Missing Daddy

Jacob had to go up to Goodyear again for work last week. The kids miss him so much when he's gone. We stacked our days full of fun so they wouldn't have as much time to miss him, but every morning and every night they wished he were here.

Knowing that Thursday was the launch for the new Mars Rover: Perseverance, we did the Build Your Own Rover activity from AstroCamp on Monday. Ryan and Megan used wind power coming from a balloon to power their rovers.

 Both worked fairly well.

Rachel and Annie were determined to use the motor they had left over from their scribble robots to power their rovers. They experienced true engineering difficulties, then tried something new and when that didn't work, tried something else.

 They persevered for quite a while and had marginal success. Rachel managed to get her rover moving as long as she held the battery pack which made the rover too heavy if it was attached. We'll call it a success. Annie was getting really close to a breakthrough, but lunch time hit and hunger waits for no man. Or woman. So she put it on hold to come back to later.

The actual launch was before 8am eastern time, which means before 5am here, and we weren't getting up to actually watch it live, but we did watch the footage of the launch later.

Later that day as we took the kids swimming in Manny's pool before I took Ryan, Jared, and Eloise to swim practice, but we had to abandon the pool after less than 30 minutes because a storm blew in. It was possibly the best monsoon we've had all summer. Swim practice was canceled and we rode out the storm inside enjoying watching the wind and the rain from the safety of our home. The wind actually gusted enough to blow our basketball hoop over.

 Ryan turned into a goggle monster since he couldn't go to swim practice.

 This week there was a little more push back about the non-electronic parts of our morning routine. Workbook and flashcards are not the kids' favorite things. I think they are improving their typing skills, however. Ryan and Megan saw a picture of Sammy with monkey feet and thought it was a great idea. I guess it helped Ryan work:

Tuesday we went back to Manny's pool to get a full session of swimming in since the day before it had been cut short. That meant everyone except Ryan got in the pool twice that day. Once at Manny's once at Sunshine Swim School for lessons or swim team. It turned out to be the girls' last swim practice because by Thursday, which was supposed to be their last one, the pool was too green to swim in until they got the chemicals balanced, so practice was canceled. They were not bummed about it. They enjoyed swim team, but they are a little burnt out from too much swimming for now. A week without swim team and I'm sure they'll be over it.

 While the girls were at swim team/lessons with Savannah, I took Ryan to Freddy's to get dinner for us all. He wore Annie's old boots and his pajamas to go pick up dinner. He's quite the fashion guru.

 The kids were delighted to get burgers/hot dogs and ice cream for dinner. One perk of Jacob going on a work trip.

 Because of the hours Jacob was doing the testing and the long drive from the test site to his hotel the kids didn't get to video chat with him much since they would be in bed by the time he was ready to chat. So Thursday morning before he headed out he called in when we were getting ready to do our yoga for the day. He did some stretches with us while we chatted.

 Since we didn't really have time for a full Cosmic Kids Yoga session after talking to Jake we did a Cosmic Kids Brain Break which is only 3-4 minutes, but the kids love them just as much.

 Then Thursday afternoon we got to go use the Spear's pool. This is definitely the kids' favorite pool of the summer because it has a diving board. They were diving in backwards, doing flips, and all sorts of tricks. And Peyton and McKenzie got to come out and join us. So much fun.

 Friday for AstroCamp we learned about solar radiation. The kids made bracelets with solar beads that look white inside, but once they get in the sun they change to an assortment of colors.

 They also made prints on solar paper. This one has a command hook (for hanging on the wall, several coins, and a blade for a food processor on it.

 It was Annie's turn for a mommy-daughter date. She likes the Italian Sodas at Viva, and their dining room is open now, so we sat and talked for a few minutes before going home. Always fun to hang with this girl.

 Friday we got great news. Jacob was going to be done early, so instead of coming home Saturday, he could come home Friday night. The kids were ecstatic. When he got home, he still had some work to do, downloading data from his equipment, so he set that to run overnight. Ryan thought all the bells and whistles were pretty neat, though he could only look, not touch.

 Since next week it's back to school and Ryan's head was starting to look like a Q-tip, he agreed to let me cut his hair. If I would give him another R on the back of his head. I figure his hair will grow out fast enough that the R shouldn't be too noticeable by the time we see people.

And now we're ready for heading back to school. This week we pick up computers, meet the teachers, and do all the last week of school fun before we see how this remote learning thing is going to work starting next week.

New Routine and Pioneer Day

Last Saturday night Annie's face started getting itchy and blotchy. Her skin is pretty sensitive and starts reacting if dog saliva, melon juice, nectarine juice, or a number of other things touch the skin on her face. Usually she runs to the bathroom and washes off wherever it's itchy and the problem is solved. Saturday that worked for a time, then it kept coming back so we finally sent her to shower to wash off her whole body and took a Claritin. She was fine the rest of the night, but the next morning she woke up with her face, especially her eyes, totally swollen and her whole face itchy. We gave her some Benadryl which she didn't love because it made her feel sleepy and weird, but after an hour or so it did the trick.

