Sometime last month we got so focused on NaNoWriMo that I stopped posting here. And this month it’s been a struggle to get back into the school routine with all the Christmas excitement going on. Binky, our elf on the shelf, is back, and shopping is a whole different hassle this year (we are not going to any malls or even most stores – we’re in a red zone now), and my work is busy, and I’m trying so hard to get some school work done with Steven before his chosen Christmas Break starts December 21. I might do a couple more short posts for Yule and Christmas but I mostly won’t be posting until the new year.
This Wednesday was Steven’s 11th birthday. Luckily he doesn’t mind not being able to have a party this year. Last year, knowing that parties aren’t his favourite thing, we suggested doing something else. Maybe a shopping trip or just taking a couple of good friends somewhere. He chose to spend a whole weekend shopping, eating out, playing board games and video games… He now refers to his birthday as his “reign of terror” because as long as we don’t go over budget, he can do and make us do whatever he wants. This year I apologized that we couldn’t take him and his friends out somewhere and he said he’d rather have a “family time birthday” anyways. Apparently, until last year, he thought birthday parties were some kind of unavoidable social obligation.
Luckily, Doug Ford declared the Easter Bunny an essential service earlier this month. Steven is hoping he’ll do the same for Santa in December. I’m hoping he won’t have to. But the way this thing is going, he might.
I was hoping for an outdoor egg hunt this year, but there’s a huge storm on the way. We had snow on Good Friday and now a storm Easter Sunday and Monday. People are saying it’s Mother Nature’s way of saying “stay indoors”. Hopefully people are.
Regardless, Steven had fun finding all the treats the Easter Bunny had left for him. He even found some kinder eggs in the egg carton in the fridge and a chocolate rabbit in the bread box.
There was also this huge “smashers” egg left out on the table that had a whole bunch of messy activities in it, through which he found a bunch of bones to build a dinosaur skeleton toy.
And he got a big Miraculous Ladybug Kinder Surprise egg. Steven and I love that show, we watch it together whenever there are new episodes. We had already collected all the toys from the little kinder eggs over the past year or so, but never found the larger ones in the store. He requested I ask his aunt to find more if she can, “because if the Easter Bunny found them maybe they’re in stock now”.
We’re going to have another video chat family dinner tonight. This time we’ll use Steven’s laptop. Hopefully, it will work better than the tablet. And Steven requested peanut butter pasta tonight, so that’s what I’ll be making. Not a traditional Easter dinner, but that’s alright. It will be nice to see everyone at least.
This blogging thing might become weekly. Or whenever I feel like it. Work is exhausting, even at home. But it’s nice to see my family on my breaks.
Steven did most of the rest of the social studies unit we had started on Wednesday. I think he’s trying to finish it so he can have Wednesdays off. It’s not a bad idea to have a day off in the middle of the week, really. He did the math work from school yesterday and today. He could have finished it in a day, but apparently he thought he needed to do it in order, and one of the tasks said “talk to someone about math”, so instead of talking to one of us about it he went “my friends aren’t online, so I can’t talk to them about math, guess I better quit and play Roblox”. Hopefully that won’t happen next week.
After finishing the math today, we watched the video that had been assigned for Music (“Beethoven lives upstairs”) while decorating paper Easter eggs to put up in the windows. There was a post on a local Facebook group about putting up eggs so kids walking with their parents can still do an “egg hunt” this weekend even though all the usual ones at the parks and such are cancelled.
Now we’re working on finishing up our birds we started a few weeks ago. I don’t think they’ll be done today, we’ve had some technical difficulties. The model magic can be painted pretty easily, but it’s a little fragile. So Steven’s bird lost a wing and we’re waiting for the glue to dry.
Hope everyone has a fun and safe Easter weekend! ~Lauren
