A Day in the Life During a Pandemic

A Day in the Life

The morning started off slowly. Crawling out of bed, wishing I was crawling back in instead of out, I am not a morning person, but the day needs to get started, 7am ugh!!!

I head downstairs and notice that my amazing husband has been working hard, he is an IT Tech and we have been blessed to be one of the lucky few that are still able to work. Working from home can be interesting with a large family and a small house but we are making it work. 

I glace around the room and notice the little bodies all camped out on the sofa. Hubby announces that for whatever reason, they woke up a little after 5am! After making them all go potty he was able to convince them to lay down on the sofa until mommy woke up. Thank you my wonderful husband for that extra sleep!!! Soft snoring is coming from one of the kids, one is faking being asleep, while the third is clearly ready to start the day.

I think God must be having a good laugh giving me children who ARE morning people..... 

I am not a coffee drinker, honestly to make it even taste good I have to add more sugar than kool-aid has so there is no way I am going to drink it, and why people feel the need to drink hot drinks is beyond me. I like my caffeine ice cold and in the form of soda. That reminds me..... I should give it up for a few months again. I would say forever but let's be real the longest I have been off soda has been about 6 months. Maybe when my morning kids are adults I wont need to try to open my eyes before 8am, maybe??

The little one that is wide awake on the sofa is now bouncing up and down .....how do you even find the energy to move this early?? Eggs are being requested, thankfully daddy is about to take morning break and has agreed to do eggs while I try to pry my eyes open and make my body move. 

I do a quick check to my email, move the laundry around in the washer/dryer, and make a mental note we need to buy more dish washing tablets before we can start another load in the dishwasher. 

I walk outside and stand on the back deck overlooking the garden, my little morning child has already gotten dressed and has followed me outside. The thornless blackberry bush has more blackberries this morning. After pointing them out to my early bird she makes quick work of running down and picking all the ripe berries and bringing them back for both of us to share.

We then head back inside and she starts working on a puzzle while I start cooking eggs for the other kids who will be getting up shortly. Once the eggs, oatmeal, and mangoes are all plated up the other kids wake up and head to table. We do not have the kids wait for everyone to finish because when you only have one bathroom you end up having to use whatever time you can find to get in there and take care of your business. As kids finish at the table they clear their area, put their dishes away, then head to the bathroom to brush teeth, potty, fix hair, and get dressed. 

While they are getting dressed I start our morning reading time with the kids as they finish getting dressed and ready for the day. If I am busy reading with one child they head back to their room to tidy up their room and make their beds. 

My early bird cuddles up next to me and I sit sipping my morning soda while we cuddle up under the blanket (it is a bit on the chilly side this morning - 50s) and she practices her reading snuggled up against me. 

Our egg loving child finishes his breakfast, heads to the bathroom, gets ready for the day, makes his bed, then heads into the living room to start working on his puzzle. While the kids trickle in and get started on their puzzles other kids are waiting for their turn then snuggling up next to me to read me their books. 

Older kids are starting their morning chores, the kids know the routine, everything is flowing and for the moment we sit with the cool morning air coming into the room through the open windows. Fresh breeze brings in the smell of flowers from the garden and I take a deep breath to soak it all in. 

Yesterday I sat thinking about a dear friend who has a busy life, is always busy doing things, and I was envious of what I did not have but then after a good nights sleep, lots of prayers, and an attitude adjustment I  decided that I need to be thankful for what we do have rather than what we don't. Years ago when my oldest four where young we used to go on all kinds of adventures, right now is a slower time in life, but I am sure we have many adventures left to take and instead of being envious for what I do not have I need to stop and be thankful for what we do have, and what we have is a peaceful house that is not overly busy, relaxed routine and kids who are gaining skills and confidence with the activities they are doing. It really seems to be helping set the tone for a better day when we can be thankful rather than envious.
I started cleaning up the kitchen counters when we got a wonderful surprise visit from one of our adult kids and their partner so we stood around and just had a nice chat before they headed out for a day of adventures. 

My poor soda has been on the sofa waiting for me to come back to it but it is getting too warm so I stick it back in the fridge for later. 

Started another load of laundry and hand washed the dishes since we are out of the dish washing tablets, cleaned the counters, and sent kids outside to play. 

Then it was off to help one of our older girls who sometimes get, "stuck". I really do not have a better word for it. Some days, they just forget to get out of bed. I am not talking about a kid who just wants to sleep in. I am talking about a child who forgets how to get out of bed. They will be hungry and laying there and even needing to pee, but they just do not get out of bed. Sometimes you can wait a bit and they will figure it out on their own, but when it is almost noon and they are still in bed, it is time to interfere.

