19 April 2020

April 12-19

Christ is Risen!

One thing this pandemic is good for... My blog is being written more frequently again. I'd have preferred to reach that goal without the fuss of mass destruction and death, but c'est la vis. I'll take what I can get right now.

Virus confusion is rampant over here. If we can't do anything, it's because of the virus (mostly true). Matthias thinks we should solve this by running very fast to our car and then driving to wherever he wants to go. Once we get there, we can again use our super speed to evade those laughably slow viruses. Kaitlyn knows this won't work, because everywhere we go there is a man (The Virus? Mr Corona Virus?) who will breathe on us and we will get sick.

Matthias is preparing for a life of crime. Last Saturday he began his efforts by burning off a couple of fingerprints. Bryan had just made popcorn and Matthias, being his nosy self, stuck his hands up on the stove to try to get some popcorn. Alas, he got a handful of recently turned off burner instead. He blistered two fingertips on his right hand. He's never been burned badly before; usually he grazes a pan that's been out of the oven for a few minutes, puts an ice pack on the sore spot for approximately 40 seconds, and is good to go. This time he couldn't understand why the ice pack wasn't working. "It still hurts! I need you to kiss it." I kissed it, and he looked at me with betrayal written on his teary face. "It still hurts!" And so begins the realization that mom's kisses don't actually fix everything. He suffered noisily through application of aloe and bandaids and more ice. He did eventually calm down and we let him stay up to watch a movie while the pain receded enough for him to sleep. By Sunday morning he was very focused on making sure he got PJ Masks bandaids, so we proclaimed him cured enough.

Update on Matthias's criminal preparations: This week he went into the bathroom, got some shampoo, and rubbed it in his eye. He immediately regretted his decision and tried to rub it out of his eye -- with his shampoo covered hand. Now retinal scans can't catch him, either.

Other Matthias things:
~He likes to wear his sisters' shoes. Those are the ones he can get on himself. He will choose boots over shoes, so he often clomps around in boots three sizes too big.
~He covers his eyes if he doesn't want you to look at him and his ears if something is too loud or jarring. If he is scared, he will try to cover both his eyes and his ears, which results in him successfully covering one of each and hugging his head with his elbows.

The girls have found a series they enjoy on Netflix (which we don't have, but they watch at Grandma's) called Miraculous. It's about normal teenagers who can turn into superheros with the help of ...little creatures called miraculas? Maybe? I'm unsure about the actual mechanics. There's one main bad guy who uses evil moths to turn regular people having a bad day into mini villains bent on wreaking havoc and stealing the miraculas. Once the superheros defeat the villains, they catch the moths and de-evilize them. Or something. Anyway, the girls (and Matthias sometimes) like to play games based on this show and they leap around on the furniture being the multiple characters and their alter egos. The interesting part is that they've started making up their own mini villains to defeat. Each one has a backstory for how he became susceptible to main bad guy's moths. Then they give him a name, a havoc wreaking purpose, and a costume. It's quite interesting to listen to.

Our fruit trees have blossoms! The apricot blossomed, but then snow came and it dropped them all. Please don't be dead, apricot tree. :( Three plums and the peach tree weathered the storm and are still flowering. The pears (presumably three) are still working on flowers. This could be a very tasty summer. :)

Theodore has three top teeth to go with his two bottom teeth, and I think I see the beginnings of a fourth top tooth and a third bottom tooth. If you're going to grow teeth, you might as well do them all at the same time. With both top and bottom teeth has come the teeth clicking. All of our kids didn't do this, but I remember at least Olivia having the habit of rubbing her teeth against each other to make a little clicking noise. Theodore does that as well. I think it's more of a tactile thing than a noise thing, but it is annoying regardless.

Lent is a good time for trying new foods. Theodore has tried pea soup, corn chowder, and the beans from Dominican beans and rice. They're basically flavorful refried beans. This is in addition to the beets and red cabbage that he'd already had. Oh, and the banana that he stole from me once. He now consistently swallowing his food instead of letting it dribble back out of his mouth. He also sucks on bread crumbs until they become nothing in his mouth. Theodore is of Gretchen's opinion about food: All of it is delicious and I need more now.

Other Theodore things:
~He's working on the closed mouth g sound (why do they all try that one?) as well as on buh. We hear a lot of buh in various registers.
~He tried to catch a sunbeam during church. More accurately, he tried to eat it when he saw it on the floor.
~He really wants to be able to crawl, but can't figure it out. He has learned how to get where he wants by rolling.
~He's not a strong sitter. I mostly put him down on his stomach, so he hasn't had much chance to practice.

I pulled out my high school art things to show Gretchen the other day. She was very happy to see the sketches especially. Unfortunately, I had to throw everything out after showing her because it all got wet at some point and there was mildew on everything. Many of the papers were still damp, I assume because they were stored stacked together in the portfolio. All my favorite pieces are framed and displayed around the house, and the few that weren't were salvageable because they were laminated. I was sad for the demise of my sketchbooks, though.

Head scarves have really taken off around here since we've been having church at home. The girls found my whole collection and enjoy picking out scarves to wear. Olivia favors the green one from Russia which she wraps loosely so that it can "look like a hijab." She read a picture book that explained what hijabs were and she thinks they're pretty. We've explained the religious implications and she doesn't care, as long as it looks like the picture in her book. Gretchen likes to get my dark red scarf and wrap it so that she looks like Mary. She is disappointed that it's not bigger because all of our icons of Mary have the red extending down almost to her waist. Kaitlyn usually tries to find the softest scarf and then wears it like a cloak. Matthias is jealous of everyone else's head gear and claims the brown scarf for his own. He looks quite beautiful in it.

We've let bedtime get away from us. Because there's no reason to get up early in the morning and because we're often playing games via video chat, we don't go in as often to settle things down and the girls don't wind down naturally on their own as quickly. Once we quiet them down they do alright, but both Olivia and Gretchen have been known to stay up reading way too late and then they sleep in the next morning.

The big girls are at the age where they spell a lot of things unnecessarily. The two most spelled things in our house are d-e-s-s-e-r-t and p-o-k-e-m-o-n. I'm not even sure they know how to ask for them without spelling anymore.

Pictures:
A test Olivia did from back when there was still school. Every fill in the blank question was answered like this. Bryan was so proud that he hung it up in his office.

All our ring crayons:

Bryan and Gretchen made peanut butter crackles. We didn't have any kisses, though, so they made them tiny and used chocolate chips:


Brothers playing together, a progression:



Theo and mom:

Some of Gretchen's artwork. She's drawing pictures from the Dogman books:



Matthias's burned fingers:

Artwork for school:



Pictures for Grandma:



Theodore eats an F:


I told Matthias to bring me five books:

Matthias, mom, Gretchen:

We stripped our table on Maundy Thursday. The dark picture is Good Friday.

Matthias wanted me to take a picture of him bowing:

The kids haven't been in the car since March 15th. Yesterday we went to wave and sing to Gretchen's friend for her birthday. I was planning to just take Gretchen, but everyone else wanted to come, too.

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