During the beginning of the quarantine, Melody was really missing her grandparents (and friends and anyone that wasn’t Brad or me, ha!). So I decided to make a coloring sheet that she could send to our parents. I hoped she would make it more colorful, but purple is her favorite color! And she decided to make the hearts faces, haha.
I decided to make a color mixing sheet using Microsoft Word to show Melody what colors make when mixed together. This is actually a really fun and semi-mess free “craft”. We have mixed colors beyond the primary colors too. When we do this craft, I let her go through all of my paint and pick all the colors she wants to mix together. We then use q-tips to do the mixing which makes this a pretty clean activity even while using paint!
So we are very, very close to what would have been the end of our school year. Preschool always ended a week or so earlier than the city schools. It is really bittersweet to be here, but that is where we are. Ironically Melody wore the same apple dress (as more of a shirt/tunic on Friday), that she wore a year ago. Next week we tackle new learning tools too! Below you can find pictures from our week this week!
So being told you have to stay home for the foreseeable future and you can’t see anyone else is hard. So to say we have had fun may come as a surprise. We do really, really miss our family and friends, BUT we have enjoyed the slowness and time together. Melody is a fun age where we don’t have to take things too seriously if we don’t want too, but she does thrive on schedule. So we have tried to maintain a schedule while having lots of fun too! And we are getting to FaceTime our family and friends which helps! Below are some of the pictures from our quarantine time in March and April!
I am constantly searching for the perfect pancake recipe, and I have yet to find it. But this one is pretty close. It is far from healthy, but it is quite yummy!
One of Brad’s Christmas presents last year was a 3D printer. He has found lots of things to print, and I wanted to try and find something he could print as decor in our newly made over playroom/craft room. I searched and searched, but I could not find anything I loved. That is when we decided to just put letters on the wall and work with that. Brad came up with the letters himself, and we decided to spell out “CREATE” above my craft table since I do a lot of creating there.
So with all of our vacations being cancelled for the near future to Disney World, we now have much longer countdowns to make. This is a really easy countdown and can be adjusted for any length of time really. However, the shorter the better when it comes to coming up with ideas to put on each stick.
Since we haven’t been able to see our parents in person, we thought it would be nice to mail them a happy from Melody. This only required a little bit of paint, and it was a fairly quick craft!
So in the COVID-19 world, Alabama was released from our “stay at home orders” and now we are under “safer at home orders again”. Basically non-essential stores may open at lower capacities, but that does not include salons, massage parlors, etc. There are some other rules and changes, and you can find those online if you are truly interested. That all began on Friday, May 1. We don’t really plan to change much, if any, of our routine until we see how these next two weeks pan out.
One of the things we added to our playroom when we did a makeover to it last month was a dress-up storage solution. Melody just recently started getting into dressing up, but that is even still not super often. But she does have a few dresses from Halloween, last year’s dance recital, and a few gifts. So I wanted a better place to store them than on the back of a door. She also has lots of accessories like jewelry, wands, tutus, etc. So we needed room for that too. My best friend, Emily, recently came up with storage for her daughters dress up, and I decided to copy it! All you need a 9 cube storage system, a tension rod, and storage bins to fit the cubes if you want. Follow along below for the changes I made to the instructions.
So to start, I have used a purple crayon to show you what you do NOT want to install. Follow all the steps in the instruction manual unless noted below.
As you can likely tell from the pictures, we made this recipe a LONG time ago, but we were making it frequently. And I simply forgot to post about it! We haven’t made this in a while simply because it is a bit time consuming, but as I write this, I am starting to think maybe we should give it a go soon during this quarantine!
So this year we obviously have a lot more time at home to do and prepare for things. One thing we do a LOT of are crafts (in case all of my posts these days doesn’t give that away). Well I wanted to do something fun for our mom’s (and myself) for Mother’s Day this year. So I decided to make us all bookmarks! You don’t have to do everything I do for this; I just happen to have a lot of craft supplies, ha!
One of my favorites spots that we had dinner while in Pensacola in February was Crabs on the Beach. It was literally right next door to our hotel so we walked over (perfect when you have been in the car over 5 hours with a 3 year old!). It late and dark, but I saw a sign for a play area but we didn't get to see it. But I am sure that is great during the busier times when you are waiting to be seated. The atmosphere was nice and they offered both inside and outside seating which is great.
We did this craft before Easter, but I think it also can be a craft you can do anytime. It is another unique craft in that you don’t use a paint brush. And if your kid is a little older, they should be able to do it all without little help!
This week has been a really good week as far as school goes. Melody has actively participated, and we were also able to repurpose my old computer so that Melody can watch her videos on that without using mine. We accomplished a lot of crafts including some for Mother’s Day and a few “miss you” ones too. We took a break from dance on Thursday. I think Melody may be getting burned out doing it twice a week. So we may back down to the usual once a week and see if that helps her eagerness. Daddy was teacher one morning while I had a checkup at my doctor. We also had to rearrange things on Friday because we had to make an urgent trip to the local urgent care for Brad. A few stitches later and he is good. And we were able to finish the day up!
The playroom/bonus room/craft room has always been a difficult room for me. When we bought this house, we loved the size of this room. It offered us a space that both Melody and I could easily share between her toys and all of my crafting supplies. It even has a nice big closet with shelving installed. Well once we finally moved in and got everything up there, I realized we have a LOT of toys and we are lacking in the organization department when it comes to all of these toys. Christmas did not help this either! We did try to spread the toys between her bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, and the playroom. However, we found that doing this some rooms just were left out during playtime. So now she doesn’t have any toys in the kitchen (she has a cabinet with arts and crafts for downstairs), and we have reduced the number of toys in the living room and her bedroom. So now we have a majority of the toys upstairs in the playroom. But this has caused even more organizational issues.
Melody’s obsession during this quarantine has been bubbles. And while we found a bubble machine through grocery pickup early on, we have been having trouble finding bubble solution. I mean we can find small bottles, but every time I order bubbles through grocery pickup, they are out of stock. Well we opted to figure out a way to make our own! We tried two recipes, and both have their pros and cons.
One of the new dishes I wanted to make for Easter was a corn casserole. I love corn, but I wanted something a bit fancier for Easter. It turned out delicious and was really easy to make.
So one of this issues during the current pandemic is food access and remaining safe. We have always kept a stocked pantry and freezer, but now we don’t have the luxury to just pop in and out of the store if we think we need something. So one of the things I did was go back through our freezer and get a good count of every single thing we have. This would make grocery planning easier and keep us in the know of exactly what we have at all times.
This week I am keeping it simple. We did school; we learned; we danced; we played; we crafted; we are still exhausted, ha! A few new things this week happened though. Melody did start riding her tricycle on her own for long stints. We did take a really long nap after this long, exhausting week.
