Antics of Cats and Kids

Of all the creatures in this household, I think the cats like homeschooling best.  Timmy Whitefoot and Rosie Grayfoot both enjoy having their people home with them all day.  

Kyla and Rosie do homework together each day.

In another room, Piper and Timmy "do homework" together. (Piper has finally caught up with a month of homework.  Timmy is going to fail middle school if he maintains these study habits.)

Then, Mama came across an article on NPR about this bird saving device. The BirdsBeSafe collar claims to decrease songbird killings by 87%, affecting only the birds who fall down laughing at the hunting cat.  I bought two that day.

The cats seem perfectly happy with their new fashion.  I theorize that they have found their inner lion. 

 

So the cats to mind, but oh!  Piper was mad.  She protested the horrid collars, and marched in solidarity, with herself.  Her first collar was made of paper, and was quite uncomfortable, which of course, is how she assumed the cats felt.

Then she made a cloth one (which lasted in all its glory until the next time I insisted she shower.  The color faded somewhat, but my towels got a little more colorful!)

 

 See, Rosie doesn't even mind.   

So far, so good.  We haven't been brought any presents by cats disgusted with our inept hunting skills.

Backyard Project and April Showers

My "If you give a pig a pancake" syndrome took itself outdoors this month.  I'm not even sure what the catalyst was, but somehow, I ended up with 10 yards of topsoil, heaps of plants that I swear just jump into my cart every spring, new containers, seeds, fertilizer, and a to-do list as long as I could make it.  And when I say "I ended", that in no way implies that is the end.  There's still May.

I got so energized that I moved most of the 10 yards in a few days. (Dwayne was working, but he's the one to suggest finishing up in the evenings so he could share the labor.)

 

Dwayne and Kyla did not get into a dirt dumping contest. Allegedly.

Before

During

But no after yet--it's still growing!

The girls were putting together the trampoline, so I put Wes on the lawn mower for the first time, on the parts that weren't reseeded.  He blogged about it. 

April has been a mild month and gave us both showers and flowers!

I planted under our mailbox trellis.

I love my "front yard".  Let's extrapolate that the rest of the 2 acres looks as good as this 3' by 20' strip.  

 

Day 51

[Note: Our school district's first official day of Don't Enter the Building was Thursday, March 5th, which became Day 1 on my calendar.  Wired puts it at March 11th, but that magazine probably doesn't have kids in my neighborhood school.]

This week, my experimental parenting of "I'll support you in whatever ways you ask for, but your teachers are giving you to-dos, and I'm trusting that you will DO them" philosophy went to shit.  Yes, shit.  So today started with me throwing Piper in the shower, taking away her jammies, setting her up at her desk and not in her bed, for period 5, the first class on Fridays.  Then, making sure she was actually Zooming at 9am, I got to see her face when she realized that she hadn't even thought about the project assigned a week ago that was due today.  That was probably less drastic than my face when I saw she hadn't done ANY of the assignments since approximately Day....2.   I've been forcing her to keep up with math and English and assumed the others she could manage.  I don't like to be the literal motherboard that all brains under this roof must plug into, but the consequences in which Piper will supposedly learn her lesson probably won't be obvious for several years, and the bad habits will really be ingrained by then.  What Piper learned is there is no lockdown like a Mama lockdown.



Kyla's not doing great either.  She focused on a really cool science project and a lot of books and gardening last week and went from being ahead in math to behind.  Really behind.  You know who you can gain 10 pounds in one [ahem, really amazing!] weekend, but need at least a month to lose it?  While, keeping up with classes is just like that. This is the online algebra course done outside the school so we could, you know, travel around the world, and she could start geometry next fall.  Ironically, she will probably be the most prepared math student next year returning to class...if she catches up.  

Guess what?  This Saturday isn't a weekend for the girls.  


Oddly, the day turned out surprisingly well.  For speech, Wes and I played a new board game.  I think the point is to say "red", "green", and "orange" a lot, but I'd rather just play (by "play", I mean "win") the game rather than have another conversation with the kid I'm around all day.  But somewhere, I got the giggles.  So when Wes somehow simultaneously tripped over the coffee table, the couch, the pillow, and his own container of pistachios "accidentally" covered in honey, I laughed.  And when he started doing his death scream over his scratched ankle, well, dear reader, I howled. I held him after I grabbed an icepack so that I could continue silent hysterics behind his back.  The girls quickly caught it too, and when I eventually pulled myself together, I found him in his room, feelings and ankle hurt, but not irrevocably. 


Piper, in lockdown on her pre-tech assignments, had finished the one due today and started working the Rube Goldberg assignment, where she made a tea-making machine for me.  It was actually great fun and led to a few rabbit trails.  First of all, we watched a few youtube videos on remarkable Rube Goldberg machines--this one most impressed me, and even more so hours later, when Piper completed her 5-step machine.

