being held by mom. Though I think you can tell from her body language, she definitely trusts Mrs. Claus more than the big guy, himself.


This year, for cookies for Santa, Jenny specifically asked if we could do homemade gingerbread cookies and she asked near the beginning of December. So we made sure to make it happen at Grandma's house where we did Christmas (thanks, mom!). By gingerbread cookies she meant sugar cookies that she could cut out into gingerbread men shapes. She really loves using the cookie cutters and she had fun decorating them too.



She wanted to make one for Santa, one for Mrs. Claus and one for their baby. Thus the three cookies in the three sizes.


Then this year David and I introduced a new Christmas/winter time tradition - snowshoeing. We snowshoed around Tibble Fork Reservoir twice now and it is really beautiful there.


I've liked hiking for a long time and I've really missed it in years passed during the winter so it has been really fun to start snowshoeing. It has really helped with making the winter feel less long and awful to be able to still get outside and enjoy nature. Yay for snowshoeing!



We also started a new tradition as a family - watching a Christmas movie. This year, mom picked it and I choose the Mickey's Christmas Carol, an old classic I liked as a kid so that was fun. I didn't get any photos of it so I'll just include this fun Christmasy picture from the office at Jenny and Tessa's school in it's stead.


Merry Christmas, y'all!


Friday, January 17, 2020

Tessa's First Choir Concert

Tessa had her first choir concert. She loved learning her songs for it and sang them around the house frequently. David and I definitely got the songs stuck in our head, but it was cute to watch her practice her choreography and listen to her sing around the house. It was really neat to see how much she enjoyed it and how excited she was to perform with her class. She asked me nearly everyday how many days there were left until the "Christmas Sing" for the 2 weeks leading up to the concert. Here she is practicing one of her songs at home.


Here she is performing with the rest of the first graders at her school. All the parents were excited to get videos of the performance so you'll see other parent's phones in my recording - LOL.

King and Queen

    Jenny's favorite thing to play at the moment is this game she made up called "King and Queen". It's this cute mash up of 'dress up' and 'house'. Generally, she'll want to play it first thing in the morning. So it starts with Jenny getting all dressed up to be the Queen. She has to put on a Princess dress, slippers, a crown, and jewelry which will usually include a few bracelets, a few rings, clip on earrings, and necklace. Then she'll sit at her vanity and do her make up.


Once she is all dressed up, she'll tell me that I'm the King and we'll get married which is super cute or sometimes we'll already be married and she'll find some dolls to be our babies and we'll take care of the babies giving them bottles. When Tessa plays too, she plays as our baby or older kid or sometimes as our royal kitten. I think it's super cute how much Jenny loves dressing up.




Kids Say the Darndest Things 100