 When the Benadryl wore off she started to get itchy again, so she took another dose and was fine for the rest of the day. Monday she woke up with a couple itchy spots, but it wasn't too bad and she preferred to deal with it rather than take more Benadryl because she doesn't like how it made her feel. We don't know what caused her reaction, but we did get an appointment scheduled with an Allergist. In October. We're on the cancellation list so hopefully we can get in earlier if someone cancels, but in the meantime we'll hope she doesn't have another reaction, or if she does we can figure out what caused it.

A couple days before Annie's ordeal started, Megan was complaining of a headache, a sore throat, and her tummy feeling yucky. Her tummy is a nightly complaint so I thought nothing of it. The next day slept in quite a bit, which is very abnormal for her and usually just happens when she's sick. When she woke up she said she felt like she had a fever. She didn't, though she asked me to check several times throughout the day. She complained a couple more times about her throat, and later in the day she started complaining about body aches, too. Normally that all would be no big deal and we'd be happy that those were her only symptoms and no one was throwing up, but with COVID-19 such a big concern and Arizona having a lot of cases right now I called her doctor to see at what point we should get a test. The doctor's office said that tests right now are taking about 10 days to get a result, after you even manage to get an appointment, so it wasn't really worth it, but we should probably play it safe and stay home for the weekend to see how it played out in case it got worse or she developed other symptoms, so the kids skipped swim team practice on Saturday and we didn't go to my parents' house for sacrament meeting on Sunday. It was hard knowing if we should self quarantine for longer or just go back to hanging out with cousins and swim lessons as normal. It is such a strange world we live in right now, having a headache make you think about if you should have your whole family stay home for a couple weeks. But we didn't decide to quarantine. We're already pretty quarantined, seeing very few people outside our family during the week. And no one else has gotten anything, except that Rachel complained about a sore throat one day a couple days later.

Monday we started a new routine. The kids are exhibiting symptoms that the summer has gone on too long, evidenced by lots of bickering and fighting about chores and everything else. I decided we needed a schedule for a couple hours every morning so they would be productive and have something to occupy them every day. It helped so much. Chores have improved 100 fold (especially for Ryan who pushes back on chores a lot, but really thrives on a schedule).

The kids have 8-9am to get their scriptures studied, chores done, and piano practiced. Then at 9:00 we start 15 minute rotations doing math, reading, writing, typing practice, and family history. They have specific things each day on a schedule from working on a workbook, doing flashcards, writing a book to writing in their journal or indexing or playing Prodigy (an online math game). After four 15-minute rotations we do group yoga or meditation. Annie doesn't love it, but everyone else goes along without complaint. I'm hoping they can develop deep breathing/relaxation skills that will help them as they get frustrated or anxious.

 After yoga we do another group activity: AstroCamp on Monday and Friday, Spanish on Tuesday and Thursday, and a family history game, then a trip to the library and going out for lunch on Wednesdays. We just have two more weeks before remote learning begins, so they won't have time to get bored of this new routine. The kids are still really enjoying Astro Camp. Last week we did Astronaut training which included a taste test and using "satellite communication" to build a space station. They also made film canister rockets which was pretty fun.

 A couple of times last week I had the kids try out working with their masks on so they can get used to it in case they need to wear them for long periods of time when they go back to school.

 Annie discovered she does want nose clips in them, so I added some to her masks that I made, but everyone else was happy with the masks I had made for them. They all managed 30-45 minutes a couple different times last week without messing with their masks too much.

 Megan decided she wanted a haircut, which has made a huge difference in how easy it is to comb her hair, thankfully. It also cut off the worst of her green hair from swimming all summer. She's such a goofball. This is her happy picture after her haircut:

 The Knights still join us on Tuesdays and Thursdays for Spanish. They came a little early on Thursday and joined us for yoga, too. It's fun seeing them all join in together. The kids enjoy Cosmic Kids Yoga on YouTube.

 Thursday and Friday were overcast and lovely. Thursday was drizzling and a real nice change from the intense heat we've had this summer. It was the first time all summer I actually enjoyed being in the back yard, so I went to work cleaning up the yard, despite the light rain. Megan came out after it was mostly cleaned up and ran around enjoying the clutter free lawn and the rain.

 Friday was Pioneer Day. Jacob had the day off, not because of Pioneer Day, but because he had worked 7 days the previous week, and will be out of town all this coming week, too. It was nice having him around. With the beautiful weather the kids rushed to get their chores done early and spent a half hour out front playing basketball with Jacob before we started our routine at 9am. Instead of Yoga we went to the park and played kickball. By then it wasn't super hot, but was warming up and combined with the humidity we were sweating like crazy.

