40 days and 40 nights in quarantine.

Forty days.

FORTY DAYS.

How is it we have been home for forty days now. I went to double check and was shocked because thirty days had sounded like so much, but now...forty.

Nothing much has been going on that hasn't been already happening. Still our regular homeschool schedule (without, of course, any co-op Fridays for the rest of the school year which really sucks). Elisabeth is still e-learning and hating every minute of it (seriously, e-learning is great for some students but is nightmarish for others). Evan's still conducting work from his makeshift office in our bedroom (which the kids still love). I'm still trying to keep the ship afloat.

Before the world went on hold, buying enough bananas for the kiddos to have smoothies weekly was no big deal because I went to the store multiple times a week. However, after grocery store trips started being pushed to 10-14 days between trips, smoothies were deemed not essential. The kids either needed to eat the bananas before they turned bad or they were designated to the freezer to become future banana bread. Well, a miscalculation in whether I needed to buy flour a few days ago led to me needing to go to the store mere days after a big grocery run and I grabbed more produce since I was out. When I announced smoothies could be made that day, there was much rejoicing in the land! 

Julia is our designated smoothie maker. Thomas is her supervisor.

We went to go get eggs from our friends that have chickens on Monday and the girls got to pet sweet Monty.

I don't know.

Thomas often asks at meals if it is lunch or dinner because we're all together for every meal now and he gets them confused. He likes to play Favorite and Least Favorite at dinner time, so he's basically asking so he can prepare his answers.

I'm thankful for big sisters who are always willing to read to little brothers.

Again. I don't know.

David asked to do book work during school time today. His pencil grip is getting so much better!!!

So, right before we realized we'd need every available device to keep kids educated, our iPad mini took a dump and needs to be connected to iTunes to be fixed, but we don't have any device that runs iTunes, so we have to wait until we can go to Pekin again and borrow my father-in-law's computer. So, we have one Chromebook we use for the younger kiddos (Ebeth has one we bought when she started Boylan and Evan has his own work computer). It's not a big deal, we aren't dependent on devices for our homeschooling days, but it's cute to watch them all gather around to watch something on the small laptop.

My shirt for the current state of the world:

There were lots of birds getting worms in the yard today and FOUR BUNNIES running around our yard, so there was a lot of window watching.

We planted seeds today for our garden. We're hoping to get a few successful carrots, cucumbers, peppers, radishes, peas, and green onions. A local nursery is providing curbside pick up for things like tomatoes, herbs, and other varieties of vegetables, so we're going to place an order next week for those as well.

Julia also wanted a shirt like mine. She was thrilled when it finally arrived.

This week's menu:

So, tonight for dinner was biscuits and gravy, which is one of Vivian's favorites, but I decided to try a new biscuit recipe and I have no idea what I did wrong, but the dough was so runny that it was like pancake batter!! I added more flour (2 more cups!!), but it would not get the right consistency and I didn't want to waste more precious flour, so I decided to see if maybe I could just pour them into muffin tins and make...biscuit muffins...?

And it worked!

They weren't the best things ever, but they were good!

Vivian likes to make biscuit and gravy sandwiches, which is really gross in theory.

It's supposed to rain the next couple of days, so I think we're going to break out the art supplies tomorrow. We haven't done big art projects in a few weeks and I keep not thinking about it until it's basically time to clean up for dinner.

I'm trying not to think too much about the possibility of being at shelter in place through June. It hasn't been declared yet, but the rumor has been that our governor will keep our quarantine until June 30th and I just...can't think about that too hard right now. Honestly, I'm only surviving mentally by just going one week at a time and figuring out what we need to survive and thrive here at home. Looking forward too much more than that starts to make my brain feel frazzled and I start feeling panicky. Right now, we're focusing on finishing up the rest of the school year, completing assignments, finishing up any grading I have for my high school writing class for co-op, and planning the few things I want to do to continue schooling over the summer. Anything beyond that is out of my control and worrying about it just causes headaches.