Peacock Flock Take II: Just Some Mother Rambling

Today our oldest turns 19! Oh how different from what we expected this day has looked for us! We thought we would go to CO for Easter to visit her. We thought this might be the first birthday we had to celebrate apart. We had a physically distanced "birthday party". Really, it was the grandparents driving in to drop off a gift. They stayed outside & 6ft away from everyone. It was wonderful to see them, but still super hard to stay apart.  Evie & I worked on some yummy cakes for Sloan! We thought they turned out pretty good! Guess the dog thought they turned out pretty good too.... Ugh! Yes, he got to them BEFORE we were able to try them ourselves or even light the candles.  I am going to try to focus on the positive & pray the cake doesn't make the dog sick all night. My silver lining is definitely that she is HOME for her birthday this year. I do know that will not always be the case. She will grow up, have a family of her own,...

Our home has been in full quarantine since 3/22 officially now. Almost a month. We were kind of on a partial quarantine starting on 3/13 when our public schools started to close & we started to prepare to be at home for a while. But we still had to find a way to get our oldest home from school and then get back up there to move her out officially.  We worked on a home project and painted the water closet in the master bath to match the rest of our bathroom. We went from a "chocolate brown" in the entire bath to a more peaceful grey.  We also had haircuts this week. THAT was stressful. I believe that the shorter the hair the less forgiving it is. I do not think that using clippers is in my skill set. Will wanted to keep the "length" on the top. Pretty sure he's working on a "man bun" here. And yes, his hair is kind of a greenish - blue hue. Who knows what color it will be next week. I am seriously not sweating some of the...

Happy Easter! Well, Easter in our house seemed to span a few days (maybe it felt like a few weeks). I know the Easter holiday usually does span a few days and as Christians we celebrate for almost a week with Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday & then Easter Sunday. But this year the week did seem to go a bit slower, maybe it was supposed to. We had plenty of rain on Maundy Thursday - plenty of rain. Some of us enjoyed the rain more than others. Sig playing in the rain Deuce hiding from the rain I made homemade hummus. You can find the recipe I used here . I will probably be making this one again very soon! We also started some green onions. They've done a bit of growing over the past week... On Good Friday I made an Easter cake. The cake did NOT make it until Easter though - the girls enjoyed it right after I got the pictures of it. We had part of a cake mix leftover from some other project one of the...

Health care workers at a nursing home around the corner What day is it?  For me it was just a really hard day. Yep, I said it. These are difficult days... And Tuesday of this week was especially difficult. ~Days full of questions. ~Days full of uncertainty. ~Days where it's difficult to find things to busy our time and minds. ~Days full of running interference between children who have cabin fever. ~Days full of trying to figure out new learning systems for these kids. ~Days full of nagging your children to make sure they have gotten their school work done, and are taking care of themselves. ~Days full of stress and loneliness. ~Days that run together. One of the things that made Tuesday more difficult for me is the fact that I can see many who are NOT heeding the government warnings about social distancing. I take my dogs out for a walk - BY MYSELF. I see groups (of no less than 15) gathering at the track for clearly organized workouts. I see smaller groups at ...

Liquid hand soap that is. It's something I have wanted to try for a while. We happened to have some bar soap scraps laying around so I finally googled a "few" how-to instructions on it so that Thing #2 & I could get to work on our own! First we had to grate the bar soap scraps I had. I had a mixture of soap types & since I wasn't really sure if it would actually work I didn't worry too much about what kind of soap was going into the mix. Thing #2 picked out some essential oils to give it some fragrance. (I didn't micromanage her here; I think she picked grapefruit & orange for our first batch.) The recipe I used calls for 1 Tablespoon soap shavings to 16 ounces of water. We put the shavings, the water & essential oil into a small pot on the simmer burner set to low. The shavings will eventually (be patient, it takes a bit longer than I thought it would) melt into the water creating the soap liquid. I was a little w...