Social Isolation

2020 has been wild! Lots of bad news, like Australia being on fire, WW3 threats, heck, Kobe Bryant died! But this virus has really hit home. Literally. But there has been good that has come from this. We have had a lot of time with our family and that has been really nice (for me at least). Humor has been on point with the internet as well.

When my kids ask about the Corona Virus toilet paper shortage 20 years from now, I will have no explanation for that.

Some things that has helped us to social isolate are long walks. Luckily there are some beautiful trails around us.

This tree was crazier looking in person

This cracked us up

At least the weather has been super nice and all the flowers have been blooming.

These beautiful lizards have been coming out as well.

 Sam has had a really weird schedule and has been shuffled around a lot. It still changes day to day as far due to Covid-19 but as of now he has been home the past couple days. The kids have really been eating it up having their daddy home. Heck, I have been too!

Eden popping a squat next to Daddy.

 Sam loves to cook and bake a lot more than I do so we've been eating that up too!

Homemade Cinnamon Rolls.

Some of the best homemade pizza we've made!

 The kids approve of his baking!

And some delicious orange rolls! We froze these for General Conference weekend.

Tried to teach these boys how to wink. It was pretty hilarious.

My pretty girl!!

We had a wacky Wednesday at home.
Joey refused any of the props I offered and made his own:
a frog taped to his shirt. 

Having fun outside. I bought a lot of sidewalk chalk for us.

Joey has been telling us for a while what he wanted to do for his birthday. He wanted to invite all the boys in his class for a party. I thought we could order some praying mantis egg cases in hopes that they would hatch before his party and the boys could take some home to either release or keep as a pet of their own. Well, this party is not happening sadly, but we still had a lot of fun when these egg cases hatched and we now own hundreds of praying mantis nymphs.

One of the first that hatched

One for each of the family to keep. We ended up releasing them to
help them find better food.

The boys are loving it!

The mantises protecting our new garden from harmful bugs.

What it looks like when they hatch.

 One of the biggest changes for us is Joey now doing school at home. His teachers are amazing and have done everything they could to make sure Joey has all the tools he needs to keep up with his school's learning schedule. Sam is something else too. One assignment was to draw and label a bluebonnet. Well, he took the kids for a walk to find one so Joey could sketch it. Our kids have been so lucky to have him at home.

Last Saturday I broke down and decided to grab some things from Sam's Club. I thought showing up a half hour before opening would suffice. Hahahahahahaha. That was a trip and I'm so glad I decided to go by myself because it would have been miserable waiting there with the kids. I waited over an hour and it happened to be really rainy. My umbrella was in the van, which I let Sam keep. Then it got COLD! It's been reaching the 90's here so it was so weird and I was so underprepared for all of that. They came out and said they were out of toilet paper, but I otherwise ended up with everything I was hoping to get. I knew the toilet paper was a long shot though. And we still have some. But we don't have an infinite stash so at some point we will need it!

Best 2 1/2 hours ever. Not.

All the cold and rain went away by the evening so we went to a pond we've never been to before. It was super nice and we brought dinner and things to feed ducks, primarily oats. We also had to tell our kids we couldn't play on the playground because of the virus, even though there were kids still playing there 😒

The bees wouldn't leave me alone.
They loved the honey mustard sauce on my fingers I guess!

Lots of ducks to feed!

The boys kept trying to climb this sideways tree. We didn't have a change of clothes so it was nerve wracking!

Joey always throws the oats fabulously like it's a fist full of glitter, ha.

We then spotted these cute fuzzy ducklings and had to feed them as well!

I hope everyone is staying safe and hopefully the better we practice social isolation, the quicker we can get out of it!

The Good (Not so) Ol' Days

Like I said, I'm going out of order. Here are some pictures before Spring Break, mainly frogs and some celebrations.

Archer is clearly the funniest frog, always doing something that makes us chuckle. Here are some frog shenanigans. 

Archer giving Sunny a pat on the back

On top of the world (or cage)

Archer at the door: "Let me out!" 

Archer up on the highest vine

Hard to take photos of our kids with such tiny frogs but these were cute!

Archer showing off his muscular leg

All four are there!

We don't have pictures of this but I wanted to mention Frogger. I was noticing some weird smudgy spots on him and wasn't sure what they were. Well, it turns out these frogs can get more spots! They became clearer and clearer until he had new spots to show off, making him even easier to tell apart from the others. Now we see similar things happening to the other frogs so I'm excited to see what they look like when they are all grown up!

For Valentine's Day Sam was gone in Orlando. He's not the type to party without us so he stayed and worked on Presentations for future conferences that are now canceled (woohoo!). I hosted a Toddler Valentine's Party at our place and I think that went well (forgot to take pictures of course). Valentine's Day was on a Friday but Monday was a holiday so we celebrated then. We hired a babysitter and ate lunch then went bowling (no pictures of that either!) But these are the picture I actually snagged!
First one is Joey holding his shark Valentine from Jeep Grandma, and the second is the flowers Sam got for me for Valentine's Day.

