September 2020

 In September, the littles were cute and loved each other.

Also in September, Tiny bit Wrenzy on the back, and it was horrifying.

From the kitchen, the girls and I spotted a dead rodent under our outside table. I was calling it a rat, but Jim later said he thought it was a gopher. Wrenzy wrote and illustrated a story about it. The pencil is hard to see in these pictures, but it says, "One day there was a rat under our table outside. I saw it. It was outside my window. This is how big he was. I wrote it when I was five. It was brown." 

Tiny, the nearly naked wilderness child:

It ticked me when I looked out the window to see Tiny, dressed as Cinderella, on the fence. Except then I had to tell the girls that I don't like them climbing that fence. 

Leela and Ever did a Zoom cooking class for Girl Scouts. They made homemade pasta and sauce and chocolate-covered strawberries. It was really stressful and hard for me to help them both with the pasta and try to keep up, and the pasta totally did not work. It wouldn't cook. I don't know what we did wrong, but we couldn't make it not raw. The chocolate-covered strawberries were more of a success. 

Wrenzy started dance at Cadence.

Daddy/daughter dogpile. 

I found this thing that Ever made, and I thought it was hilarious. 

Zoom piano recital.

Tiny started preschool at Meagan Bunnell's Little Bugs (she took it over after Miss Paula moved).

Sweet Tines got all tuckered out from fake reading.

The children love climbing the wall on the other side of Cikaneks' house. If they fell, they would land on concrete. Cikaneks' neighbors on the side finally regulated at some point because it terrifies them. 

Wrenzy is on the far left side of the wall in this pic; Nathan is crawling near the lamp.

The girls went to the beach with Karners (and Oddous, I think).

Trail walking with Rafi and the Cikanek boys. 

Scott and Rebecca printed lots and lots of worksheets and coloring pages for the children, who would spend long periods of time on them. Often I would realize I didn't know where the girls were, and I'd text Rebecca and find out they were over there working.  

Noah and Tiny shared some sweet moments.

Other than what is captured in pictures, I suppose it was homeschool, homeschool, homeschool. The Coastal curriculum was great. The English program (Logic of English) was super intense but amazing. I learned tons from it. Ever was able to go ahead in math. We got permission to do fourth-grade math instead of third-grade math. Most of that was stuff we had already covered, though, so I later discussed with our advisor and decided to do a program called Beast Academy instead. It covers everything on a way deeper level and encourages kids to understand math intuitively rather than to just solve problems mechanically. It was really challenging but fun, for the most part. The flexibility Coastal offered was amazing, and the kids learned so much. They were amazing and motivated students. 

Susan was working three days a week, and we came up with an arrangement wherein I did school with Luc and Amelie at our house a couple days a week, and Susan took the kids another day or two. I don't remember our exact schedule, and I think it changed over the course of the school year. But it ended up being incredibly difficult. Luc made me crazy. He complained about everything. He fidgeted and created nonstop distractions whenever I tried to teach something. He always gave silly answers that he thought were clever. Amelie was hard for me, too (she's really into whining), but Luc was a nightmare. I was super mean, which I always regretted but could not seem to control. It was awful. Later in the year, I started having problems with Ever and told Jim I wondered if it was Luc's influence. He threatened to talk to Susan if I didn't, so I ended up telling Susan that I had to cut back on the togetherness because I thought maybe Ever was acting up to impress Luc or something. It totally screwed Susan over because she was already overloaded with work and homeschool and everything else, and she simply could not be home to do school with them. On days I didn't take them, she was coming home from work and doing school with them at night. I could tell she suspected that I wasn't telling her everything and that it was really her kids' fault, and she was really stressed about how to manage everything. It was such a disaster. She is so good with kids. She's super patient and kind and does fun things with them. I am the exact opposite. I have no patience, am not fun (and don't want to spend extra time coming up with fun things), and expect a lot. I've always known I wasn't a kid person and didn't do well with other people's kids (even worse than I do with my own), and this experience really solidified that. Susan was able to homeschool her kids just fine. Luc is a bright kid and not a troublemaker in a classroom. I just could not do it. Anyway, that happened down the line. In the beginning, I really enjoyed homeschooling my kids.  

August 2020

 I'm so far behind and have almost no memories of these times. My record consists primarily of my random photos and videos. The detailed stories are the few things I wrote down at the time.