Here's what we're calling Take 10:

But, while we were watching a few amazing Goldberg Machines on youtube, it became lunchtime and Mama Hour, a time set aside where all 3 kids get the special wisdom across many disciplines that only such an amazing Mama can impart.  Today, we searched "coronavirus song parodies" and split our pants, busted our guts, and generally interrupted the meetings Dwayne was having on the other side of the house, laughing uproariously and we learned that, indeed, laughter is the best medicine.  We particularly liked this, that (and another one by him) and anything by this family--though this one by them pretty much made me wet my pants. Then all the kids, instead of being done by 2pm, "volunteered" to get more school work done, then we watched those same videos again, went on a "voluntary" family walk, getting home later than we should have to make dinner.  

I want to get the hang of this StayHome eventually, but I think I have to face the facts--it's not the quarantine.  It's me.  The good stuff and the "doh!" moments.  And I'm content (regardless of the soiled underwear).

Family Antics

So much time...together.  

Piper had to write up an example of feudalism so we taught the family to play Kings and Serfs, a card game we like to play in large groups.  When the king position is knocked out, we've always said, "Off with your head!" Wesley heard "Weapon!" and he was all over it.  That's the finest plastic ax a dollar can buy.

Here, Dwayne smiles for me, thinking Piper is just photobombing. 

Which is short-sighted of him, since she pulled the ottoman over as well.

 

Kyla is oddly amused by her sister's antics. 

Here, Wes is so glad to be reunited with Larry the Cactus II (the first one was a gift for someone else, but Wes fell fast and hard, and he got one at Easter).   Larry is a mircobead pillow, which I admit, is a wonderous thing to snuggle, and Wes has figured out a way to put it on his head.  Of course he has.

Piper has some poor speech habits which don't help Wes's speech impediments  particularly when she speaks on the inhale, which is even more annoying than it sounds.  So she has to do a push up for each offense.  This is good because at the beginning of the January semester, she couldn't do a single one.  But somehow she got everyone else to do pushups with her.

Then Dwayne does some particularly amazing feats of strength!  He has worked his way up from 20 pushups daily to 30, and sometimes the kids want to give him an extra challenge.  (And, yes, my man has amazing muscle tone--I love it!)

And again, with Piper on his back.  The goal is for the kids to do pushups while being .... pushupped?  Can I makeup that word?

Hope your antics are happy, too!  We all need some laughs.

Happy Easter, from both Denise and the Evil Easter Bunny

We have hosted Easter for so many years (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2019) with the exception of the year that we got a stomach bug the night before and just packed up the dinner for others, we kind of only knew one way to celebrate. After mixing our personal and religious observations with family secular traditions, we would host a dinner and egg hunts for all the family and friends we could gather to us. Every single year, it both stressed me out before and brought great pleasure during and after.  

This year was going to be different; we would be with Dwayne's brother, Dan and his wife, Deborah, and a few crew, as we traveled up an Amazon tributary. Perhaps I would have tried to purchase chocolate bunnies for everyone in our day in Manaus before boarding, but we wouldn't have been able to add the Evil Easter Bunny to our luggage, and I don't think we would have found any churches accessible either by geography or language. It was going to be our own restart.

But we got another restart instead. What if it is just the 5 of us for Easter, just a third, or even fourth, of our usual? What if we still celebrated, the religious holiday, or silly traditions, and ourselves?

It was an amazing day.

I came up with a bacon, bread, and blueberry breakfast to eat while we watched the service on youtube live. Then the Evil Easter Bunny hid the bunnies with clues of where the baskets were hidden. Dwayne got to learn that we keep the extra airfilters in a box on top of the wardrobe in the mudroom. All these years, and he was unaware....much to EEB's knowledge and amusement.

While we were still dressed up (yes, Wes considers himself well dressed in black polyester pants--because they are uncomfortable enough to be dressy, but not torturous like, gasp!, jeans--and the sweater Grandma knitted 4 or 5 years ago), we brought fresh bouquets to my aunt's homecare and we were able to wave and shout hello from the sidewalk. Then we did the same for my parents, but got to stay much longer chatting from the lawn to the front porch. Grown ups are invariably boring, so my feral children wrestled together, much like I picture young wombats would intoxicated on spring sunshine.

I'm not going to lie--I was highly amused by their spirited hijinks.

Then the good stuff started. After Dwayne and I had a little too much fun hiding the eggs, I spread out a blanket in the grass with a good book, Dwayne dug into his favorite outdoor pastime, weeding the grass (two marijuana terms in one clause!), and the kids hunted candy. 

The kids surprised us with another egg hunt. They had found the camouflaged eggs--ones made to look like grass, rocks, etc-- and filled them will little drawings and love notes and ordered us to find them.

Then we turned the tables, brought out a dose of the EEB, and hid the camo eggs so well that they were hunting them while we made ("made", thanks Costco!) our Easter dinner. Salmon and lamb, veggies, and no deviled eggs. Since the kids don't eat hardboiled eggs, we let our first Lent go by without dyeing eggs, and maybe I'm hardboiled myself, but I didn't particularly miss (mess!) it.

A toast: to resurrection, to good things, and to each other.

Happy Easter, friends!