Quarantine Day 17: Basement Cleanup & Virtual Family Gaming

Another home day in quarantine. Today again, we let the kids get up and watch tv until we got up. We had a bit of a lazy morning. But once we got up and ate breakfast we FaceTimed with Nana and Baba to check in with them and Uncle Dave and Alex to check in with them. After that we went down the basement to try to set up our old TV in the exercise area of the basement. As this week looks like rain all week, it might be nice to 'walk' or 'bike' in the basement and put on something on tv, like a warm sunny walk down a road or something! We moved The tv out of the 'storage' area - basically the corner of the basement, into the 'exercise area.' We only have 2 outlets in the basement and they are all used to the max. Lots of daisy chaining of extension chords! Once we figured out how we could get power to the tv, JP started working on seeing if the TV even worked and I started cleaning up the basement. The kids on the other hand were perfectly fine swinging on the swings and playing on the ninja line while we figure this all out.

It turned out that the bulb for the tv was completely smashed. So JP ordered a new one that should be here in a few days and then we'll continue to set that area up. I vacuumed the basement and cleaned up the 'main room' so the kids had a nice play area. We swapped out some of the swings on the swing set and put in two trapezes so the kids could monkey around on these for 'recess' this week. We moved some of the furniture around too. JP hung up the circle swing in the middle of the basement again. The kids played with the new set up in the basement for quite a bit. Naomi on the swing pretending that she was on the flying horses trying to get the rings from JP - which were scrunchies. And Juliet and I played hide and seek. Now that the space is all organized and open and clean we can have gymnastics lessons and we can have indoor recess this week due to the rain and get our wiggles out!

After cleaning we had lunch and while eating everyone worked quietly. The girls read the batman comic books we have with Spanish words, JP read stuff on his phone and I added color to my field notebook from our Blue Planet expedition. Once the kids were done with lunch and their books, Naomi played JP in dominion and Juliet and I worked on sentence structures with a game we have. She made some funny sentences. Mostly using the word 'but' a lot! Juliet then went back to her field notebook and copied down some of the animals she missed during the documentary from Naomi's field notebook.

I haven't really been in touch with Naomi's teacher during this shut down, so today I reached out via email explaining that we were doing some work and shared our theme Thursday activities and our daily routine that we've been trying to stick to. I felt bad explaining that we weren't doing her activities so much because I had put other activities in place. But this coming week we'll do more of what the teachers have put out other. This makes less work for me :) But as this online learning is new for elementary school students and teacher, I sent a note to her teacher helping her out a little with google classroom. Tomorrow her class is going to do a zoom meeting which will be nice for the kids to see each other and speak Spanish to each other. I'm trying to also set up a FaceTime tutor with Naomi's Spanish tutor. Hopefully at some point this week we'll do that.

Uncle Dave messaged us and Naomi logged on to FaceTime and played battleship with him and Alex. Juliet wasn't really interested. Not sure what she was interested in, maybe food.... Once she had a snack, JP, Matt & I played a round of dominion online. This wasn't easy once the kids were finished with their activities as Juliet wasn't interested in this and Naomi wanted to play and was leaning over JP's shoulder the whole time. After the game, we waited for Andria to be available and Matt, JP/Naomi, Andria and I played dominion online against each other while doing a google hangout video to chat! Juliet took a bath while we were playing. We ended up playing multiple rounds and eating dinner while playing. As it is Sunday night, the kids 'should' be going to bed early for school tomorrow. However, one of the nice things about having school at home is that you can sleep in. We've been sleeping in past 8:00 some morning. It's been wonderful. Sometimes JP even gets them going with breakfast as he gets up and ready for 'work' so I get to be a little lazier about getting motivated to get up!!