Anna and Leela roped us into two more weeks of camp in August. Ever and Leela went to a day camp at the YMCA the week of August 3 through August 7. They opted for the traditional camp over some other specialty ones we told them about. Ever started calling it "trabajar camp" because she couldn't remember "traditional." "Trabajar" means "to work" in Spanish, so it sounded as if we were sending her to a labor camp, which I enjoyed. Anyway, when Ever found out the camp was at the Y, she got a bad attitude and said she didn't want to go, camps at the Y are junk, etc. She was basing that on the fact that she no longer enjoys child watch at the Y. The only camp she's done was a gymnastics camp at a different location a few years ago, and she had a great time. Nonetheless, when August 3 came around, she was a little weepy and said she didn't want to go. I told her to be open-minded. When she came home, she said it was AMAZING, and it should be called "game camp." She had a wonderful week and passionately loved it. Her favorite thing was some game called "gaga ball,"  but she also enjoyed playing dodgeball, search and destroy, and all sorts of other things. She was a little bummed when, toward the end of the week, she hadn't won Camper of the Day. Thursday, her leader didn't award anyone that distinction. Ever said she had to win it Friday since it was the last day. When Anna brought her home Friday afternoon, they were excited to announce that Ever had won Camper of the Day and Camper of the Week! Not only that, but she and Leela had broken the previous camp record for hula hooping. The record had been 41 minutes, but Leela and Ever hula hooped for a whole hour. I don't understand how that's possible, but apparently it is. Ever said Leela dropped her hoop at 59 minutes; Ever had to stop at an hour because they had to move on to something else.

Wrenzy does her own hair sometimes, and I love it. 

Sunday afternoons are for baking. Not infrequently, Jim (who generally avoids the kitchen at all costs) feels the need to make cookies or some other sweet treat on Sundays.

Tiny went out in her nightgown and got completely soaked playing in water at Nathan and Noah's. 

This is what we call "side face."

The littles played with dolls and related items for a really, really long time, and it was lovely.

Wrenzy turned a section of her bed into a fort and peered out menacingly.

Tiny spent a long time reading chapter books, despite not being able to read.

There was a Zoom piano recital.

Afternoon ice cream on a perfect summer's day.

We allowed Ever to go to Ella's birthday party, despite COVID.

Indecent exposure here, but the littles were so cute together in the bath.

Besides the week of camp at the YMCA, Ever and Leela also did a surf camp through the city of Oceanside that consisted of many hours at the beach with very little supervision. They were tiring days, and Ever got crazy blisters on her hands that caused problems. She was really over it before the end, and I don't think there's any desire to do it again. Anna met them on a lunch break one day and took them Italian ice.

In Costco, the littles loved.

I put Wren and Ever in Coastal Academy for the 2020-2021 school year. It's a charter school that supports homeschooling families, with options for kids to attend classes on campus once or twice a week. Palmquist did such a bad job during the 2020 spring shutdown after COVID hit that I didn't want the girls to have that sort of experience and waste a year on Zoom. I figured if we were going to be homeschooling, I wanted to do it through a school that actually has a homeschool curriculum. In August we went to the school to pick up books. The first few months were entirely at home.

Sam and Tess and Rue Hawkins came down, and I was rude enough to ask Scott and Rebecca if we could use their pool. Scott had hung some shade canopies over the pool, set up a couple of ropes, and attached the playset slide to a palm tree to make a waterslide. The pool was fabulously tricked out in a ghetto sort of way.  

Our girls are always really shy with Tess and Rue at first, but Ever, especially, always ends up having fun. She and Tess played around with my camera phone like teenagers. Nobody knows where Ever got the peace sign from, but I blame Tess because I know her mom does it in pictures all the time. 

The Homers did a crazy road trip across the entire country and managed to make it all the way to us. Dustin worked during the day. The girls fawned over Baby Eleanor, and we spent some time in Cikaneks' pool. Ever was crazy blond.

Silliness:

Anson spent some time with the play kitchen. Here it appears Tiny was "reading" to him while he played.

The girls couldn't get enough of Eleanor. They fought over holding her. I believe this was when Tiny's obsession with Baby Eleanor began. She started calling herself "Baby Eleanor," so we called her that, and then we called her Baby Heleanor, and then Baby Helen. We still call her Helen and Baby Helen to this day. 

Wrenzy got tuckered and just passed out on the couch one day.

Again we took our guests in Cikaneks' pool. Anson mostly played with the watering cans by the hot tub. Anytime Scott was in the pool, he had all of the Kringel girls and his own kids (at least Nathan) all over him. It gave him a workout pulling five or six six kids around. 

