Hello week two of social distancing and self-quarantine-ing.
This was Dana's and my first full week of working from home together. Because my company supplies food ingredients, we are considered "essential infrastructure," similar to medical personnel, though I don't feel nearly as critical! Christel sent me this meme since she is a pharmacist and truly is an essential fixture in this mess. I had to post it on our internal social media platform for my co-workers as well.
Anyhoo - many of Dana's co-workers are also working from home as are most of mine from our Fargo office. This pic was from Monday, day one. We were still happy and smiling at that point. Haha. Just kidding. Sort of. We've been trying to juggle not being on the phone or conference calls at the same time or at least not in the same room. I'm used to my sit-to-stand desk at my office, so I will take my laptop and cart it around to other areas of the house. That also gives me the flexibility to help Clara with something or get dinner started while still checking my e-mail and such. Dana's set-up is more stationary with his dual monitors, head phones, etc.
Brynn made us signs with our respective company logos. :-) It is super helpful to hook up my home monitor and keyboard since my laptop screen is not that large.
I have a smirk on my face in this pic, but I think this was about day four and I had had it up to my make-up-free eyeballs with Dana's coffee slurping. Pros and cons, people, pros and cons! I am truly grateful that we are both able to work from home during this time and our first week went very smoothly with the girls being home as well. More on them and their school updates later...
On Sunday there was a call out on social media that we were to 'chalk our walk' with encouraging messages for people to read in their neighborhoods as they were out for walks, etc. We were about a day late on that train, but here was Brynn's display.
Because we're not all sick and tired yet of looking at the magnified COVID-19 virus germ, Brynn drew it out and put it front and center on the fridge for us. ;-)
It's hard to say how much Clara truly is understanding all of this, but she was wondering about that magnified microscopic image and how big it really is, so Brynn kindly got out her microscope to show her the different slides that she has.
Brynn was still off of school all this week yet as our district is working to put together their distance learning plan. So, thankfully she's been willing and able to help keep Clara entertained. Clara has been doing great at keeping busy on her own as well.
Brynn has been waking up in the middle of the night and then taking a while to fall back asleep again, so at least she's been able to sleep in in the mornings. She was going to rest for a bit before she and I ventured out this week for an appointment she had. I was looking for where she went and then stumbled upon this helpful sign. :-)
Most of this week was fairly cool out, but nice enough to be outside. Our snow has melted considerably by the end of this week now. Thankfully if we're mostly homebound, at least we can be outdoors. We have been going on a family walk/bike ride most nights this week so that's been great.
I had also heard of people displaying teddy bears in their windows so that when families are out on walks, they can go for a "bear hunt." I didn't anticipate that we'd see much of that around our parts since there aren't a bunch of kids and it's pretty quiet in general, but we found this huge bear out on these people's front steps when we were on our way out of Briarwood.
Lo and behold she found a piece of mail addressed to her! Ha. I think she earned about $20, so she did really well! I think she plans on going back out once the rest of the snow melts to see what more she can find.
We still hadn't implemented much of a schedule yet for this week, but more so naturally fell into a routine of the girls unloading the dishwasher and making their beds to start the day.
I joked that I'm not concerned with running out of toilet paper, but if there becomes a shortage on dishwasher detergent, then I'll have a problem because we aren't used to everyone eating breakfast and lunch at home every day!
Brynn has been checking her school e-mail for updates from her teachers as they prepare now to start distance learning on April 1st.
I'm not sure how Clara came up with this sentence, but don't mind the "I" holding on the "H" that we had to make since she ran out. :-)
More muffins! We are obsessed with these banana chocolate chip muffins. They are easy and quick to make and we found a fairly healthy version that uses whole wheat flour and exchanged yogurt for the fat along with some other swap-outs.
I love when the girls get into these 'scenarios' they make up and are so serious about it. This was the latest...'harvesting' big ice sheets from 'Ditch River,' as I've dubbed it. I can't imagine how cold that water must be and they run through mittens and gloves very quickly, but we have been putting latex gloves over their mittens in an attempt to further waterproof them.
They had to hit up the back ditch as well...
At one point Clara came up crying to the house because she had a boot half full of water after she fell down in or near the water.
Spring has sprung. Ugh - the bad part of this time of year: MUD!
