Post Vacation Life

I'm behind. 

I've tried to avoid this for years, but I ended up three weeks behind on this blog.  So let's get caught up real quick.  I'm going to zip though this post about the 2 weeks after our vacation. Then I'll do another post about last week when two of my sisters were in town.  

The weeks after we came home from our vacation were really nice. I'd de-stressed so much on our trip. I felt better than I had in months. And in some cases years. For example. I've had a small rash/acne breakout on my cheeks ever since we were living in Pocatello. I've tried a few things to get rid of it, but didn't see any real results. Well it must have been stress related, because it mostly cleared up during and after our vacation. Mentally I feel so much more cleared up as well. I was able to make some big decisions and take care of some things that needed to happen. 

Okay, let's look at some pictures. In my last post I had a lot of pictures of individual parts of my garden and how they looked when we came home.  Here is a picture of the whole garden. 

I'd put the pumpkins on the trellis and they were adjusting to it very well.

The peas were growing tall.

On Sunday night the kids watched our across the street neighbor light off some fireworks.  They LOVED them and Derrick kept asking why we didn't have any.

I guess we'll need to buy some next year.

Also on Sunday night, Brandon and I sat out on our patio and talked about our options for the kids in the fall. COVID is far from being contained in the United States and I was worried about sending our kids to school.  After talking about our options Brandon and I decided to Home school. We have several reasons for this. 

1. Home schooling gives us a little bit of control in a VERY unpredictable world. My biggest worry is that we'll send the kids to school in August and then there will be an outbreak and the kids would be sent back home. That would throw mine and Brandon's work schedules into a tizzy. I'd rather just plan for them to be home all school year and set up our schedules to work around that from the start. 

2. Home schooling gives us some stability in a VERY unpredictable world. One of the options that our school district is going to do if there are some outbreaks is they will have the kids come to school on alternating days. They would go every other day on either a Tuesday/Thursday or Wednesday/Friday and alternate Mondays.  We've already experienced this schedule. It was Derrick's kindergarten schedule. And it was AWFUL. We were all going crazy by the end of that school year. I do not want to do it again with 4 kids. 

3. Homeschooling allows us to sleep in.  During a regular school year I have to wake my kids up at about 6:45 to have them ready for school on time. It's always super hard to get them up when it is still dark outside during the winter. When school was closed in March it was so nice to let everyone sleep in. After 5 months of sleeping in I don't know if my kids would even be able to wake up for the first day of school.  Plus, I've often wondered if Derrick would be better behaved if he was able to sleep in later before getting up for school. 

4. Homeschooling might fit our personalities better. It's kind of hard to admit this, but my kids don't really fit in at school. I didn't plan for this, but they've lived lives that set them apart from other kids. They've lived in 5 states and spent a summer in Yellowstone. We spend our weekends hiking and playing outside. Charlotte often describes herself as "A WILD GIRL." None of my girls have very many close friends at school. I've occasionally wondered how well we would take to home school - I figure this is a perfect year to find out. 

5. I am worried about COVID and other germs.  I'm not making this decision primarily because I think my kids might get COVID, but it is a factor in the decision. Lydia gets sick every January. If any of my kids would get COVID it would be her. And I'd rather not deal with that if I can avoid it.  Also it would be kind of nice to not have Lydia (or the other kids) exposed to a ton of cold and flu germs this year.  Maybe January 2021 will finally be the year she doesn't get sick. 

We are still working out the details of what our home school will look like, but some things have come into place.  I asked about home school curriculum on Facebook (because crowd-sourcing is my favorite type of parenting research.) My friend Shawnee told me about the home school program that she runs in partnership with the Twin Falls school district.  It's called Venture Upward and it sounded exactly like what I wanted. The kids stay enrolled as students with the district which makes me happy. I'm not home schooling because I hate the district, I'm doing it because this is a crazy year. There is a weekly onsite part of the program so my kids still get some socialization. Each student gets a decent amount of money to buy supplies. We are planning to get the kids Chromebooks so they don't have to share my computer. 

As for work, Brandon and I are adjusting our schedules so he is home in the morning and I'm home in the afternoon. We are both really lucky that we have accommodating bosses and that our work locations are super close to home. This is not how I imagined this year looking AT ALL. But I think it's going to work out okay.