After making sure they were not staying in bed because they were sick or coming down with something we reminded that when they hear others in the house talking, and playing,  that is a good indication that it is time to get out of bed. 

Clamoring of little voices asking when lunch is prompted the reheating of left over spaghetti and starting  two loaves of fresh bread dough rising to go along with dinner tonight. (still trying to figure out what we will have, sometimes I get fancy and will make up a meal plan for a few weeks or the whole month, other times we just shop for two weeks worth of meals and then just pick whatever the weather and our moods are in the moods for. Tonight though? We need to make something to go with the homemade bread. Hunters stew sounds good. Thinking about food makes me thirsty and so I grab my soda from the fridge take a drink and get to preparing lunch.

The spaghetti looks sad and lonely on a plate all by itself so we rounded off the meal with some grapes and blueberries. Sadly those are store bought, not fresh... the ones on the blueberry bushes dried up on the bush that didn't get enough water because, well, life happened and it got forgotten. To try to recover the bush, it has been watered but only time will tell if it comes back to life or not. I start to grab that soda out of the fridge but it hasn't gotten cold enough yet so I have to wait a little longer to drink it. I head back into the living room after our daughter (the one who stayed in bed) asks me to inspect her work. I notice a few places that were missed. I am not talking about a little miss either.... I am talking about it looked like the kids took off their shoes on the living room floor after playing in the sandbox missed......

Oh the joys of teenagers and developmental delays. One of our teens struggles with executive functioning. She is now angry at me and sulking and refusing to move because after I reminded her she forgot some places she was sweeping. When I told her she actually started fixing the problem by decided to do the whole room all over. I however had to go and ruin it  and I had the nerve to point out that all she had to do was the places she missed not the whole room all over. Now some of you may think, why didn't I just let her do it all over again, well..... the short of that is that it typically takes her about an hour to sweep a room. Mind you this room is small.... it could easily be swept in 10 minutes, but we are working on life skills so we end up needing to teach,  then have the patience to let them work on it. Obviously we will let the small stuff slide but when you have two large dogs in the house you have to sweep daily.
By now my poor soda has gone warm again so back in the fridge it goes...

I go hide out in the bathroom hoping that today I might be able to have some privacy and take care of some bathroom business before someone rushes in saying they need to go potty. That reminds me that we need to switch the door knob around so I can lock the door!! (We had turned it backwards so kids could not lock themselves in and then get stuck in the bathroom, but now that the kids are older we can finally change it back!!) 

My husband is holding the grandbaby while adult daughter and son in law have run to the store. It is lovely hearing him talking to the baby and hearing all the little baby noises, so it sounds like maybe the sulk is over and I can venture out and head back into the living room. Of course the teenager is still sulking in the living room, arms crossed, ,not moving.  It is one of the challenges she faces with her delays. Some days are easier than others, today looks like she is in for a hard one. Sometimes we can wait her out, and other times (like when she stops and refuses to move in a walkway or hallway or something) we have to help her move out of the way.  For now however, she isn't in a walkway so we will let her sulk for a little while and hope she stops on her own. 

Then it is on to meal planning, we typically shop for two weeks worth of food. SO looking forward to the day when at least most of our food comes from our garden rather than having to go to the store all the time! (We are currently looking at moving to the midwest and homesteading in about 2 years). My husband does the shopping for several reasons, but the main reason is that he can stick to a meal plan and he ends up spending at least 50-100 less per shopping trip than I do. 

Three o'clock and the teenager who started sweeping the living room just past noon is still at it. Some days they can finish the room in about 20 minutes, but on days like today it can take a while. 

The bread has only about half an hour left to rise but since it is still early I will wait a little longer before baking it.
I reach in and grab my soda. Just as I am about to unscrew the lid and take a drink, mommy instinct kicks in and I put it back in the fridge while I go around looking to find out what is going on. 

Another child has taken it upon themselves to use a toy wand as a hammer and sadly broke the wand. Even more sad, it was not their wand they broke. When the wand was discovered it was noted that the batteries had been removed. Now there is a battery hunt going on in the bedroom. Thankfully my kids are past the age where they would ever put it in their mouth but still missing batteries make me nervous. Where in the world could they be??