We went to the beach, and the ocean was unusually freezing. It really ruined things. Mel Karner said she'd been not long before that, and it was warm. We just hit it during some weird cold patch. It was a real bummer because nobody could go in the water.  

Cikaneks let us borrow some of their trucks, and Anson was in heaven. 

We made the recipes for hotcakes and sugar syrup from one of the Little House books. (I think it was one of the Caroline books, not the original Little House series). Enjoyed by all.

Anson tried to follow the girls onto the wall between our house and Cikaneks' and was very upset over his inability to climb it. 

I think it was during this trip that Coco made this comment as we watched the girls outside, barefoot, exploring beyond the fence, climbing everything, etc.: "Your girls are, like, wilderness children." It was my favorite. Now when I see them out there, I think of their being "wilderness children." 

More pool time. We decided that was better than the beach, given the unbearable ocean temperature.

Tiny and Wrenzy helped Anson set up a store on the edge of the hot tub.

Coco and Dun Dun left on Friday, August 21. We jumped into Scott and Rebecca's pool for one last swim in the afternoon. The girls kept swimming after we said goodbye to the Homers. I told Tiny to get out, I think because she was misbehaving. She would not and instead swam defiantly into the middle of the pool where I could not reach her. I told her a number of times to get out. Rebecca egged me on, saying, "You want to jump in, don't you? You've been wanting to jump in. Do it." So I jumped in, fully clothed, to retrieve Tiny. I told her she didn't get to swim anymore that day and couldn't swim the following day. She sat by the pool wrapped in a towel and watched us swim. By "us," I mean not only me, in my clothes, but also Rebecca, who joined me in her clothes in solidarity. It was pretty funny. The following day, Ever and Wren swam at Subrebosts', and Tiny missed out. 

Sweet Bear likes to take pictures and videos. 

Saved this vid to remember her tongue thrust and everything else about her five-year-old self:

Tiny went through a serious orange phase.

Jim left on a surf trip to Mexico super early on Monday, August 24, the day we started home school. 

Despite the informal circumstances, we got our first-day pics.

Third grade Goose:

Kindergarten Bear:

Homeschooling through Coastal was incredibly overwhelming at first. Everything was so confusing. Documents with links and then more links. I couldn't figure out what I needed and what I didn't. As I got used to everything, it got less crazy.

Since Wren was on a "track," under normal circumstances she would have been at school a couple days a week. Because of COVID, she did some Zooming instead. One of her first Zoom sessions, she started yelling for me. I went into the office, and she told me that they were having to say their names, "and I can't say my name." (The "r" sound is really hard for her. People don't understand her when she says her name.) She was so upset, crying; she wanted to get off the Zoom and wouldn't let me help. She was distraught. It was so sad. 

Later Wren was writing on her little whiteboard. Ever came downstairs, saw what she was doing, and said, "Wren can write sentences?" Wren had written, "a man had a cat" in really neat writing, all spelled perfectly (although the first word was not capitalized). It was amazing. Then she continued the story, "that man lavde [loved] hith cat." I realized that she sounded out "his" and got "hith" because of her tongue thrust; the sounds "th" and "s" feel really similar to her. Her story was adorable, but it also made me feel bad because I know she's gotten frustrated and embarrassed by her inability to say certain sounds. I wondered if we needed to look into speech therapy. (The update to this is that in this 2021-2022 school year, I got Bear into a little speech therapy at Scholarship Prep. It was only six sessions, I think. It didn't seem to help, and it was all the school could offer us.)

That first week of school, the girls were really tired but refused to sleep. I worked really hard to get them to bed early (like between 7:15 and 7:45), but then they'd stay up for hours. I believe they keep one another up and would fall asleep much earlier if they were in separate rooms. On August 27, the night Jim was expected home (at 1:00 A.M.), they stayed up forever. Wren and Ever came downstairs about 9:00 because Wren needed to go to the bathroom and Ever wanted to ask me something. They talked to me, wrote super cute notes to Jim, and finally went back upstairs around 9:30. Ever threatened to try to stay up until 1:00 to see Jim, but fortunately she couldn't manage it.

These were the notes the olders left for Jim. Wrenzy's says, "Welcome Home daddy We mad[e] ap [up] a story. Here this is sam [some] av [of] it You glued a chair in top av [of] the train I Love you I hop[e] you had a good tim[e] Love wren." She was some kind of kindergartener. 

Homeschooling. Tiny wanted in on the action, too. 

One night Ever read to the littles. On the bathroom floor. No one knew why.

While I was in the shower, the littles organized our bathroom drawers. It was very unexpected and amazing.