One of the new mom friends I have has a pool and invited our small group over for a play date! I was sitting in the water for most of the time (it was HOT) so I only got one pic to show Tom (who opted to stay at home and work on the garage).
The kids had a blast on the diving board and the slide. We had fun watching them of course. The parents basically stayed in the shallow end and visited.
Anna had the idea to take all the kids to Goodwill and let them pick out something to take apart (okay, destroy). So we all masked up and wandered the aisles until the kids found fun stuff. Then we just gave them screwdrivers and let them go.
Amazingly, all the kids played really well together for like two hours.
First, home demo. (Masks off for a pic!)
I finished my look after Angel left… I forget how good Mirage is. And Cinnamon Shimmer.
Second, a visit with a friend/playdate for the kids.
Third, an unexpected driveway visit with the people who are living in our old rental house (I was dropping off some stuff were accidentally moved that belonged to the owners).
Fourth, an unexpected trip to our park to visit with Hannah, a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. (The kids went down there randomly and were surprised to see their friends who don’t live in this neighborhood!)
Fifth. Bag collection, sorting, and folding by the kids. They didn’t love it. Didn’t care. It was something they could do.
They spent their first night out there last night while I was at my mom’s night. Tonight Tom is at a guy’s night (totally separate from the moms I just met!) so they’re out there again! They love it!!
Solo stove fire going. I’m drinking. Tom is cutting wood from our trees with a chainsaw. Katie just put on an Elena princess dress. Owen is talking about mages and normal knight boots?!
Playing while Mom and Dad work.
The kids started by catching fireflies. They were actually pretty good at it. Katie set these on the table and they stayed there long enough for me to get a photo—half on and half off!
Soon the fireworks came out. We started small.
The kids were at a respectable distance.
But the second one we did—a Panda—got a little crazy. It started small but then the second phase got insane and sparks were reaching the kids. Needless to say everyone immediately moved back!
Then they did some individual ones—each kid got to hold one and I managed to snap this awesome pic of Owen.
The dads got involved, too.
A neighbor took the kids on a bike ride to the river the other day and that’s ALL they can talk about. They went back a time or two by themselves and really wanted to show us (mostly so we’d let them go by themselves once we saw how they could get there without traveling on the main road)…so we finally agreed.
First you ride through the church parking lot. At the far back corner there’s a strip of grass that you ride across which connects to a dead end neighborhood cul-de-sac. Then you ride up to the front and hop a curb and ride on some grass untill you reach the sidewalk then take that until you reach the next street and then you ride all the way to the end in another cul-de-sac where there’s a…creek. River is exaggerating a bit.
It is pretty back there… Can you see the kids? They are on their favorite rocks. Owen calls one of them his thinking rock.
Underneath is more fun… traipsing through the water in their rain boots.
This is exactly the kind of place I’d have loved to explore and play at as a kid so I get the fascination. I just wish they’d found it before we were ready to move. They’ll just have to explore the new neighborhood…
It took them a day but they finally have the hang of how to really maximize their runs! Now we need to make sure it doesn’t end at the fence!!
Everything water-related is either out of stock or listed online at price-gouging prices, so when I saw this $18 slip and slide at Walmart I grabbed it. Of course the kids loved it.
She pulled out this Lego project she had started a long time ago but had gotten taken away (most likely due to sass or whining of some sort) and she put it together like a champ. The only bad thing is now we have leftover Lego pieces all over and she loves to actually play with it so it’s still out all over the place.
He is working more hours now than before—sometimes starting before 7 and trying to finish by 6 but getting calls at all hours. He even worked ALL weekend. So since it was so nice today he tried to take a little break to play catch with the kids. It lasted about 10 minutes before he got a phone call.
They’re cleaning right now…but please tell me we’re not alone.
Also? They cleaned for a whopping two minutes before they started playing with the toys. WHAT DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND ABOUT CLEANING UP? Yet if I stand there and micromanage they throw a fit.