And case in point about why my kids might do better in home school - here is the lego village the girls worked on most of the week.  

They are so good at making things like this.

I love this little fountain.

In other creative news, we went to see Charlotte and Lydia's art work on display at the mall as part o the Art and Soul event. Here's Charlotte's fuse bead house.

And Lydia's little black and white picture.

It was fun to see their stuff alongside other children's art.

Most of that first week back is a little bit of a blur. Brandon and I had work. Derrick had behavioral and speech therapy. I took the kids swimming in the afternoons of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And at some point I rearranged the patio. Brandon moved our our former dinning room table out of the garage and onto the patio.  I figured out how to arrange everything so the space functioned really well. I love how it turned out. 

While I was doing that, Brandon was working on finishing the rope webbing on our treehouse railing.

It was a tricky job. It kind of felt like we were weaving the ropes into place.  Charlotte helped a lot with feeding the ropes through the eyehooks.

We also got the little pool back out and the kids had fun with that.

We discovered a birds nest in our tree. (It's hard to see here, but there is a robin sitting in the nest.) I'm sure the birds moved in while we were on vacation and though they'd found such a nice quiet place. Then we came home and then must have been, "Oops this is a huge mistake."

Here's Lydia showing how tall the sunflowers were getting.

At some point we cleaned the kids rooms. While I was helping Derrick I realized that we hadn't cleaned his rug in a really long time.  So we took it outside to the driveway.  We sprayed it with the hose, worked some laundry soap into the rug, and then rinsed it out with the hose. Then I let it dry in the driveway the rest of the afternoon. This worked so well that we did it with the other two rugs the next two days. Here's our big living room rug. 

It was super satisfying to clean.

I *think* I cleaned this when I first got it from my grandma 4 years ago, but I have no memory of doing that. After we cleaned it I think it was at least 2 shades lighter.

Here's what the living room looked like without the rug.  Veronica had all her toys all over. But the real point of this picture was to show Veronica and Marcia both taking a nap on the couch.

Here are the kids at the pool on Friday (I think). We don't have a lot of pool pictures because normally I'm in the water with my kids.

But we got there a few minutes before it opened so I had a minute to take some pictures while we waited for the lifeguards to get in their chairs. We've LOVED the pool.  All the kids have really improved as swimmers.  Even I've learned how to swim.  Brandon came with us one evening and taught me some tricks.  I used to hate putting my head under the water, but now I do it all the time.

Brandon took Lydia on her overnight camping trip the weekend after we got home from Washington. Lydia somehow got a mosquito bite on her eye, and it was super swollen when they came home on Saturday. But Lydia still said it was one of the best times she'd ever had.

While Lydia and Brandon were gone the kids and I watched America's Funniest Home Videos in the evening.  Derrick got his turn to sleep in my bed.  And on Saturday afternoon we were able to go swimming because the pool was finally open on Saturdays.

I found fortune cookies at winco so we had ham fried rice for dinner on Saturday. The kids found skewers and pretended they were chopsticks.

We've been eating outside nearly every night and it's so nice.  When I took this picture I keep thinking, "I am so happy and content right now.  This is perfect."

Sunday night we had kabobs for dinner. These were a lot of work, but they were so yummy.

Here's a random picture of Veronica in the water from Monday.  She'd getting good at swimming. I thought about signing the kids up for swimming lessons this year, but went with our usual plan of going swimming as a family a lot. It's working really well.

On Tueday I took the kids along with me to get an oil change at Jiffy Lube. The kids were so excited.  We stayed in the car while the techs did their job, but I did run into the lobby to get popcorn for everyone.

Then we went to Best Buy to pick up the last of Derrick's night time potty training rewards. He'd earned it on the last night of our trip, but we'd had to wait for it to be shipped to the store.  It was a remote control Spiderman Car. Derrick had seen it at Walmart, but it ended up being a better deal at Best Buy.  We did curbside pick up  which was so convenient. Can this stay a thing after COVID?  When the lady from the store brought out the car Derrick started cheering.  He was saying things like, "There it is! There's my Spiderman Car! YAY! THANK YOU! I love you spiderman car!"  The lady said she'd never been greeted that enthusiastically. She said she felt like royalty.

