Jaker's Pumpkin Patch 🎃

One of our favorite Halloween/fall traditions is going to Jaker's pumpkin patch! 🎃 The kids love playing in the corn pit, seeing the animals, and running through the corn maze. I especially love the hay ride and Art City donuts 😍😋 We had such a fun time!

Cutest little pumpkin 🎃 

Burying Malea in the corn pit 

They could play on this slide for hours! They kept filling up their shirts with corn and then letting it go at the top of the slide (we found corn ever-y-where when we got home haha)

We made it through the corn maze!! 

Isaac turns 10! (and other cool things going on in his world)

Isaac just turned 10 about a month ago, I can't believe how fast time has passed! He has been wanting a gizmo watch for years, so it was pretty fun to surprise him with that (and I love being able to get ahold of him when he is out playing in the neighborhood!). He also got to have a super fun birthday party at Classic Skating.

 He is in 4th grade this year and still doing Chinese Immersion. It was really hard for him when 3rd grade ended so weirdly with the pandemic, especially because his 3rd grade English teacher was his favorite teacher so far. I am really proud of him for getting through something really hard and being resilient. Having to wear masks at school this year has probably been the hardest for him out of all my kids. We bought him a couple of different gaiters, which I think he likes better.

He is such a big help with Brooklyn!! He is so cute with her and it absolutely melts my heart!

(Sharing his popsicle with her)

He just finished up another soccer season where he rocked it, especially at goalie. I absolutely love watching him play! I hope he will go on to play for years to come. 

His team this year, "The Legends"

Took this pic of him on the day he made a goal! I  am so sad I wasn't at his game when he did it 😭 (Keith and I take turns going to his games and the other stays home with Brooklyn, she is so hard at things like that and we would end up spending the whole time chasing her around).

His favorite things to do are soccer, riding his bike, playing with friends, playing video games, and making videos for his YouTube channel (a project we started just for fun during quarantine). He always says that its his dream to be a youtuber someday. He is very in to Legend of Zelda and even has a Link costume that he dresses up in often to just play pretend. It makes me sad to think that he probably won't dress up and play pretend for much longer 😭 

Claire is rocking Kindergarten!!

Claire is rocking kindergarten!!! 🍎✏📚 She loves it so much and is always so excited to go each day. Her teacher is darling and does so many cute and fun things with the class. 

First day of kindergarten! I just love her style ❤

Claire with her teacher, Mrs. Dean (this was taken at the open house a couple of days before school started)

Because of covid the parents aren't allowed to go in the classroom much (this absolutely ripped my heart out on the first day of school 😭 I knew it was going to be that way and yet when it came down to it I took it harder than I thought I would). Thankfully her sweet teacher took tons of pictures of the kids on the first day and sent them to the parents! (Including this one of Claire sitting at her desk on the first day). She is awesome. 

P.S. its still so weird to me to see the kids with masks on 😔

This was the day she got to do show & tell. It was so funny because out of all the things in the world she could take for show & tell, she chose to take these dead snail shells that she found. 🐌 She was 100% set on taking these. It was so cute & funny!

Today Claire was so excited that she got to take the Mystery Bag to class! She couldn't wait until it was her turn! She got the letter "P" so we found items around the house that start with the letter "P" and put them in the bag, and we took a treat for the class ("purple princess" fruit snacks) 😁💜

Just cuz they are both so cute. I went to take this picture before school one day and Brooklyn wanted to get in the picture with her 👭💕

I can already tell she is learning lots (which is seriously amazing considering how short kindergarten is, and its even shorter right now because of the early out every day schedule due to covid!). I can't wait to see how much she grows this year!! 

2020 - The year we lived through a global pandemic

2020 has been a heck of a ride. We started out the year moving in to our new house, which was so awesome. We were just starting to get settled in and looking forward to spring when the 💩 hit the fan! At the beginning of March, Malea, Brooklyn and I went on a trip to Arizona to visit my friend Jill. That was the last time we got to travel for months (its September and we still haven't traveled much, or even left the state). We had heard about coronavirus on the news (or covid-19), mostly affecting China. We never dreamed that it would affect us here. As time went on, we started getting more and more worried, eventually finding out that it had spread to the US. We saw footage of over run hospitals in China, lots of people dying, and we were terrified. Suddenly you would go to the store and you wouldn't be able to find essential items like toilet paper. People were going crazy, over buying food storage to the point where the shelves were bare. You couldn't find canned foods or flour. It was insane! Then on Friday March 13th, my kids left school for the day, having no idea at the time that they wouldn't get to go back for the rest of the school year. We were told that it would only be for 2 weeks. Then it got extended to May 1st. Then, they finally came out and said that the kids would not be going back for the remainder of the school year. That was a pretty tough conversation to have with them.

All colleges sent their students home and went online. Non-essential businesses were forced to close, and people were told that if it was possible to work from home, they had to do it (this included Keith). Church was switched to at-home only, temples closed, and Missionaries were sent home from their missions. You weren't allowed to go in a restaurant, only drive thru or curbside. Weddings were cancelled, funerals had to be limited to family. We were told that we had to go in to quarantine, where we weren't allowed to spend time with anyone outside of our house hold, in order to "flatten the curve". Eventually all play grounds were closed. Everything on the news was scary. 