After we came home Annie asked if she could bake a pie with the leftover crust from the Chicken Pot Pies we'd made the night before. So she made an apple pie for PIE-oneer day. It also helped her work to accomplish one of her #StriveToBe goals.

 Peyton and McKenzie couldn't come out Friday to celebrate Pioneer Day, so we got together on Saturday instead to play Pioneer games and eat pioneer food (fried chicken, homemade bread, dried fruit).

We did leg wrestling:

 The stick pull:

 Note our warrior faces:

 (I won)

The three-legged race was hilarious.

 And Savannah was ambitious enough to make taffy. We sent the kids outside to pull the taffy for 15 minutes because they were dripping everywhere. Which just brought a ton of ants. It was a super messy activity, but the kids thought it was tasty.

 Aunt Cari had travelled to Mesa with friends, and Jacob set her up on a date with someone from his work, so she came down to Tucson for the afternoon. The kids were happy to have her around to play for a few hours.

 They managed to cram a lot of games and fun into the few hours we had her here.

 Then Cari headed off on her date and we got ready for swimming.

The kids are wrapping up their summer of swimming. Or at least of Swim Team. Swim team can be ongoing at Sunshine, but the girls have had their fill and we'll be getting into school work in a couple of weeks, so they'll just go to swim practice through the end of this month. Megan and Ryan may have a few more classes until school starts in person, but I may just get in with Megan and have some one-on-one lessons in Manny's pool after that until it gets too cold to swim.

 Saturday was the last swim meet for our family. They all swam really well. Megan had a good time cheering them on, but even more of a good time being goofy on the sidelines.

 Since both of the Knight families joined in Swim Team, we had 7 kids from the family at the meet. Because of COVID restrictions limiting the number of people congregating at the pool instead of having all of swim team at the meet, they split it into two groups and conducted one set at 4pm and one at 5pm. Our group had our 7 plus a few others. There was only one race the entire time that didn't have a Campbell or a Knight swimming in it. It made the meet a lot more exciting that way. Here you see Ryan in the green swim cap on the left, Eloise in the middle, and Jared on the right getting ready to swim back stroke.

They all did great and I am really impressed at how much they've improved in endurance and form over the course of the summer. Ryan was so fast he nearly swam right out of his shorts. For some reason he wore his worst shorts that won't stay up. We fixed the safety pin once, but the next race it popped as soon as he hit the water and he spent the entire race reaching down to grab his pants so they wouldn't fall off. It's a bummer, too, because it was his butterfly race and he is so good at that normally. Thankfully Ben was there in his swimsuit, having already finished his swim lessons so he (reluctantly) let Ryan trade swim shorts with him. Ryan's last few races went off flawlessly and we saw how speedy fast he is, especially in freestyle.

Rachel was exhausted by the end of the meet. She swam the butterfly leg of a 50 IM relay, then immediately afterwards had a 50 individual butterfly race. She said afterwards it's unfortunate that she butterfly seems to be her best stroke because she really doesn't like it. Just because it is so exhausting. 

Annie was a little down afterwards because she's at the low end of her age bracket and she didn't think she'd won a trophy, but she did admit that she was glad she joined swim team this year and would like to do it again next year. She has improved so much this year and it was fun to see her swimming so well. And the trophy isn't what it's all about, especially in this (mostly) non-competitive swim team. It's about improvement and I bet she beat some of her times from the last meet, which will earn her ribbons.

Today we had the special treat of being able to go back to church for the first time in 20 weeks. March 8 was the last time we were at church before everything was shut down worldwide because of COVID-19. That happened to be the day I was released as YW president, so today was my first day back at church without that calling. But since all we had was a 30 minute sacrament meeting, it really didn't make a difference anyway. It was a unique experience attending church with only about 50 people there, all spread out with at least a bench between family groups and everyone in masks. 

Megan was surprised when we left after sacrament. "Wait! What about primary?!" One day we'll get back to that. For now we'll take what we can get. The kids did love that they got to keep the sacrament cups, and got double the cups since the bread was also passed out in cups. They've been lobbying for that for years, but we've always made them put them in the tray, but this time they didn't collect them in the tray for sanitary reasons, I guess, and they were super pleased. We'll be back to home church next week, but we'll be able to attend every other week from here on out, so that's nice.

Astro Camp and other fun

Savannah's sister runs a summer camp in Ogden called Astro Camp. Because of COVID restrictions they couldn't have it in person like they usually do, so they converted it to camp in a box. They sent out a new box every week in June with materials to do experiments and activities, and have a YouTube channel with videos explaining new concepts. We signed up so we could have some fun stuff that we didn't have to plan out. In June we hardly did any of the activities. We've been picking up the pace a little now and the kids are enjoying themselves.

