Shelter in Place

Our county is officially under a "shelter in place" directive.  All non-essential businesses are closed and people are supposed to maintain 6' distance from others and only go out for essential reasons.  Thankfully exercise counts, and the weather has been great, so we have been going on walks almost every day.  

On Monday, Dan smoked a turkey.  The meat shelves in the store have been bare, but they had turkey, so Dan decided to do a whole Thanksgiving meal, we did a turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce (thankfully we had some frozen in the deep freezer) and homemade rolls.  The kids had fun with it, the food was yummy and we enjoyed sharing some of our meat.  

The kids did great with their first week of school at home.  The school has done a really great job of it - they have sent home packets for the elementary school kids and online work for the middle school kids.  Evie and James have been great about getting their school work done and have had a lot of fun doing the activities for their "specials" classes.  James made a LEGO sculpture and Evie painted a "happy tree" after watching a Bob Ross video. 

Evelyn challenged the whole family to a Plank contest - I was doing great until David climbed on my back....  Anna won of course - but David got the prize for cutest plank!  

David loves being read to and looking at books.  I found him quietly sitting one afternoon while I was working on dinner - he was sitting looking at the lego search book for 15 minutes - it was so cute!  

 The kids have been having a fun time with food, and haven't even complained too much when we eat a lot of leftovers.  We've tried to get creative about how we eat them, but I'm just not willing to let food go to waste for no reason - right now especially. 

In addition to lots of walks, the kids have been having fun on the ring fit. So we've been keeping busy between school work and enjoying each other with walks and games and family time.  This is a rather scary time for so much of the world, but we are feeling so blessed right now.  I hope when my kids grow up and remember this, that they will remember the blessings and the time together - not fear.  We had a wonderful home church today, we had a little fast and testimony meeting and we talked about how this experience can be like a refiners fire - we can let is remove the bad and make us better - but then what do we do about it once it's done - do we go back to what it was before?  

The kids got to have fun doing a youth game night online.  Eileen didn't participate, but Anna and Aaron seemed to have a fun time.  We have such great youth leaders!  

This is just a fun little video of David being adorable.  Dan also took a video of Evelyn and James singing "I Will Walk with Jesus" but it's too big to fit here.  They sang so beautifully and then we sent it to Grandparents!  

Dan and I are feeling so blessed that we made this job change a couple years ago - He may not have a job now if we hadn't.  Instead his company is thriving and being useful in this crazy time.