First day of "at-home school" aka remote learning

Pics of the kids after we started remote learning (it was rough....there were lots of tears and frustrations, missing friends and normalcy, etc)

Isaac on a Zoom meeting with Mrs. Taylor, his 3rd grade English teacher. She was his favorite teacher and he was so sad he didn't get to finish the school year in person with her. 

Malea had an assignment to make a slide show about something, so she chose gardening and shared her presentation with the family 

Keith starting work from home (which he is still doing 6 months later, and probably will until at least 2021). There are times it has been a blessing, and times it has been hard (like when the kids are loud 😬)

All public playgrounds were taped off 

Then! To make matters worse, Utah had an earthquake on March 18th. That was crazy! It was already a scary, uncertain time, and then the earthquake just made it feel that much more scary. We felt it a little bit down here in Springville, but it was a lot worse up in the Salt Lake area. The stores were already having a hard time keeping up with the demand, and the earthquake made it 10x worse. 

Malea made everyone in the family a mask 🥰

It was one of the hardest times of my life. I think I cried every day for weeks. Everything was so weird and uncertain. Every fun activity and event was cancelled. Malea was just wrapping up her last year of elementary school, and all the "lasts" she would normally get to experience were cancelled. I cried about this daily for months and even still tear up about when I think about it too much. Claire was wrapping up her last year of pre-k. Isaac had lots of things to look forward to at the end of 3rd grade. All cancelled. I felt like I was taking on the emotions of all my kids and their disappointments and fears. I know things weren't as bad for us as they were for some people, but it was still really hard. A couple of weeks into quarantine we found out Keith had to take a 20% pay cut for 6 months. Some people got laid off, so we were grateful he had a job at all, but it was still a huge blow, especially after just building a new house. We had lots of plans and things we wanted to do for our yard and house that had to be put on hold. At the time all the play grounds were closed, and we had no grass at all. So despite money being tight, we got some grass put in our backyard, just so the kids had somewhere to play!

LOTS of tears were shed during this time 😔

A picture from when I cleaned out Malea's backpack recently. It felt like it was frozen in time. Her incomplete March reading calendar, the script from the play "Peter Pan" that she was supposed to be in, a flyer for the book fair that was supposed to happen the week after school was cancelled, her permission slip for the track meet. All cancelled 😭💔

Thankfully, around the end of May, Utah was able to switch to yellow phase, which meant that things could open back up slowly (with precautions). This meant we were able to have a somewhat normal summer. I feel fortunate that this was the case, because things are still pretty strict in a lot of other states. 

Signs like this are everywhere, although now instead of "requested" they say "required". You can't go in to most major stores without one (i.e. Walmart, Smiths, Target, etc).

During quarantine we went on lots of walks and bike rides. We were lucky to have bikes, because during this time it was actually hard to even find bikes or scooters at the store!

Working on the backyard 

We didn't have grass yet, so we spent lots of time outside playing in our driveway.

Claire colored.....A LOT!!!

Lots of movie nights! These two also had sleepovers on the couches, which was kind of fun and different 

The library was closed, but you could order books online and go pick them up.

Mostly I wanted to do this post for memory's sake. But also as a reminder that we got through, and are still going through, something really hard. We have really had to band together as a family. There were weeks where the kids had to spend lots of time together, and were each other's friends. We played lots of board games together, went on bike rides, did movie nights and made forts, and explored our new neighborhood. We landscaped our backyard and Malea started a garden. It wasn't always easy, but I'm glad they had each other. It really put into perspective what is most important. It was also a good reminder to be prepared with our food storage and emergency kits, especially after earthquake.

Now it is September, and in Utah things are a little better but still uncertain. Thankfully, the kids were able to go back to school in person (HALLELUJAH), at least for now. They do have to wear masks, which is really hard and heartbreaking (I cried a lot of tears over that announcement too, and it took me weeks to come to terms with it), but we are glad they are able to go at all (a lot of states are still doing remote learning). Our numbers were really low for a while, and now they are spiking some. I'm really worried about them closing schools again. With cold and flu season coming, I really worry about what is to come. But I am just trying to take things day by day. 

First day of school, covid style 🤷‍♀️

2020 still isn't over, and we have had even more craziness outside of the pandemic, like an upcoming election and all that entails, the black lives matter movement and protests, etc. Lots of memes and jokes on social media talk about how we all can't wait for this year to be over, and hopefully things will go back to normal soon (although, I don't think a lot of things will be "normal" again for years). There are lots of things I could go in to, about how this pandemic was handled, how political it has gotten, whether or not we should have to be this strict about everything, how mental health is suffering nationwide and the economy is being affected, etc. Its a very complex issue. But I'll just say that  I have good days and bad days, and mostly just miss my pre-covid life. This experience will be a good lesson in enduring through trials and trying to make the best of hard situations. We have lived through a historical event that I hope we never have to experience again!