101 months

Never did we think they would leave for Spring Break and not return to their classroom for the remainder of the year. By the time mid-April came around the district announced that learning would be online for the rest of the year. I'm glad we had settled into a nice little routine, it made the days a lot easier on all of us! J's teacher continued her daily morning meetings and also taught a few live lessons a week to help them with language arts and math. The morning meetings were more fun for the kids, they played virtual bingo, told jokes, found things around the house for scavenger hunts, had show and tell days and other things that I can't remember. What I do remember is the smile on J's face every morning at 8:55am as she got ready for her 9am video call, and then the laughter coming from the playroom while she was on her call. In a time of such uncertainty and gloom it was nice to see the teachers going above and beyond for their students. 

We continued with our PE routine of running, biking and swimming, although she gave up on the running when it got to hot! J really enjoyed the art lessons the art teacher posted, she always had to have an elaborate project and the teacher always posted nice comments to her on the work she had done. We did some of our own science experiments at home and we did a few more Zoom experiments with their cousins Grandma. Their grandma started working over Facetime with them twice a week on their Portuguese, J is really good at understanding Portuguese but lacks in the speaking department. Grandma incorporated their toys, Barbies and drawing into the lessons to make it a little more fun! J is a good listener and is doing really well at learning the names of things and pronouncing words. 

The last week of school their language arts project was to create their own fairy tale, her teacher had read them different versions of Cinderella the week prior and thought this would be a fun project to end school on. J spent the entire week working on this project and in true J fashion it had to be perfect. She wrote and illustrated her book, "Cinderella's Baking Adventure" all by herself, I knew there was a reason I had bought little blank books! The last day of school she got to read it aloud to her class on Zoom.  Her teacher was very impressed with her work and how much effort she put into it, she even got to show her teacher her book in person as we had to go to school to pick up something and just happened to see her teacher for a last goodbye! While this wasn't the perfect way to end the year our girls girls rocked eLearning with few complaints the last 9 weeks of school.

Our butterfly garden continued to be in full force this month, our caterpillars continued to turn into cocoons and the hatchings seemed like they were never ending. At some point we noticed the orange Gulf fritillary caterpillars were back and one day looked to the neighbors fence to notice something weird hanging, to our surprise it was the start of a cocoon, these guys cocoons were much different (and uglier) than the monarchs. Maybe we missed the cocoons the first time around when we thought we had lost them, when they are all done they looked like something shriveled up just hanging there. We caught one starting to make his cocoon and decided to bring it inside the screen for a more up close look at the process. He made his cocoon, J kept a close eye on him and then notice about 7 days later that it was starting to hatch! She watched him hatch, dry his wings and take flight on the patio. While this seemed like a good idea, the hard part was getting him out! Luckily after a few tries we were able to get him on the spider web broom and release him outside into the garden. What a beautiful orange butterfly the ugly cocoon turned into, it's amazing how things morph into something else! We really enjoyed this round of our garden! The milkweed is all gone so now time to clip everything back and wait a month or two for the next cycle to begin.

Mommy's birthday called for a day off from teaching so we went on a field trip! Both girls were learning about flowers in school so I figured why not go and pick some. We went out to Hunsaders Farm and spent our morning social distancing picking sunflowers from the HUGE field, J was in heaven except she was afraid of all of the bees that were flying around! We surprised their teachers and delivered flowers to each of their houses. The girls were so happy to see them and it was hard to refrain my hugging them! We chatted with each of them for about 15 minutes on their front porch, it was a wonderful morning. That night we went over to Grandma and Grandpa's for dinner, Grandma cooked my favorite Brasilian seafood dish, even while in quarantine we've still found ways to celebrate birthdays and holidays.  We spent Mother's Day weekend with Grandma and Grandpa, Saturday we BBQed some ribs (with even more sauces to try) and swam at our place and then took to their house on Sunday for a BBQ, the weather was lousy so no swimming was had, the girls were ok with that because they got to get all dressed up and actually do their hair!

To give mom and dad a break the girls have been staying over at Grandma and Grandpas house one night a week, the house is so quiet when they are gone we don't know what to do with ourselves! Their American Girl doll carriers have come in handy to take their dolls (and of course their change of clothes) back and forth with them. They have taken over the guest bedroom so that they can play in their room without having to put things away to get the trundle bed out, they are pretty comfy in the giant king bed! Grandma got a new vacuum that came in a HUGE box, the girls wanted to turn it into a car so they got Grandpa to help them engineer one and couldn't wait to show it to us when it was done, and how they spin crazy in it in the garage! J always enjoys Grandpa's BBQs and the steak bone she always has to have!

We hadn't seen friends since March and decided to get together with our good friends for socially distant donuts one Saturday morning. The girls had fun helping me to divide the driveway so that we were the recommended six feet apart and then deiced that they needed to color all of the bricks in. We had a fun morning with our friends, they jumped in and colored most of the bricks on their side of the driveway while the adults caught up on the last 5+ weeks, we played Heads Up on our phones (like charades) and the kids ate their donuts. Even if we had to stay apart it was a great morning catching up with them and was nice for the kids to see their friends in person. 

We've done lots of puzzles and have enjoyed watching the Mask Singer as a family, they love it when daddy guesses it right and look forward to seeing what Nick Cannon is wearing! We've read, they've played with their fairy gardens and we've eaten a lot of ribs! The girls are really into ribs and we have been having BBQ sauce taste tests to see which ones we like best! We've been finding ways to keep ourselves busy when they aren't doing school work or swimming in the pool! I finally had to sew the girls each a mask, of course they chose their fabric, and they had their first outing out (other than to G&G's house or just riding around town in the car) to the dentists office. J had a great check-up as usually and for once she has no wiggly teeth, her top teeth (besides her two front teeth) are taking forever to come in, maybe she will have them by Christmas!

 

The art studio J took her drawing lessons at launched online lessons for the kids this month. We decided to try it out and see what it was all about. With not much to do we were looking for new things to occupy some time after school, we were even able to get their cousin on Facetime and do the lesson together! J really enjoys drawing, painting and anything art so this was right up her alley. Of course everything she does she has to do it perfectly, the other two would quickly finish the part we were at and then we would have to wait for J to catch up! In one class (the cake) they learned how to use markers and water to make their own watercolors, was pretty neat to watch how the colors reacted and we quickly learned you can't color things right next to each other and have to skip to another part on the page so that the colors don't bleed together! We definitely have a little Picasso on our hands!

 

Here are the pictures from the month.