“We gotta get out of this place…” 🎵🎵

It’s Day 25 in “lock down” for us today. 

Yesterday afternoon we got the news that our “Safer at Home” restrictions have been extended through at least May 26 and school has officially been cancelled now through the end of the school year. 😞 We all knew this was a real possibility, but of course we were holding out hope that somehow they could go back. The boys are especially disappointed about their soccer and swim seasons continuing to be cancelled indefinitely. They miss their friends, they miss their activities, they just miss normal life. Sigh. Now they don’t even know if they will get to do any camps or activities over the summer either, since many things are already being cancelled in that time frame. 

Asher attending a webinar about how to swim better breaststroke. This is the closest he is getting to swimming these days. 😦

Overall, however, they have been handling this whole situation really well, I think. The school online hasn’t seemed to faze them too much and besides getting sort of squirrely somedays, they haven’t even really seemed to mind having to stay home. I know they are disappointed, but they seem to generally be taking it all in stride. 

I, however, woke up on Wednesday (Day 23) with a sudden strong urge to GET OUT of my house. 

Until this point, I had really officially only left the house twice- once to go to the post office and once to go grocery shopping. Of course we have gone on daily walks and things like that, but otherwise, we really have just stayed home. We are taking the restrictions very seriously and doing our very best to follow them to a T. I hadn’t really felt a super strong urge or “need” to get out so far.

I’m not sure why, but suddenly on Wednesday it just caught up to me I guess. I felt like crawling up the walls! It was a beautiful sunny day, but only around 27 degrees out, so an extended walk was not in the cards. After breakfast, I said to the boys, “I will be right back.” I got in my car with a mug of tea, my sunglasses and my phone, and I drove about 1 mile away to a busy street corner parking lot. I parked my car (with the heat on 😊) and proceeded to sit in the sunshine, drinking my tea while listening to a podcast and watching the cars go by for about 20 minutes. I then drove home to get the boys going on schoolwork, feeling much better about the day (for a while, anyway)! 

Ah, such a beautiful view of the intersection. This actually felt really exciting! I think I may have just been happy to be a.l.o.n.e.

Since it’s Friday, and everyone is kind of bummed out and crabby about the restrictions being extended, I am going to list a ‘Friday 5’ list of positives in my life from the past few days. 

1. Family Outing!! 

Building on the momentum from the thrilling morning car ride on Wednesday, we decided do a big “family outing!” that evening as well. We all piled in the van and went to Culver’s for dinner (using their car hop service), topped off with custard (I chose my favorite- a caramel cashew sundae). We then took a ~40 minute drive out into the country, blaring oldies the whole way on Pandora. We got lucky and were graced with some good ones: “Twist and Shout”, “the Twist”, and “Fun, Fun, Fun” came on, to name a few. Fun fact about me: I LOVE Oldies. This was the first outing like this that we have done, and I definitely think we will do it again. It just felt nice to all go somewhere together, even if we didn’t leave the car. 

2. Lawn waste pick up

We had probably 6-8 BIG (heavy) bags of leaves that had been sitting decomposing behind our garage that never made it to the recycle center in the fall, thanks to our one freakish tree that doesn’t drop it’s leaves until way after all of the other trees…  The city had originally cancelled our yard waste pick ups, but the one this week was back on. I thought they wouldn’t come until later in the week, so Ivan was planning to put them out after work on Wednesday. Well, I felt like some fresh air, so on a break I decided to lug all the bags out to the curb myself. Less than an hour after I did, the truck came by for pick up! I was SO glad I got those bags out there when I did!! It would have been a huge hassle to load those big bags up to take to the recycle center. 

3. New piano music

Asher has been really into playing rock type songs on the piano lately. He just finished learning “Great Balls of Fire” and wanted some more, so after conferring with his teacher and watching some You Tube videos, we decided to order him the sheet music for “Let it Be” and “Piano Man”. Since I was placing an order, I poked around on the website looking for some fresh sheet music for myself. I ended up ordering “The Sound of Silence” and “Bohemian Rhapsody”. I’m super excited to have some new tunes to play! And fun ones, too. Playing the piano is probably my #1 stress reliever. 🙂 

4. Fuzzy socks

My Mom bought me 3 different pairs of fuzzy slipper socks for Christmas. I have been alternating them (along with a couple I already had…) and I just really like wearing them! My office is in the basement and I always get chilly, despite my little space heater.  Ivan looked at me funny the other day and said, “Exactly how many different pairs of socks like that do you have???” Haha!! 

5. Lady and the Tramp

The other night we watched Lady and the Tramp (the new live version). This was one of my favorites as a kid. I had some Lady and the Tramp Christmas ornaments growing up that I just loved. I remembered seeing that a new Disney version was coming out this past year, but then I never really heard when it was actually released and we never saw it. So when I saw it on Disney+ I got really excited! I thought it was great! The live dogs were so cute. We spent half the movie though trying to figure out how they got the dogs’ mouths to move…were they computerized dogs completely? Or real dogs, with the talking mouth superimposed on top somehow? Or, were the dogs actually talking?? We still don’t know. All I know is that it looked extremely real to me. Regardless of how they made the dogs talk, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie! Definitely recommend. The old Victorian homes and Christmas scenes in the early 1900’s were beautiful too. The movie was filmed in Savannah, Georgia (though I believe the actual setting was New Orleans) and it was all so quaint and lovely. 

This was always my favorite scene!! The spaghetti kiss. So cute!!

Have a great Friday and a wonderful weekend! Weekend= no distance learning! Yay!!! Haha! 

I’ll leave you with a great article to check out, if you want a little more reading today. It’s from the USA Swimming website and references Michael Phelps, but has a super positive message for anyone, really, or especially people with kids that are athletes. 

My favorite quote from it is: 
“View things as a catastrophe, and you’ll be overwhelmed by strong emotions and become paralyzed. View things as a challenge, and you will successfully ride the waves of these emotions and become mobilized.” – Dr. Alan Goldberg of competitiveedge.com 

Attitude is Everything: Managing the Stress and Uncertainty of Covid-19




Daily Gratitude:
I had planned to write something else here today, but as I was finishing up this post, I just took a little break to heat up some more tea. I checked Facebook quick and happened to see a post from a Fashion/Lifestyle blogger that I follow (Living in Yellow). She wrote that a good friend of hers and blogger at Little Miss Momma just found out that her 3 year old daughter, Stevie, has a rare, incurable brain cancer with days to live. I clicked on the comments and saw floods of people commenting about having lost their own children to brain cancer or other childhood diseases. Oh my goodness. My heart sank to the floor. I can’t even fathom this. I am so extremely, incredibly grateful today and always for every single day of health that my children have. If anyone is reading this, PRAY PRAY PRAY for this little Stevie and this family, and for all of those other people that I don’t know who commented that they have suffered a loss or are suffering a loss like this now. Pray for their health, healing, peace, and comfort….In Jesus’ name, Amen!