Ahhhh the lovely sound of the garbage and recycling trucks, not!! They come once a week for garbage and once every other week for recycling. With so many people living in the house we really need it to come at least every single week for recycling but sadly our city does not do weekly recycling pick up. They were however nice enough to give me a tiny little table top composting bin. I think they must assume that we are an older retired couple or something because there is no way a family could use it. We tried to use it, we really did..... I filled it up in one day with egg shells and bananas. Every once in a while we we do a big breakfast and  we make eggs for everyone. The kids wanted bananas with breakfast we added in the banana peels, and then it was full!! So it is a great container if I just want to put things in for the moment until I could bring  outside and put it in a large composting bin but for now I do not have a large composting bin to put things in, and hubby has a two page list of things to do so if I add one more thing right now I think he will scream. Today, even though the trash and recycling was picked up, we will have to do a dump run later today however since we end up using more than they pick up.
After searching for what seemed like forever all the batteries were recovered that were missing from the broken toy. Amends were made, apologies given, and we move on.

Our little ray of sunshine decided that being they needed to put on one of their beautiful dresses and play outside in it. We decided that with the pandemic going on and churches being closed in our area that the kids can wear their fancy church clothes any time they want otherwise they will outgrow them before they can even wear them. She is currently dancing around outside pretending to be a princess.

Then it was time to go check on the kids outside and rescue toys from the kiddy pool.... older v-tech toys along and wooden toys needed to be rescued from the water.  A few years ago one of the kids mashed the buttons on the toys so much that they broke $300 + worth of V-Tech toys that we had been accumulating over the last few years, so the damage to the cars had been done previous to their swim in the kiddy pool.
Another one of the kids decides to use some spare wood we have to make something for Buzz. I am told it will be a house, but it is still in the planning stages so it could change at a moments notice.

Heading back to check on the laundry, sheets are done,  beds need to be remade. And I can finally get back to the bread and  get it into the oven. I am looking forward to the wonderful smell of freshly baked bread and hunters stew tonight. Nothing smells better than a homecooked meal. 

Well, best laid plans and all that got waylaid by our teenager who decided to stop sulking and start doing her chores again.... sweeping and mopping the kitchen.... I will have to wait to get started on the bread. but there is always more laundry to wash and dishes to do.

After another load of laundry was started and dishes turned on (the store run was a success and we now have dish washing tablets!). Our early sunshine is suffering an upset belly and decided she needed to lay down on the sofa. Once she is all comfy I head back to work on the hunters stew and get the meat all cooked up.

 Then it is back out to check on the kids playing outside. The house turned into a boat!!

 Ah the life of a child who never grows up! She could play in this pool for hours and hours and never get tired. She is certainly our water baby. We would LOVE to have a full sized pool however in our area we would have to heat it, so we will just wait until we move and then invest in a pool. For now however, she is happy and loving playing so that is what counts.

 I turn back around and suddenly the boat has become a fort. 

We had planned on working on writing post cards today but that got delayed due to the poorly tummy. Two of our girls are in American Heritage Girls and are writing to pen pals this summer.  It is great writing practice for both girls and it is always fun to get mail. But there is always tomorrow, for now resting is more important than writing.
Instead we are listening and watching to our favorite Christian songs on youtube.
The bread is finally out of the oven and the soup is almost ready. The house is filled with smells of fresh baked bread and soup, so good!!! While it is cooling our water baby heads to the shower so I help with that. She is pretty good about washing herself, but you have to remind her and also help with the shampoo but other than that she does pretty good by herself.

I only hope it tastes as good as it looks and smells! I wish you could smell just how amazing it smells right now! While we finish waiting for the bread to sit for few minutes and the soup to cool enough to eat, we are enjoying watching one of our favorite Homesteading channels.
 Everything turned out good, it isn't my favorite bread recipe but it was good enough for some kids to want seconds, and the hunters stew, yum!

