I realize that an "August recap" published the following July is simply ridiculous. However, I'm committed to documenting our days, so I'm doing my best to get back into it. Here goes.
After quite a few months of debating the pros and cons of installing a Murphy bed in our guest room, we did it. By trading out a traditional bed for a Murphy bed, we bought ourselves some square footage in this beloved house of ours that feels smaller by the day with our many family members. The bed is very comfortable (we didn't want our guests to suffer by this trade), but we're able to use our guest room as a very functional school room now, as we can fold up the bed when guests aren't here. Which is most of the time.
All that to say: we ended up with a ton of really big boxes (the bed did not come assembled, obviously) that made for some excellent forts.
Example of box fort
Trumpkin and friends got in on it, too.
I also let the girls decorate the front door with their Picasso tiles, which was SO much fun (and beautiful, I think) and also made our door weigh 1,000 pounds.
We had already started school in July, so August was a bit more of just normal life and routine...wait...nope. In August, we all got COVID. It took over almost our entire month, when it was all said and done. We didn't all get sick at the same time; we all kinda overlapped, dragging out the whole experience (and, consequently, our quarantine, which, at that time, was ten days from the start of symptoms and ended on the last day of the last family member's quarantine). Because we took turns, as it were, we kept plugging away with school for the most part, as there were usually at least two who were ok at any given time. Until I got sick. I was the sickest of us all, as it turned out. I kept running our school days and following the lesson plan until I just COULD NOT. At that point, I put on "educational" movies and tv shows until I couldn't even be bothered to care about that and just put on long movies, handed out whatever snacks I could find, and passed out on the sofa after barricading Hallie in the living room area. It was rough, and we were confined to our house for a solid 3 weeks. Lots of quality time, I guess?
These two also got rather sick. Hallie had symptoms similar to RSV and Brynnie ran a fever for 7 days, accompanied (understandably) by constant lethargy. It was very sad.
Brad, however, had exactly one sniffle, and we never would have known he had ever had the virus if the rest of us hadn't gotten sick, prompting him to test to see if he had it, too. He did. He was just *mostly* asymptomatic.
Lily mostly just had a cold. She didn't feel great, but she wasn't SICK.
Practicing counting
Claire had the terrible headaches and vomiting. I, obviously, convinced myself that she had a brain tumor. Being up with a vomiting 8-year-old in the middle of the night while being sick myself is not me at my most mentally acute, as you can probably gather.
But we all came through
Spent a lot of time laying around, though
A lot of school happened in jammies and on the couch.
There were also A LOT more screens that usual. It can't be helped sometimes.
In a very providential turn of events, mere days before we succumbed to illness, our neighbors gave us a Wii that their grandchildren no longer used, and we put that sucker to good use during our seemingly never-ending quarantine.
The VERY DAY that we were released from quarantine was our first Community Day of the school year with our homeschool co-op. I wasn't sure I was going to make it through the day, given the remaining fatigue and shortness of breath, but somehow, we made it through and had a good time. I should note here that I was the tutor for the 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old girls. It required a lot of energy, and I was fairly useless for the next few days.
Despite all of that, we got lots of snuggles during our nearly month-long quarantine and now feel as though we have fully participated in the pandemic. Oi.
And as Hallie does not yet have her own blog posts for quotes, please enjoy some pictures:
The hardest part of getting back into the saddle with blogging about our lives is just getting the first post up. So, hopefully, this is that post!
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