Keeping Busy Staying at Home

We’ve almost come to the end of three weeks since Washington state’s governor ordered all schools to shut down and do school online because of the coronavirus.  I have four teens who came home with that order and while it took us a bit to get readjusted to them all being home, some had been away at college, we are doing pretty well with this extra time on our hands.

I’ve seen some complaints on social media from folks who aren’t used to this slower paced life and I thought I’d share a few of the things that we are doing to make life more bearable for even social teens.  Admittedly, we may have had a head start on getting adjusted to this since we have spent many a year in the homeschooling realm already, but even this mom of six had kind of gotten used to a little more peace and quiet and had some attitude adjusting to do.

One of the things we are doing is pursuing some of our former interests such as gardening, crocheting and reading.  At the beginning of this quarantine I had scary visions of four teens sitting around the living room glued to their phones and having giant sized attitudes.  I decided right away to curb that by having them all figure out a daily schedule for themselves.  I had them include time for outdoor exercise, time for chores, time for reading and crafting and some time to communicate with friends.  Since we had spring break for the first week and a half of this past three weeks, these schedules proved to be invaluable!

The kids helped each other stick to their schedules by getting their siblings to come outside with them when it was exercise time and recruiting each other to play games or help with projects.  Three of the four teens are now in full swing of online classes, the fourth is done with high school and not currently in college so I have put her into “home culinary school” for the time being and assigned her to help make the families main meal each day which we eat mid day.

This “culinary student” doesn’t have very many hobbies and is extremely social so she is the one I most worry about sitting around bored and having a bad attitude but this plan is helping a lot!  She is happy to be learning something she’ll need for independence in life and feels good about herself when she accomplishes the job well.

One of the teens is a 19 year old boy who was going to college and working construction.  Providentially, I believe, he purchased an old camp trailer from a friend right before this stay at home time, and now he has a project to work on when he has spare time.  He is remodeling it and hoping to make it into a small air b n b.

Mama’s attitude needs to be dealt with from time to time too, I must admit.  For my alone time I have been writing, reading, videoing and gardening.  Today I photographed some of the blossoms in my yard.  I came across apricot and peach trees in bloom, tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, dandelions, hen and chicks, johnny jump ups and more.  These never fail to make me happy!

Last week I brought a large pot of soil into the house because our weather has been quite temperamental lately and I wasn’t able to go out and work in the yard.  I planted radishes and chard in the pot.  The radishes are because they always sprout up quickly and though they aren’t our favorite food they will add to our salads.  The chard because I didn’t have any lettuce seeds right now and wanted to plant some salad greens.  I plan to pick up or order more seeds soon so that I can get the rest of the garden started whether indoors in pots or outdoors depending on the needs of the plants.

I’m planning to check in here a little more often than I have in the past since I have more time.  Here’s hoping you all are finding things to do that will enrich your lives as you stay at home during these unprecedented times and may God bless you and keep you and yours healthy and strong.

Quarantined!! and Gratefulness!!

Wow!  Our little farm is in Washington state and we are one of the states that is completely quarantined after today!  Oh, we do have access if needed to medical care and groceries but the schools, restaurants and coffee shops (take out permitted), salons, and all “non-essential” businesses are closed per order of the governor.  From what I read today, even a sleepover among the children is forbidden and punishable by law!  This coronavirus has taken the world by storm and we all have to cooperate to put it under wraps.

Here on the farm, we are not strangers to home schooling or staying home days in a row, but even so, the four children that are living at home right now, three of which are college age and one high school age, are having a few early withdrawals from their friends.  As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I home schooled our first three children through elementary school and part of the way through high school.  I also home schooled one of our adopted girls for one year.  I never in my wildest imaginations expected to be home schooling college however!

We have been making lists of things that need to be done around here and the younguns are making themselves schedules so that they remember the things they should be doing and don’t spend all of their time on their phones talking to their friends.  One of the things we are definitely going to do a bit more of  this year is gardening!  We’ve also set up a puzzle and game table, we have a library full of books and we plan to teach some extra cooking, baking and crafting.  We will likely be doing some of this on videos as well and putting them on Youtube.

This all brings my thoughts around to gratefulness.  Even though our income, like many others right now, seems to have come to a halt, we have health, food, clothing, shelter and activities to keep us busy.  It is a beautiful time of year to get outside right now as well so that adds to our activities!

One of the blessings that I am most excited about right now is our apricot trees!  Here where we live, a few miles out of town and a little higher in elevation, our apricot trees bloom just a little later than our friends trees in town.  The consequence is that almost every year, their trees freeze while they are blooming and they don’t get any fruit from their trees while ours usually just miss the freeze and produce bumper corps which of course, we share.

Last year however, we ended up having an unexpected snow storm in February that covered us with ten inches of snow that lingered until half way through March.  That was enough to keep us from having apricots as well.  When our trees started blooming this year and were in full bloom as the weather report called for low temps, we began praying for a miracle. Sure enough, overnight we got a couple of inches of snow and then over the next week temperatures dropped every night to as low as 24 degrees and didn’t raise above 32 degrees during the day.  We kept praying!

Why we are surprised when God answers our prayers I’m not sure, but surprise, excitement and gratitude are our current emotions as we look at those trees.  Along side the old browning blossoms these trees are putting on a whole new batch of blossoms!  I’ve never seen this happen before!  I’ve been around apricot trees most of my life since my grandmother had an apricot orchard and we lived near by when I was growing up.  We are hopeful that we will have plenty of apricots to eat, can and share this year!

So, as we are all quarantined and finding ourselves with extra time to spend with family and on things we’ve been putting off for a while, let’s remember to be grateful for what we do have and to take time to let our needs be made know to our Heavenly Father.  He promises to never leave us or forsake us.

God bless!!