Another weekly album

Here are the everyday pictures from April 5-10, aka quarantine/stay-at-home week four. One of my personal quarantine activities has been to attempt writing a cute little novel. It's something I have always dreamed about doing, and now that my time at home alone with Amber has suddenly been cut short and is over forever, I decided I had no reason to wait. I am loving my first attempt at large-scale fictional story crafting! It's hard and absorbing and fun. Since a whole lot of my writing energy is being spent elsewhere, this is a bare bones photos-with-captions post. Even if these captions aren't eloquent memories, they are still memories I want to hang on to!

Spring is sprouting and I have been admiring it from all angles. If we have to stay in our little bubble, at least it's a beautiful bubble.

Home, through the flowers, across the canal. While I was admiring these pretty purple weeds one day, I started wondering: why do some flowers get called weeds, some get to be wildflowers, and other get to be "official" garden flowers? Isn't a flower a flower? I love these little purple weeds--they grow on the ground in between the rows of grapes in the vineyards and on the side of the road. They make the plain old grass happier and prettier.

The kids played our Oregon Trail card game over and over for a few days last week. Amber died of dysentery and had to "act dead" as part of the game. It was hilarious.

A close-up of Amber playing dead. Amber learned all of the action cards in the Oregon Trail game by heart. A few days later, she was sorting through them and saying what they stood for. I heard her little voice across the  room saying "Calamity. Dysentery. Cholera. Typhoid. Broken Leg. etc. Jeff and I were laughing our heads off. What excellent timing--during a real pandemic--to learn all of these historic health risks!

Date-walk-selfie, part 1. We had some gorgeously mild weather and went on several evening walks together last week.

Mint and Mt. Adams: one of my favorite views on one of my favorite running routes.

Jay and Rose take turns carrying an old cell phone loaded with library audiobooks outside. They wander around the fields out back, walking and listening to stories for one of their 30 minute sessions of required outside time.

On Monday (April 6th) Jeff and I cleaned, swept, and organized our garage. I forgot to take a before picture, but it was a dirty dusty leafy wreck. We were both sore from all of the sweeping.

Adorable little lambs, less than a mile from our house.

Canal view, from another lovely run.

Camera angle is everything. Our little torpedo home is cute.

I'm loving the swooping curves of the road and the canal.

Happy purples, with a few yellows mixed in.

I had some cookie baking success! I finally ditched my crippled old cookie recipe for a different one, and it worked! Hope is restored!

Amber was so excited to lose her second tooth at dinner. She bit into an apple and the loose tooth started to bleed. Amber did not like the blood on her apple, and next thing we knew, she had reached in and pulled the offending tooth right out. Once the bleeding stopped, she was so excited, we had to call both grandmas to tell them the news!

After dinner is not an ideal time to try taking a picture of these hooligans.

YouTube cursive lessons are still in full force. Jay does the bare minimum and sighs about it; Rose proudly shows me her loopy new writing. Jay has never liked anything requiring fine motor skills; Rose is an artist. BOTH will learn cursive!

One evening Rose let Amber link up to her audiobook. They walked around the back fields with their headphones daisy chained together. Rose came back annoyed and said Amber kept walking off to dig dirt and throw rocks, pulling the headphones crooked. They were still a pretty cute pair, like little elephants walking in a line, holding each other's tails.

WILD. LOUD. Back in February, Jeff and I walked across the road to meet a nice couple who is building a house there. When we told them we lived across the street from them (both of our houses are set back from the road a good ways), recognition dawned in their eyes and they said "Ohhh, you're the ones with the loud kids on the trampoline!" Yes. Yes we are.

On this night, Jeff and I actually left the kids wrestling on the trampoline and went on a walk around the fields out back. We could hear the kids screaming and shouting for almost our entire walk, waaaay out there by those tiny trees on the horizon in the grassy area past the brown mint field.

Date walk 2.0! Give me all of the sunshine and husband-time!

Date walk 3.0. The wind picked up during the latter half of the week and we had to take a break from our evening walks. But they will be back, rest assured.