Day 18 - Marvalous

Thursday April 2, 2020

Status report:
WA State* Confirmed COVID-19 cases: 6585 (+601)
WA State* Confirmed COVID-19 deaths: 262 (+15)
**data updates have been problematic in WA state for a few days. They claim their data reporting can't handle the new amount of data. I don't know how accurate these new numbers are

US Confirmed COVID-19 cases: 215,000 (+26000)

US Confirmed COVID-19 deaths: 5000 (+1100)

We topped 1 million cases world-wide. That we know of. There's a lot of speculation of China and North Korea hiding their real numbers. Heck, the US isn't testing and can't confidently say we actually have only 215k cases.

My friend whose grandparents were in the hospital with COVID? They had been married for 75 years. Her Grandma died last night. Grandpa is still fighting it. More famous musicians died. So many musicians are in that 60 year+ age group.

Splendid

This morning was splendid. The big kids and I played games for Math again. Edgar and I played Splendor and Sabrina and I played chess (I'm not really any good at chess).

The kids spent their project time today emailing their teachers and checking in. Next week they will probably be starting some kind of distance learning, so I wanted them to get their hands on the keyboards and say hello.

Marva (and Mick)-less

The sun was out again! The kids jumped on the trampoline for a while, but then we decided we had to use the sunshine to get a little Grandparent quarantine visit in. We were thinking that since it has been more than 14 days since we have had any real unprotected contact with the outside, that maybe we would relax our quarantine with Grandma and Grandpa. But we were all a little unsure and Grandpa finally called it and said, nope. He didn't think it was a good idea. And I totally support that. I sure don't be the one to do them in.

So, we showed up at their house with sidewalk chalk, and we set up our camp chairs in the driveway and talked to each other while about 20 ft. apart. It was nice to see them and to enjoy the sunshine. It passed quickly and the rain chased us back home.

We came home and the kids and I snuggled up and watched Newsies! I LOVE Newsies. I watched it a jillion times as a kid. I still have every song memorized (and most of the dialogue). My 11 year old self still swoons when Spot Conlon from Brooklyn shows up.

And then, trying to find a clip of Spot Conlon, I found this silly mash up. And it's super fun.




We finished our night off with another Marvel movie. Captain Marvel for the win. It was marvelous (all the puns intended). Took up a little googling to figure out who the heck the aliens were, but we totally enjoyed the movie. The girls had another pretty successful sister movie upstairs. Tomorrow: Avengers Endgame and Taco Bell. Epic.

Day 17 - April Fool's!

April Fool's! It's not poison. Just Milk. Ha. Ha. Ha. 

Wednesday April 1, 2020

Status report:
WA State* Confirmed COVID-19 cases: 5984+? (+?)
WA State* Confirmed COVID-19 deaths: 247+? (+?)
**data updates have been problematic in WA state for a few days. They claim their data reporting can't handle the new amount of data. I don't know how accurate these new numbers are

US Confirmed COVID-19 cases: 215,000 (+26000)

US Confirmed COVID-19 deaths: 5000 (+1100)

The world more or less cancelled April Fool's by common consent. No one wanted to be the guy who did a dumb joke and got everyone all upset. Google cancelled their famous jokes. More people died. Up until now, we have been told not to wear masks out in public. We were told that they didn't really help and might make things worse. Now, they are back pedaling. Maybe the masks do help, but don't take needed N-95 masks from health care and first responders. Hm. Doing my best to just stay home.

April Foolery

While the world at large was avoiding April Fool's, it has become a favorite of Sabrina. Some of the pranks she did today:

• Had me set Alex's phone alarm for 2 am with a note that said, "Happy April Fool's! Love, Sabrina"
• Woke everyone up early by throwing (clean) underwear on our faces
• Put (clean) underwear in the fridge
• Made a decoy pair of glasses from paper, straws, and toothpicks and swapped them out for my glasses on my bedside table early in the morning
• tried to lock everyone in their bedroom or bathroom throughout the day with chairs up under the handles. Except the doors open in. So all that happened was a folding chair falling on your foot. 
• put a box of dirty laundry on top of a cracked-open door so it would fall on someone
• colored the milk blue and wrote "posin" (poison) on it

She had a blast. Betty joined in on the fun. She heard it was joke day, so she made up and told this on the spot:

Why did the cow get on the bus?
Because he was poopy!

And she retold it all day and laughed her head off. Because she's three. 

Today for math the big kids played chess.

Poor Betty. This is really hardest on her. She misses her preschool. It's so hard for me to juggle managing my big kids and helping them with their schooling and their emotions, keeping up on the house work, cooking, etc., and helping Betty to feel like she's getting what she needs.

Betty, on her ride-on car, playing play-do, and trying to keep it all together.

She wants someone to play with her all of the time. But we are all usually busy doing other stuff. When she plays on her own, she makes giant messes (like, just dumps crap on the floor and walks away). It's tough. We are trying to balance it all. We're doing pretty well. But the house is mostly trashed all of the time, and Betty never quite gets enough time with her big kids and parents.

For school project today we watched some documentaries on seahorses for Sabrina. Turns out, there are really not any decent full-length documentaries on seahorses. So we watched some clips and subp par stuff. Someone should really remedy that.


Grump Grump Grump

You know what happens when your excited 9 year old wakes everyone up at 6:30 am for April Fool's? Everyone gets really grumpy. So we skipped art time and I took a LONG nap. Betty napped too. It was lovely.

And this week is going to be a super hero marvel extraveganza.

Alex and I have been watching all of the Marvel/Avengers movies. We let Edgar know which ones are approved for him to watch. Well, we are now down to the last three that are currently out. And we checked Common Sense Media and decided they were okay for him (I love that site). So we are going to watch them all together for the first time. Tonight was Ant-man and the Wasp. It was super fun. We made the girls go upstairs for a sister movie night. If they came down to bug us, they were told they would have to go right to bed. Worked pretty good. Hopefully it will work three nights in a row!