After everyone finished eating we all sat in the living room and I read our current Magic Treehouse book (we are working through all the books then will be starting the Little House series!) After hearing about the Olympics and ancient Greece we got everyone's teeth brushed and tucked kids into bed.
My husband and I sat around talking about vacations since our summer plans got canceled due to covid.
We have decided that if we go camping again we will be buying a very large tent and some blow up air mattresses. The last time we went camping we tried staying in a campground cabin. I have discovered that I do not like them at all. It might have been ok if we knew what we were getting ourselves into but we overestimated the size of the cabin... by a LOT. We have a small house. We expected a small cabin, however we did not expect it to be THAT small, and sadly it is the largest they had! It had a bathroom (which we were very thankful to have a private shower and bathroom) but it also had only two rooms besides that. One had a very large bunkbed with a full size bed on the bottom and a twin on the top. In the living room the sofa was a futon that folded down into a bed. The beds were like rocks and so we ended up leaving a whole day before we planned just so we didnt have to sleep on those horrible beds again. The little kitchen was only a sink and a microwave and a mini fridge. They had notes not to use a  hotplate or any other cooking device in the cabin. So much for using my crockpot and having a meal waiting for us at the end of the day at the beach
So, in light of all that we thought back to the time before that, before we ever adopted, and when we drove down along the Pacific Coast Highway and ended up driving through the Redwood forest and camping there. LOVED camping there.... well, except the bugs - horrible mosquitoes that year, the rangers said it was the worst they  had seen in years, and the tent, and the ground...... other than that it was a great trip! The problem with the tent is, when your husband is 6 feet 2 and he tries to get into a regular size tent, well, it just doesn't work out well. Thinks get bumped, knocked, etc. My husband has really bad reactions to bug bites. And he is a bug magnet, poor guy. By the time we left I had been bite twice, and had a couple small bites to show for it. The kids had a few bites maybe 5? My husband however seemed to take the brunt of it all and we ended up counting over 20 bites and he doesnt just get small little bites either, every single one of his bites were 2x larger than ours. And the ground, you start to feel your age when you take your kids camping and you think you are still young enough to rough it and sleep in your sleeping bag in the tent on the ground. No. Just no. If I want something to make me feel that old ever again, no, just no. All I can say is I learned I had places that could hurt that I did not even know I had before we went camping.
So we are thinking that before we go camping again we will get a different tent (after that last tent camping trip we decided never again and gave our tent away) one that would allow my husband to fully stand up. Standing up in a tent is VERY important when you have kids with special needs and some never remember that you can not stand up in a regular tent. We are hoping that if we get a large tent we could make our own little cabin with the tent and have nice air mattresses which would hopefully improve the trip.
After wishful thinking and day dreaming we sat down and watched some more of our favorite youtube channels, cleaned up the kitchen, grabbed our fresh clean sheets out of the dryer, made our bed, and then headed to sleep. (At least my husband headed to bed - I have insomnia no matter what time I wake up and get out of bed - 1:30am and still not feeling tired. sigh)
Since I am still up however there are things to be done. While listening to our dog suckle in his sleep (it really is the sweetest thing ever), I pour over their curriculum that we will be starting in August.  I want to have everything organized and have my plan ready. This is one of my biggest challenges. I want to be able to be flexiable. I want to go at my child's pace. However, I also want to stick to a schedule. Life doesn't respect schedules but for someone who struggles without a plan in place, being able to just say oh ok, you dont get it or wow that was so easy for you and either stay at that area or more faster than planned is not easy when your other kids needs to be at their pace too and suddenly you discover that you are teaching the same stuff not once, but many many many times, over and over and over.  However after much thought I am going to try .... TRY .... to keep the kids along the same path. In other words when I see someone needs to spend more time in an area, we can ALL spend more time in that area, or if it is really easy for one or two of the kids but the rest are going the pace of the book, then instead of having them skip over it or spend more time reviewing it, we will have other activities that they can work on while the other kids catch up. That is my hope, not sure how well it will work but we will do our best and let you know.
A little disclaimer is that we are using Masterbooks this year. A friend talked to me about how much her kids love it and I have decided to see if it will work with our kids. I think the hardest part of homeschooling for me is feeling like I have to relearn things. With our four oldest kids, homeschooling them was easy. They got things I would teach them easily, they did well in their own learning, and they did well with Abeka which was the curriculum they used. However, with our other kids we tried Abeka. We decided to go the video route and we hoped it would be a good fit. The kids did the kindergarten Abeka program and we stopped about halfway through the year when we saw it was NOT a good fit for our kids with special needs. Since then it has been an adventure researching and trying to find what will be a good fit for them. We are hoping Masterbooks is it, but we will have to wait and see, only time will tell. Either it will be a big hit or a total flop. One big part of Masterbooks is that it has some reading. Nothing like Sunlight which is pretty much one book after another, but Masterbooks will tell your child a story for science, but also for math, and pretty much every subject. Nothing too big, a one page story or something like that, but for kids with auditory processing either it won't work for them at all, OR they will start to improve their auditory processing. Hopefully it is the later. We are also double dosing them with phonics with the phonics program from Masterbooks but also Alpha-Phonics. Up until this point, we have worked more with sight words which tends to be easier for kids with Down syndrome, than phonics. I do not want to give up hope thou, so we will use it this year and see how the kids respond.