Brynn has been a bit apprehensive to know what e-learning was going to entail. Thankfully she was able to join Zoom video chats with a couple different teachers as the they were trying things out and working to get set up for next week. That also allowed other students to see what this format would be like and ask questions. It definitely helped Brynn feel better to see how it was going to come together. As her school has continued in their planning process, we've been receiving more details of schedules, information, etc. She learned what her new class schedule will be and was pretty excited to find out that she'll essentially be done at about 12:15 each day and off altogether on Fridays!
Dana and some of his co-workers had a tele-happy hour on Thursday.
It's still a pretty sad state of affairs over here with my gym still being closed, but our 5:30 AM group has still found a way to workout together. Jasmine, shown below, has led us in our morning exercise classes and kept us going. I've overslept a couple of mornings, but I just join in once I mosey my way downstairs and then I can bring up a previous video that we've done and finish out with that. Courts Plus has also been doing live group fitness classes through Facebook and then also posting them on their website.
I'll apologize now that Clara is mostly always in her unders around here.
Have you heard of the #aworldofhearts movement? People are called to place hearts in their windows to show that we're all in this together. Again, we didn't think many people would see our display, but I still told the girls we should participate anyhow. Clara got started on hers first.
They each ended up doing a string of hearts which I sort of directed because I didn't want to tape a bunch of individual hearts all over our windows. I know, buzz kill. :-/
They made the hearts earlier in the week and then finally got around to taping them up yesterday.
Lo and behold someone did see our hearts: our mailman! They waved to him as he was bringing a package up to our doorstep.
Two of the four remaining people in our office joined in as well and sent me their pics. Love it!
We've had to read "50 Below Zero" every night this week. Well, I've stopped reading it, I guess, since Clara has it memorized now. "This house is going craaaazy!" ;-)
We found out from Hope yesterday that for the next nine weeks they are only able to have 10 people to a classroom which includes the teachers. So, depending on the ratios for each age group, that isn't very many kids! We had still planned to keep Clara home with us next week anyhow. With Brynn starting school next week, Clara still being home, us working from home and news information changing daily, we have been working within week-by-week time frames. What we don't know is how long Dana and I will be working from home or when we will feel it's safe to send Clara back to preschool. So, with the cap at 10 people, if we get to a point when we feel comfortable sending Clara back, we'll have to check in with them to see if they have availability for her. Brynn will not be going back to school to attend physically in the building and will be doing distance learning for the rest of the school year. We had hired a nanny for the summer to take the girls to different activities that we signed them up for, so Clara was planned to be done at Hope at the end of May and then start Kindergarten this fall. So, if she just doesn't go back at all now over the next nine weeks, she's essentially done there forever. :-( It's so crazy to think that, but like I mentioned, we're just taking one week at a time.
For starting next week once Brynn begins school again, though, I think I am planning on putting together more of a routine or schedule for Clara since Brynn will not be as available to help with her and Dana and I will still be trying to work from home and all that. With so much information out there, I hadn't saved too much of what I found for ideas that others had been sharing as far as projects for kids to do at home or even 'homeschooling' stuff. I am not planning on homeschooling Clara for preschool per se, but would at least like to have some kind of familiarity to what she's used to at preschool. Thank you, Grandma Holly, for sending an idea my way just this morning. Keep 'em coming!
It was gorgeous out yesterday, especially while we were out for our walk.
The girls spent a good half hour throwing sticks in this pond in Briarwood.
We paused our Friday night movie last night to FaceTime with auntie, uncle and cousin cats.
I was so close to a quarantine bingo! :-)
There have certainly been many pros and cons to being at home so much and working from home now. I love eating dinner earlier and how it's been nice enough outside now to get bikes out and go on after-dinner walks. I am naturally a hermit, and so is Clara, so we've been getting along just fine from that regard, though the girls have been missing their friends and others that they'd normally get to see more often.
I know a lot of people have been saying they have so much more time on their hands now being stuck at home, but with still working and having both the girls at home, we have been still keeping pretty busy. Although I feel like I have had more time, or flexibility, rather for keeping up on some more things around the house like throwing in a load of laundry or vacuuming up all the dried up mud in the entryway, during the day on my lunch break or what have you.
There are many things that we already were doing that, for us, has not changed much like eating dinner at home every night together and getting stuff done around home on the weekends.
Well, I guess one change has been the number of pictures I've been able to take now that I'm home more since this post alone took me about three times as long as it normally might have!
Stay safe, everyone!
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