100 months

We all survived our first real week of "school" at home, thanks to the schedule mommy came up with, with daddy working like crazy from home we needed somewhat of a routine to follow and keep them quiet and busy most of the day. We set the girls watches with alarms to remind them of things throughout the day, J started her morning with a daily meeting with her teacher and whatever classmates could join that day, she of course was always the first one on and would ask me multiple times (before her alarm went off) if it was time to log into the computer, she never missed a meeting! After her meeting it was PE time before it got to hot, followed by math, specials time, lunch, language arts, recess (yes we built that in), iReady and then finished the day with either science, social studies or Portuguese lessons depending on the day. By 3pm we were wrapping it up and calling it a day! While this seems like a lot, they had lots of friends who were done by 11am each morning or crammed all of their work into two days for the week, with nothing to do outside of the house we needed some structure and normalcy in our lives and it worked for us. Our prinicpal did a great job keeping the families informed of what was going on with his weekly/biweekly video news update, they especially enjoyed his joke of the week segment. What started as three weeks of eLearning quickly was announced through the end of April.

The girls quickly adapted to the new schedule and way of school, we tweaked it along the way as we saw fit. J started learning about measurements in math and spent time running around the house with her ruler and a tape measure measuring things, she even attempted to help daddy with some measurements on the patio. She looked forward to art class and the new lesson every two weeks, she loves art and really enjoyed making her mandala, the art teacher said her mandala was the most detailed of all the students in the entire school! She completed her habitat project and report on the manatee, this is something they had been working on in class and she was very excited about it (I just happened to do a manatee project when I was in second grade too). She really got into making her habitat and sculpted her own manatees and turtle, we found the rest of the stuff around the house to complete the project and of course she had to incorporate legos into it! The kids all presented their habitat and read their report over Zoom for the class to hear,  she had to get all dressed up that day and was nervous at first but did a fantastic job, I was very proud of her. Her teacher made their daily morning meetings fun by incorporating show and tell, jokes, bingo and other games virtually to get the kids up, moving and participating with each other. They also enjoyed virtual science lessons with their cousins that their Grandma over Zoom, it was fun to learn about electromagnetic force and they liked playing with the very powerful magnets!

We are sure getting use out of our pool heater! We haven't hit the rainy season yet (and April showers have been minimal) so we have been spending a lot of time in the pool and on the patio while the weather is still somewhat tolerable. We added some new floats to the pool and on one of my trips to Walmart (it's the only place I go for now) I picked up a new swim suit for each of the girls as theirs from last year were on their last leg! J loves to dive for the rings and can get all 15-20 of them at one time without coming up for air. She has been working on her handstand and her backwards somersaults in the water. She is loving the new underwater camera and likes me to take crazy under water pictures of her (we are still working on getting the timing right so she is fully in the picture!).  I do not know what we would be doing without being able to swim daily right now!

About nine days into this cycle of our butterfly garden the milkweed was destroyed and some of the caterpillars started migrating to the top of the screen and the big red leaves to make their cocoons.  J was constantly outside counting the caterpillars and giving us an update on how many were climbing the screen. We were able to catch the tail end of one finishing his cocoon and got to see him wiggling around to finish it, it was so neat! At one point we had the entire The life cycle of a butterfly from our garden! One of the perks of being home is being able to continuously watch and document this with the girls. On April 4th we had our first hatch and the hatching continued for almost the next two weeks with a butterfly or two hatching almost every day, I think we had about 17 in total that hatched. We went (mommy went with a mask and everyone else stayed in the car) to a local nursery that specializes in butterflies and got some new plants for our garden to give the monarchs some more food and also to attract different butterflies to our yard, we brought home in our plants two Gulf fritillary caterpillars to start the process off, unfortunately we watched them get big and fat and then lost them when it was time for them to cocoon, these unlike the monarchs don't eat much food and there was plenty of leaves left on their host plant, maybe we'd get some more?

Easter was our first holiday in quarantine and two little girls were excited when they saw the Easter Bunny had come! Once again he filled the eggs with Legos, which they thought was hilarious again and they spent the morning putting their new sets together. They both got new swim suits and they couldn't wait to put them on and swim like mermaids in them. After a month of staying distant and not seeing Grandma and Grandpa we broke down and got together for an afternoon in the pool and some BBQed ribs for Easter, it was just what we all needed! We attempted a full family Zoom call, I don't think anyone heard what the others were saying, everyone just nodded, smiled and looked at all the kids, was a half hour of chaos on the phone but it was good to see everyone at once even if it was via the phone! The next weekend was Grandma's birthday and we picked up where we left off in the pool and with a BBQ. Finding her a present in quarantine was hard but we were able to buy her a beautiful orchid from our local nursery, J helped me pick out which one, we picked it up curbside and did a "surprise" delivery to her door.

We've done lots of puzzles, J is the little puzzle master, need a piece just ask her and in a matter of seconds she is handing you the right piece.We struggled with her fist 1500 piece puzzle, the Disney one, but once we finally got it started we couldn't stop! Once we figured out there was a pattern to the border and decided to do it in sections it made puzzling a lot easier! We also finally did the birds puzzle we had gotten back at Christmas, when I say we I really mean J did it and C and I helped her a little when she would let us! They put together their fairy lights they got as an Easter gift and colored their pillow cases Nana got them. We've been finding ways to keep ourselves busy when they aren't doing school work or swimming in the pool!

PE time is when the girls groan every day at me! J has been a little better than C and is still running with me twice a week, we are in the high 11 minutes for our mile run through the park We've tried to go farther but her stamina isn't there! She however loves biking but is quickly outgrowing her bike, there are no bikes to be found to upgrade hers! If she had a bigger bike I know she could bike a lot farther than we go, her long legs just can't crank the small bike anymore and it looks like she is riding a clown bike!

Here are the pictures from the month.