If this was a normal year you would have heard of trips to the beach, zoo, or how every year we do our best to find and explore as many different hikes, trails, parks, and playgrounds as we can fit in, and this year we were suppose to take the big drive to California, take the kids to the redwood forest (our younger kids have never been) and then finally Disneyland!!  However, as many others in the world have missed out, so have we, even if Disney would have opened up in time for our tickets to be valid, there is still the mask requirement that we would not be able to pass. We are praying that in a few years we can try again. Next year is more than likely out, simply because there are just too many things happening next year to be able take that much time off work. But who knows what the future holds. Lots of dreams, praying we can make them come true. Just trying to stay positive and taking it one day at a time.
And there you have a day in the life during a pandemic.



And in case you are wondering what happened to the poor lonely soda.....
.. 2:29am I grab my poor lonely soda out of the fridge
3:15am  and I finally finish the soda I started this morning.

Homeschooling starting soon

We will be opening up our new classroom and starting homeschooling in August!!
We will be trying a new curriculum this year, MasterBooks. We will also be continuing to use So Happy To Learn. We will be a review of Masterbooks after we have used it a few months. 

I love how it is coming together. We have a cute little clock that we made flower pedals that show the  minutes so the kids can learn how to tell time. I did update the letters because I was missing some from last year. I posted an updated picture below of the alphabet letters.

 

We have several drawers of things I pull out when needed. These are put away so we do not have big messes but also so we can make sure we don't lose pieces for when we need them. Also by not having them out all the time I can have a less cluttered classroom and the kids will be excited when they see something they have not seen for a while. 

These are my teacher reading books. These are the books that we will read when we are doing our curriculum. I want to make sure we have them when we need them. Once we have used them they will join the book shelf that the kids can pull from anytime they want, but for now, they are stored here. 

My husband made this cute little caddy for the classroom so we could store some often used supplies

We will be learning about birds so we have a bunch of different levels for all the kids to be able to enjoy. Bird identification cards that they can match to bird figures, a book that makes the sounds several different birds make, how to draw birds book, a bird coloring book, and a puzzle with bird facts under each picture.

Our math shelf

money, unifix cubes, Math-U-See blocks, counting bears,  dice, and sand paper numbers.

We also have these wonderful numbers for the wall that we found on teachers pay teachers! It shows how it would look on a dice, ten frame, what money would make that number, math problems for the number, and tally marks!

We LOVE the letters well because we have kids who are doing cursive and kids who are doing print, this works out perfectly for both. Also found on Teachers Pay Teachers. I love these way more than the ones we had before. Some of the things I like about it, is that they show the letters on a lined paper so it acts as a guild to show you where you should start, stop, curve your letters in regards to a center dotted line. I also love that the pictures are real not cartoon style. 

Our white board is a very important part of our homeschool classroom. I end up writing on it all the time.

In the past we have had fancy pocket calendars but I decided with the kids getting older we would stick to a regular calendar 

The kid shelves are things they can look at, explore, read, activities to do, when they finish their work. One of the book shelves holds early readers, while the other shelf holds chapter books.

This is where I keep all our records. It is in a closet so I can just close the doors and it is out of the view of the kids. I keep all their folders in here, I keep flash cards, our Equipping Minds material, workbooks, binders filled with all different kinds of things from math, phonics, reading, geography, art, and much more

 

'I hope you have enjoyed our little tour of our classroom. It isn't super fancy, but we like it. 

We hope you did too and it has inspired you to create your own little space too.

Puzzles

Two of our kids have really struggled with fine motor skills so for a long time we did not push things like puzzles. We were hoping by waiting it would ease their frustration and they would be able to do puzzles when they were older.
However after talking with a good friend about all the great benefits of doing puzzles, critical thinking, visual processing, fine motor skills, and just confidence we decided to make it part of our daily routine.
When we started our son who struggles with fine motor was only able to do a 9 piece puzzle. Now he is putting together 35 piece puzzles. Our daughter who was able to do 24 piece puzzles is now up to 40-60. Another one of our kids started out doing 50 piece puzzles and is now doing 100-300 piece puzzles.
In addition to the confidence our kids have gained we have noticed that their visual processing and critical thinking and fine motor skills that have done amazingly well.

2021 Puzzle Update:

Our son who started with 9 pieces is now up to 50.

Our daughter whos started at 24 is now up to 100. 

Our daughter who started at 50 pieces is now doing 100-300 pieces with ease.