 

 Eli has been impressing us lately with his skills. He is doing math problems above his age and he solves puzzles made for ages 8+!  Here he is showing off by solving a puzzle upside down. I'm thinking he'll have a future as an engineer of sorts. But at the moment he wants to be a veterinarian and that's good too.

A lemur came out at SeaWorld! I'm still saddened with these
Corona Virus shut downs and hope we can come back soon.

 And my birthday came and went. This was number 28 so I still have a few more years to enjoy my 20's. I'm already feel like I'm aging. I didn't bounce back as fast after having Eden and my back has been hurting more. So no better time than now to make changes to help me age better, ha!

The cake I had fun decorating for myself

Tried and failed to make that look like 28!

Dreaming of somewhere exotic with this cake

 2020 started off pretty nice, but I'm sad to see so many people hurting these days. So far we've been spared but doesn't mean anything didn't change for us.These days were not so long ago, but we have a new normal now.

Spring Break 2020

A lot of crazy stuff has happened since I've blogged last. And it wasn't that long ago either. So I'm going to go a little out of order. Spring Break was pleasant and a good little last hurrah before everything went crazy because of the Corona Virus. Still hard to believe this was less than a month ago but here we go!

I didn't want to do traveling so we were going to have a little stay-cation. Sam had an easy week because the doctors he was going to be working with went out of town so his schedule was nice and light. On Monday he got out early and we went to the Aquarium. This aquarium is something else. We went here when we first came to San Antonio looking for a place to live. This aquarium also became famous when someone legit stole a shark. This aquarium has changed up a lot since I came here last, creating a lot of human/animal interactions in a cool way. Want to hold a lemur? Feed an alligator? Pet a shark? Wade where fish swim? It was really awesome. Prepare for a picture dump here.

Lemurs cuddling. How. Flipping. Cute.

,

 An arcade inside an aquarium. This is new too.

We found Nemo.

Petting Sting Rays.

Fresh water fish.

Despite what it looks like, he was the opposite of crabby this day.

Hanging out with a caiman

Wading and petting koi

With my limited chicken knowledge I believe these are silkies

Look how close we can get to this Heron!

 Petting Zoo outside!

This ostrich was mean (no surprise) I remember nipping Eli

 Petting (bamboo) sharks!

It was interesting how little supervision there was for how many animal stations there were.

 No wonder a shark got stolen!

Shark breeding- Mermaid's purses!

Great experience overall 👍

It was a booming business with lots of people over there, but I heard it got in trouble recently  for being open after non-essential businesses were to be closed during the quarantine. Whoops!

The rest of the week was a lot lower key, and this was the week that where everything was changing fast. So here are some of the other things we did this week before self-quarantining was required!

Tuesday we planted a garden: Zucchini, Yellow Squash, Tomatoes, Bell Pepper, Spinach, Lettuce, Green Onions and various herbs. I forgot to take a picture, but really it was still all dirt this day 😝
Instead, here is a picture of Eli when I told him to go get dressed. Such a silly kid!

Wednesday Eli had speech, so I loaded all the kids and we headed to the speech therapy office. Then we revisited the Petco we bought our frogs because I was curious to see if they still had any left. They had one yellow one left and then had a green and blue one too!

Back in December I bought a couple Cheesecake Factory gift cards that came with free cheesecake coupons. Those were expiring soon so we headed to the mall to eat some cheesecake and wander around. This was very brave of us because a person who recently tested positive for Covid-19 was at the mall beforehand. They shut it down and disinfected everything so I felt it was okay. Here's a picture of us at H&M!

Thursday I ministered to one of my sisters and we were at a park. This was right before all the shutdowns but that was still all we could talk about. She was planning a trip in April and was hoping not to cancel it. I'm pretty sure it was canceled now!

Then the church announced no meetings indefinitely. That's when everything really hit me! I was really worried because we were planning a temple trip with friends on Friday. The temple was not closing luckily until the next week so it was a true miracle. It was one of the best days I ever had in San Antonio. Sam's residency has five out of seventeen that are members of the church. One of Sam's friends really wanted to go to the temple together and we planned this in advance. We ate at a sushi place and then went to a session at the temple. With a lot of confusion, fear, and uncertainty, it was amazing to be at the temple and feel our Heavenly Father's love and peace. Tears were shed and prayers were answered. These are some awesome people and hope I get to see them again!

Before the session

After the session!

The Dr. Wives

BFF's!

A YW in the ward watched our kids for us and it was the perfect ending to our scheduled spring break. I'm a little sad that we didn't know what would end up happening, otherwise we would have said a better good-bye to friends and teachers. It's very possible Joey might not be at school for the rest of the year! I'm glad we got to do these things before everything shut down, even the temple 😥

Hope everyone is staying safe!