Bella, Gabe and Josiah

On Tuesday the boys got sent home from school with a low grade fever. This fever was literally so low that when I called the doctor (trying to be a responsible parent in a pandemic), she told me that it wasn’t a fever. They’re fine. I never saw a hit of a fever or any symptom other than Josy being grumpy on Tuesday. Nonetheless, we’ve been home for three days until I can take them back to school tomorrow. Staying home with the boys and trying to work is ridiculously complicated, but I’m not going to get i to that right now. Instead, I’ll just say that we had some extra fun together. I really do like hanging out with my boys. They’re pretty fun little boys. And while they do make my house a disaster and might make me crazy with the questions and the poop and emptying out all the cupboards, they’re pretty great. Today the weather was nice, so I insisted that we go play at the park. We were the only ones there and the weather was great, what more can you want?  Josy climbed all the wa...

The way my big relay race usually works is that we have to be at the ferry terminal at a ridiculous hour, like 4am, so we don’t get much sleep the night before. Then the race is all night, so either you run all night and then finally get to bed at like 6am to sleep for a couple of hours before waking up to meet the team for the last couple of legs or you sleep for a couple of hours before meeting the team at 3am to start running the second half of the race. At some point you end up running a crazy long and hard leg so by the time you actually crawl into bed that night you’re so tired that you’re quite convinced that you’ll sleep for 12 hours straight. Except that I don’t. I sleep terribly. I don’t know why but somehow my body sleeps for a couple of hours and then I toss and turn all night. Somehow my body knows that I ran my leg yesterday. It may not have been the real race, but my body is acting the same way. I burned a lot of energy yesterday and I figured that I would sleep great, l...

It’s been a pretty great weekend so far. On Friday night Gabe went to Aunt Jan’s house to do some planting. She’s working on getting a huge garden going in her garage, so she asked Gabe if he wanted to grow some plants. They planted lettuce, spinach and beans and he’s excited to watch them grow. A few months ago she gave him a strawberry and a lettuce plant that he checked on every morning, so he’s definitely going to be excited to watch these plants grow too. On Saturday, the weather was amazing! Pat had some stuff he had to get done around the house, so I took the boys to the park to play. Now that Josy is officially walking, he had so much fun. Yes, he did do a lot of crawling everywhere, but he was able to walk around and he was super excited to be a big boy. Both boys could have spent the entire time on the swings. Yep. He’s off. He actually figured out how to go down the slide all by himself. Stop growing up child! At least he couldn’t figure out how to get up the rock wall... Pl...

I heard Gabe yell “Mommy help!” from the bathroom. When I got there, this is what I saw. Not only was he stuck, but the sink was full of water and he was very wet. Oh, this child. My life is not boring...

Last Saturday was actually nice, which was a bit of a shock after the summer we’ve had where we’re setting rain records... So we figured that we’d better take advantage of it and spend some time hiking. We were  all actually wearing shorts and tanktops and threw in a sweatshirt just in case. Um, it may have been sunny, but it wasn’t warm so it’s a good thing we had those sweatshirts.  But we had fun. Gabe is convinced that it was the hardest hike he’s ever been on his life, but he made it the whole four miles with very little complaining. Finding old mine ruins definitely helped make it more exciting too.

Bella started school yesterday, which means that we officially have a high schooler. I have no idea how that is possible. We talked to her last night. It’s hard to get a lot of info out of a kid who fundamentally doesn’t like any part of school, but it sounds like it went well. She’s actually getting to meet in person, which is good. Unfortunately she doesn’t get to do band, because they’re not doing woodwinds in bad this year. Hopefully that will be shortlived because that’s the one piece of school that she actually enjoys and is really good at. But at least she’s not trying to do virtual school like they’re doing here.

We got back last Monday, but Pat still had the week off work and the boys had to be out of school for the week, so we’ve just been home for the week. I tried to get as much work in as possible (as I don’t have piles of leave to burn) but tried to balance that with also having fun with the kids and letting Pat do some projects he needed to do. The pirate love is still strong and Pat insisted that I make him a spy glass. Working from home is hard... Josy finally mastered the art of walking and is very proud of himself! Um, I’ve never dealt with a regular sized child before. Gabe couldn’t reach a doornob until he was three. Someone is a little tired... It was a nice and quiet week. I definitely would not to cut all of our vacations short just to have a week at home, but it was nice to have a little downtime before heading back to regular life.