Quarantine Journals - Gardening and Painting

Penny helped me thin out half our pepper seedlings and we gave them away on our community page with scheduled no-contact pickups to minimize accidental exposure for anyone. We had 18 seedlings up for grabs, and they are all gone. I still have as many in my window sill, but I ran out of seedlings pots. 😂

Then the kids did some painting while they were waiting for dinner. I think Penny was hungry (as demonstrated by her art).  Ironically, I think that's all she ate for dinner as well.  Meal times have really been a struggle lately. Whereas Oliver is willing to try anything that I feed him directly, Penny has been really resistant to trying anything new.  We tried a new meal tonight, and it ended up just being a total meltdown with her. To the point that she was sobbing and crying and starving but refused to eat. So she just had a banana and an apple.

It was nice to spend Oliver's naptime outside with her, gardening and just talking. She wanted to make up an entire storyline for the jalapeños and the peppers. The jalapeños were bullying the bell peppers because they weren't as hot, and they were telling Bill peppers that they were worthless and stupid. So Penny and I kept adding bell peppers to the garden until we were almost done, and then Penny and I went to the garden together and we both made speeches to all the peppers about how important it is to be kind and how we're all different no matter even if we're the same kind of pepper.  She was very earnest and adorable.  It was sweet.  

I went into the compost bin to turn everything over, and found that the massive amounts of rain that we've had for the last 24 hours really perked up some sweet potato remnants that were in there. So we dug out about seven sweet potatoes that were growing massive sprouts with big happy leaves and move them into a grow bag.  We also found a potato slice that had a gigantic root structure and added it to our potato bag.

For lunch, I had harvested a lot of our lettuce from the aero garden, and I gave the kids DIY salads as well as a bunch of lettuce for Richard to make his own giant monster salad.

Things are getting heavy as the end of the school year approaches. I can tell that it's really wearing on penni, it's really wearing on me as well. We love Miss Oswald and it's hard to say goodbye to her both virtually and otherwise. It's too bad that the year that she had a wonderful teacher was the year that she didn't actually be good to be with the wonderful teacher, and the wonderful teacher has said just as much about Penny. She's been one of the most wonderful student that she's ever had, and she can't believe this is the year that we have to do distance-learning.

Tonight she started sobbing and saying that she didn't even want to go to second grade. She just wanted to stay in first grade. And I told her that I didn't have to be something that we had to worry about right now because we have time to figure that all out, but for now we would just be focused on summer break. Which is probably not the best, connecting response to give, but it was the best I had in the moment.

I'm bracing myself for the big struggle that I know it's coming. I think next week is going to be especially difficult on her when she doesn't have the routine and curriculum of distance learning to fill her mornings. And honestly, I feel like it's putting a lot more pressure I need to have more activities planning to keep things interesting. Because, as of now, at least a couple of hours in the morning or spent with them on their iPads doing schoolwork, and then we move into the next part of the day. But now I'm going to be responsible for keeping everybody going from the moment they wake up until the moment they crash, indefinitely, without respite from field trips or company.

Every time I talk to my dad, I can tell he's feeling very isolated and lonely. And I hate not being able to do anything to soften that. We talk on FaceTime a couple times a week, but it's definitely not enough. I need to start checking in more, but every day just feels like nonstop from the minute we wake up until the minute the kids are in bed, minutes too late to reach out to him.  I thought about driving out there by myself today, I'm just standing like 20 feet away while we yell had a conversation for a bit and then coming back, but I was already feeling super dehydrated, and I knew there was no way that I would be able to drink any water and then whether the 3 Hour drive back-and-forth—in addition to however long we stayed to chat—without needing a bathroom break. So instead I stayed here and drank 150 ounces of water before lunch, going to the bathroom every 20 minutes. 

As I mentioned, we posted the peppers on the Coppell Facebook group for people to have, and the response has been overwhelming.  I think I have about 30 people asking for pepper plants, and Melissa, the one that runs the local plant nursery over here, mentioned that they are out of stock of pretty much everything and unable able to get anything more, so I'm not sure if that's why. I've been giving them out to at a time for people to come pick up, but trying to be careful about getting any traffic jams at the door. Which, by the way, was Penny suggestion. Because she was very concerned that people might show up at the same time to pick up their plants. Anyway, of course the first person to say they wanted any plants was Lynette. When Penny heard me say her name, she asked if Callan could come with Lynette and they could stand across the yard and talk to each other. So I told her we could try that, and we're going to give it a shot tomorrow. I think I'm literally going to tie something to Oliver to keep him from running over to them, and I guess we'll see how it goes. I think it Will be heartbreaking once it's over, but maybe it'll fill a need while they're here.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to get all the plans in place for Oliver's birthday party to make it special. Doing some online shopping for a few gifts, and I discovered a local snowcone place that delivers snowballs to your door, no contact. I wrote him to ask them about their health precautions during the pandemic, and she said everyone is required to wear masks and gloves. So I think I'm feeling OK about the idea of them throwing snowballs at each other, but I'm not sure that will actually be using any to make snowcones and eat them.  So far, that is the extent of my big birthday plans. I'm going to start getting stuff together to make him a chocolate chocolate cake with a chocolate ganache frosting, and I bought a small ornament and some curious George decorations to fancy up the house.