Honestly, the only rule they really have is that I need to be able to walk to the pantry and the cat room without tripping on anything. If they would just keep those pathways cleared I would be much more lenient. But they don’t. So then I have to let loose on everything else.
P.S. Granted it was over a week, but it’s what happens when they NEVER put anything away when you’re done with it and Mom isn’t standing over them nagging.
Owen decided to play his sax on the front porch. There was no one out to listen to him but he didn’t care.
The next thing I know I hear an electric guitar…and look out to see this. I was at once happy (that they figured out how to play together safety) and sad (that they had to).
They played for probably two hours. Katie was sitting with a sign asking for donations to buy sanitizer for people who don’t have any. (So later we had a talk about that being a wonderful idea but how could we make it better. We landed on donating to the school’s food drive.)
I gave Owen and Katie a small Lego project to work on together and they managed to do it without much argument or fighting. Katie really liked playing with it, too.
The kids went outside today…and ignored my instructions about playing with neighbors… SO THAT WAS…FUN.
 SETTLE IN, Y’ALL…here’s what happened on our first day of self-distanced shelter-at-home Spring Break.
The day was going as expected with sibling squabbles and whining about iPad time and complaining about little chores and me not getting to the taxes because work stuff popped up. So I finally sent them outside…and that was the beginning of the fall.
What happened you ask? Well, I might have gone a little crazy bonkers yelling at the kids when they ignored my instructions about playing with neighbors…
Granted it wasn’t one of my better parenting moments but we have just been stressing the importance of staying away from EVERYONE—learning how quickly germs travel and talking about it all the time and why it’s important and how we’re sorry you can’t play with friends now…and then to see them wilfully disobey me? Not good.
Yes, I know they’re kids. Yes, I know they forget—SQUIRREL!!—which is exactly why I said just talk across yards. But then it became “we’ll stay apart” in the driveway and I said no because you’re kids and we can’t trust that you will STAY apart even though you think you will. Heads hanging they went back outside. And the next thing I know I hear screams of kids having fun in our yard so I went to look—really hoping they were being good—and I saw five of them all too close. 
Now am I really and truly worried that something bad is going to happen? No. I’m practically the farthest thing from a germaphobe you might find—but I’m trying to be proactive here because too many people think it’s no big deal and look where that got us?
So I was THAT mom who opened the front door and screamed to her children to get their butts inside and for the neighbor kids to GO HOME. I might have been loud enough for long enough that Tom came up from the office downstairs to see what was going on. And then we both proceeded to let the kids know why we were upset with them—for probably a good 10 minutes. Again, not terribly proud of how we handled it but I was just shaking I was so mad. Like I was kind of scared at how mad I was. We then made the kids strip and put their clothes in the wash and take showers (total overkill even for me but we wanted to prove a point).
After they showered and I had calmed down a bit, I hugged them both and apologized for losing my cool but explained that I just wanted to keep them and us and everyone around us safe so they need to trust us when we tell them what they can and can’t do. And emphasized yet again that we are also missing our friends—we’re not punishing them.
The whole thing was rough. And it totally sucked. But tomorrow is a new day and I’ll give myself some grace and we’ll move on. And keep a closer eye on the kids. 
So use this post to prepare yourself for if and when this happens in your house so you can avoid acting like a crazy person to your kids.
And Owen’s teacher was there! I got to talk to her for awhile and get to know her…and then she finally went in with her kids.
I had zero desire to go through it because I know it would kill my back…but then Heidi came over and basically guilted me into doing it (with another friend who was there) so I succumbed to peer pressure.
Katie was our tour guide…and then we ran into Owen!
Note: My back and wrists were so sore on Sunday and Monday that I had to drug myself quite heavily. I knew I should not have given in to peer pressure!!
We relaxed the rules and let Owen use his phone for a bit to play Minecraft with his cousin Robert. (We allowed it since they also played an actual board game more than once!)