Derrick was so happy to have his car.  When we got home he took care of getting it out of the package and putting the batteries in.  He was driving it around in no time.

Here's some more garden pictures. These were taken about 10 days after we came home from  our trip. You can see that the pumpkins LOVED their trellis.  I had to guide the vines and support them with garden ties, but the plants did all lot on their own. For future reference, 8 pumpkin plans is way too many for a space like this.

Wednesday July 15th was exactly one year since we found this house and decided we wanted to buy it.  (If you want to re-read that whole saga the link is here.)  I thought it would be fun to compare how the backyard looks now vs when it was listed.  Here's a picture of the backyard from the Zillow listing.

And here's a picture taken this year from the exact same spot.  I take great pride in the fact that you can't even see most of the backyard because the plants are so tall.

On Thursday I got ready for work and put lipstick on without thinking about the fact that I was about to cover everything up with my mask. I looked pretty darn good so I took a selfie to document my look. (Earlier in the week a really belligerent client wearing a MAGA hat had told me I must be ugly because I was wearing a mask. So yeah, I was feeling pretty happy with this picture.)

Brandon finished the tree house railing and installed a trap door. This was one of our many preparations for having my sisters come visit.  We wanted to make sure the tree house was safe for all the little kids that would be running around.

Here are Charlotte and Lydia bird watching. The robin eggs had hatched and so the girls spent a lot of time watching them.

I climbed up in the tree and took this aerial picture of the backyard.

There were a bunch of ants outside and Veronica was watching them and playing with them.

We all took a moment to appreciate that we don't have to worry about fireants anymore.

Here's one of my planters.  That's a dahlia growing super well.

Lydia volunteered to stand by all my plants so you could see how tall they are compared to here.  Here she is with the pumpkins.

Here are the tomatoes. Some of them didn't grow as high as expected - yet, but they were all doing well.

Lydia is pointing to the pea plant that had grown taller than me.

The beans.

Onions.

They were getting ready to be harvested.  Look how big that one is.

I liked how this one grew funny.

The sunflowers had really shot up in the last week.

My berry patch is getting overrun with weeds, but the plants are hanging in there. These are raspberries.

And Blackberries.

Here's Lydia picking strawberries.

A few days after we came home from Washington I drove by a beautiful green cabinet at the end of someones driveway.  It had a free sign so I immediately started trying to figure out where to put it in my house.  Brandon and I walked by it on our evening walk and I showed it to him. We decided to put it in our basement to store toys and home school supplies so we went back for it with the Honda and brought the two giant pieces home.

It must have been stored somewhere really dirty because the shelves had a thick layer of dirt on them. It took a couple days and a whole roll of paper towels to clean up. I helped Brandon bring it down into the basement on Thursday night.  The kids and I had spent a good part of the afternoon sorting their toys into 12 plastic bins I'd bought at Home depot. As soon as the cabinet was in place we put the bins on the shelves. This is the most organized the kids toys have EVER been and is certainly an improvement over the pile the toys have been in since we moved into this house.

On Friday the kids and I spent most of the morning getting the basement family room all the way cleaned up.  Along the way the kids played with bubble wrap.

Derrick also made a bed on a shelf in his closet.

But we finally finished it all.  We'd moved all our DVD's into the top shelves of the cabinet. It's kind of amazing how many movies we have.

Here's a long view of the whole room. We pushed one of the arm chairs under a light and next to a book case. I moved all the kids books into that book case so it can be a reading area when we are home schooling.

I even unpacked a huge tote that had "living room" decorations that I hadn't felt like unpacking in the living room of this house. I don't know why it took me 11 months to realize that they should be in the downstairs display case. It was kind of strange to unpack that tote and realize that I might never pack these up again.  I even threw away the packing paper that everything had been packed in. I think that paper came from our move from Fort Hood. We've used it every time we moved since then.  It was so strange and yet freeing to throw it away.

Here's a really good picture of the birds in our tree.  You can see the baby bird poking it's head up in front of it's mama.

I spent Friday night prepping food for when my sisters and their kids would arrive on Saturday. It was so exciting to know that they would be coming soon.

But of course, that's the topic of my next post.