April 20-26, 2020
Wow, this last week has been hard. We are all feeling anxious and grumpy. We have now been quarantined for 6 full weeks, and it definitely shows. Jonathon and I are less patient, and the kids have been fighting more often. Everyone is extremely on edge. We managed to get through all the schoolwork, did piano lessons, cleaned the house, and went for a couple of walks. That is the extent of our lives for the moment.
The one little ray of excitement in our lives is when we go to get free lunches/breakfasts from the school. For the first several weeks, we didn’t take advantage of the free lunches because we didn’t need them and felt bad taking them from others that did. It then became clear that the schools were throwing out tons of food every week because they had been given enough state or federal money for every child to receive a lunch. We decided to go get them a couple of times a week so that the kids could have something new and exciting to eat. One day last week they gave each child a full container of raspberries. They were super excited about that. Another benefit is that it forces us to go to the grocery store much less often. Anything we can do to prevent germs is a positive. The boys also like the 2 minute drive in the car to go get them from our neighborhood school. That is the only time they leave the house to go anywhere. Crazy what our life has become during this pandemic!
With nothing on our calendars… no church activities, no school, no sports, no piano lessons, no Bishopric meetings, no dentist appointment, no exercise groups or singing groups, no friends over to play, life has really slowed down. In some ways it is nice to take life at a slower pace and enjoy the time with the kids, but there has to be balance in all things, and right now that balance doesn’t exist.
Our big success of the week was completing a Rube Goldberg machine for Christian’s science class. I have seen lots of cool videos about them, but I had no idea how difficult they were to design and make. Christian’s assignment was to do a simple task in a complicated way, like building a crazy machine to turn on a light switch. He had to have at least 6 steps and use 5 different simple machines to complete the task. Christian decided he wanted to create something that would turn on the TV... easier said than done!
He worked on it for quite a long time and got extremely frustrated because it wasn’t working. I stepped in and tried to help him for 3 hours one day. We came ups with tons of ideas, but getting them to work just right was so hard. After a long time, we gave up and decided to wait for Jonathon. Later that evening all three of us worked together to get that blasted thing finished. At 10:00 pm, we finally had all the pieces together in a system that we hoped would work. On the first try, all of the steps happened just right, and he was able to turn the TV on. Thank goodness because we were all exhausted. It was very exciting to get it to work, but not something we will likely do again any time soon.
The rough week continued, and all the boys got more and more grumpy and didn’t want to do their school work. We again knew that it was time for an intervention, so we called up Kym and Joe. It has been so nice being able to quarantine with them on occasion. They have saved our sanity and helped our kids so much. Joe randomly decided to buy a motor boat with their stimulus money, so we decided to try it out. He has wanted a boat his whole life, and the extra money finally made it possible. It is an old boat, but it has been maintained fairly well. We went down to Price and spent the day at Huntington Reservoir. The kids loved riding around in the boat, and Joe was like a little kid driving it. There was something very calm and relaxing about being on the lake. The day was lovely, and we were so happy to be out of the house.
After the little kids got tired, we took them back to their house and let Jonathon, Joe, Jadyn, and Christian stay and fish off the boat. They had a grand time and caught three fish. That night we played games and the kids watched movies.
Today we again had our home church with them, which has become a fun little tradition. Jonathon and I gave the lesson, and then we watched my weekly Singing Time video that the kids got to sing with. We came home mid-morning, and brought McKay back with us to hang out with our boys for a few days.
It is a bit overwhelming to think about doing the same thing for the next many weeks, but there have been some rays of hope that things might be looking up. Utah has done a pretty good job at containing the virus, so the governor wants to reopen some of the businesses to help jump start the economy. May 1st is the target date, so we will see if that actually happens. The school district also sent out a notification that the last day assignments will be given is May 12th for Secondary students and May 15th for Elementary kids. That means that school will be finished two weeks early from when it was supposed to end. The boys were all thrilled to hear that, and I was too. Idaho is looking to open its border on May 1st as well, so hopefully, we will be able to go visit my family very soon.
All the good news is met with caution, however. Many scientists say that we will not have a vaccine for at least 18 months to two years. They are also concerned that there may be a second wave of the virus that is worse than the first. China has already had to re-close some cities because infection rates have increased. Many articles have said that Disneyland, sporting events, concerts, and cruises may not return until 2021. Nobody really knows what to expect right now. We are hoping that warmer weather will mean less spread, but who knows what will happen come fall?
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