She called down with all this makeup on… and stripes on her hand!!
We decided to eat breakfast at Johnny Rockets again before heading out into San Juan. The breakfast sandwich with extra bacon was really yummy. While we were sitting there waiting to be seated and then waiting for food, I think we made at least seven trips back to the room—I sent Katie for my hair clip, then I wanted the Aleve, Tom went up for his hat, I went up for a battery backup (it was our first day with internet and I knew we’d run our phones down)…it got to be quite comical.
Owen loved having his own camera.
Papa stayed behind today as he didn’t want to walk through the city. As it turned out that was a good call as it’s really hilly and it was really hot. Our first planned destination was the Chocobar. We’d been there on our last cruise and knew we wanted to go back.
Unfortunately I had forgotten that we wanted to eat there…so we only had drinks and churros again. That’s a Chocolate Bloody Mary (I wouldn’t get it again).
Then it was off to the fort. I could have cared less about visiting there again—I had more than enough the last time. But we were with our friends and I didn’t want to miss out, so there I was. We stopped to let the kids cool off before heading over…
And then it was back into town to hit the street of umbrellas (which were army themed this time)…
And a recommended restaurant, Raices. With a margarita, of course. 🙂
The remnants of their shaved ice.
The kids didn’t want a single thing on the menu so they just sat and played while we ate. We really wanted to try mofongo since we didn’t the last time.
Mofongo is a Puerto Rican dish with fried plantains as its main ingredient. Plantains are picked green and fried, then mashed with salt, garlic, broth, and olive oil in a wooden pilón. -Wikipedia
Tom ordered butter garlic octopus mofongo and I got fish tacos. The mofongo was good but my fish tacos were outstanding. Not much to look at in this picture but super delicious. The only bad thing was that it took so long to get our food that we were starting to worry about getting back to the ship on time—we were only a few blocks away but you do not want to miss the ship—so we all had to eat fairly fast. I really wish we could have eaten slower and enjoyed it longer.
Heading back to the ship! With time to spare!
Half an hour later? This.
The kids were down at the pool with the other families.
I was back in the room working feverishly while we still had internet as we were leaving the port—a new product had dropped so I was busy posting on my group and trying to post a few vacation pics!!
It was hot by the pool…and hard to see to take a good selfie.
Soon it was time to get ready for our second formal night. And joy of joys we had drama with Katie and her hair. JUST LIKE AT HOME. YIPPEE.
She had been in the pool so much and hadn’t really shampooed it well (since I wasn’t doing it daily like at home) so it was a total rats nest. But she wouldn’t let me wash it and complained and whined when I couldn’t do her hair like she wanted. I was still able to do something cute but she was very unhappy and that pretty much solidified that I don’t want to vacation with the kids again (I mean, who wants to parent on vacation?!). So we left the room and she had a total grouch face… Which is why I’m surprised I got these super cute pics.
We were walking through the Promenade since we had a few extra minutes to take photos…
And a bunch of the ship photos we took but didn’t buy. 🙂
The second formal night means lobster tails!!! I thought I’d get two, but Owen didn’t eat all of his (but he ordered it!) so I finished his. Our awesome server made this and we had to take a picture for Gramma Jean.
Afterwards we changed clothes, saw our daily towel animal…
…then went to an acapella show. It was decent, but Katie wasn’t terribly interested and…
I walked in to see this.
And s’mores. The kids wanted them so I told them they had to get it all ready. I never saw them move so fast!!
We had so much fun last year we decided to do it again!!
The kids were very intrigued when Tom started using the blow torch on the ribs.
It took awhile but by the end of the night, some dads (and one mom—not me!) went down the slide. Which led us to wonder how on Earth these kids could do this non-stop… The adults got tired after just a few times. 😄
And then it was over…the cleanup aftermath. And we can’t wait until next year!!
We thought the slide was going to be delivered Saturday morning…so the kids were thrilled that it came early!