There was a section about spacesuits and how they are designed to keep the astronaut safe from super heat/cold, no atmosphere, and micro meteors that could be zooming super fast. So the kids gathered their own materials had tried to build a spacesuit to keep their astronaut (apple or orange) safe from a pair of scissors being dripped from 5 feet.

 Megan and Annie teamed up.

 Rachel and Ryan were successful at keeping their astronauts safe. Megan and Annie could have used another layer of cardboard (which Megan had suggested), but they had fun anyway.

They also experiemented with what it would be like to try to write or build with Legos with bulky gloves on like the astronauts have to use.

 It was tricky.

We continue to enjoy swimming at both Manny's pool and Sister Wagner's house. Sister Wagner brought out a bunch of pool floats last time we went over. The kids got a big kick out of the lips especially. And enjoyed jumping and diving through the hole in the donut.

Judy invited us to come help with some food distribution at a food bank last week. We brought the older kids along and sweat a lot. Wearing face masks out in the sun isn't super fun, but the kids were troopers and worked hard. They found a sweet spot to take breaks in, right where the A/C was blowing straight on them.

We worked for nearly 2 hours, then headed to 7-11 since it was July 11, 7-11 day. Unfortunately the free Slurpees were canceled this year because of Coronavirus, trying to avoid lines and crowds, I guess. But we were hot and we were there, so I just paid for a Slurpee for everyone. We all deserved one after working so hard in the Arizona heat. The kids even said they'd like to come next month to help again, though next time they want to come on the day that they work inside the warehouse instead of the day they load the trucks outside in the heat. I think we can make that happen.

Todd and Savannah invited us over for a game night. The kids had a lot of fun playing Killer Bunnies, then One Night Ultimate Werewolf.

We are super grateful to have cousins close by to keep the longest summer ever from driving us completely crazy.

More astro camp fun: We made our own paper rockets. The materials from Astrocamp were supposed to connect to an empty bottle to launch them, but we already had these stomp rockets (actually they belong to the Knights, we just borrowed them) and it was easier to do this than find an empty bottle to launch with.

The kids had fun making their rockets fly high.

The kids have long stretches of time where they will play nicely by themselves. One day I hadn't heard from anyone for a while so I went to check and found the older girls reading, Ryan playing with the city he constructed in his room out of tape on the ground, and Megan playing with her babies and stuffed animals.

They also have stretches where they play nicely together. But they also are starting to really get on each other's nerves sometimes. When we're used to a max of 7 weeks break from school, 20 weeks feels really long. There are 3 more weeks of summer before we start remote learning (still at home). The governor has a mandate saying in person school cannot start until August 17th, but it's likely that will be extended because numbers in Arizona are still pretty high. So we'll have been at home for a minimum of 24 weeks before the kids can return to school, likely longer.
We're implementing a new schedule tomorrow (the day they were supposed to be going back to school) to give us all a little of the structure that they so badly need. I'm hopeful that will help cut down on fighting a little. And maybe help some of the kids get back into the routine of reading their scriptures and brushing their teeth, which has fallen off sharply lately.

Megan finally got her glasses. She was super excited to get them.

She really wanted cheetah glasses and this was close enough for her. They're kind of dark blue with lighter stripes that look semi-cheetah-ish.

She also got a pair that is purple and pink (and a little light blue). Based on our experience finding shoes every morning I thought it would be a good idea to have an extra pair of glasses for when she can't find one.

Jacob had to go to Goodyear last week for work. The kids missed him a lot, especially every morning and night. He got back Thursday morning, but went straight to work, so when he called suggesting we come meet him for lunch the kids were super excited about it. And not just because it meant getting Eegees.

Since no one that doesn't work there is allowed in his building right now, and all the restaurants around are limiting how many people can eat inside because of COVID, and it's way too hot for a picnic in the park, we figured the easiest solution was to put the seats down in the back of the car and just eat there. We found some shade, left the AC running, and had a lovely picnic. The kids are super happy to have Dad back home.

More swimming at Manny's pool...

Jared figured out that swim shirts can turn into floatation devices, so the kids spent the last half of the time we were at the pool blowing up their shirts, looking like body builders.

It was hilarious, especially hearing them talk to each other. They had to keep their mouth in their shirt to keep putting air in as it leaked out, so as they spoke to each other there was this echo that made it sound like they were in a cave or something.

With Jacob home, they flocked around him when he showed them a video of the author of Hank the Cowdog reading one of their favorite chapters. They are their father's children. They quote it over and over and over.

We managed to squeeze in a couple more Astrocamp activities over the last couple of days. Making roller coasters for marbles out of gum tape and masking tape was probably one of the activities the kids have gotten the most into. They spent so long each building their own and adjusting it and keep going back to play with them more.

They also enjoyed making Scribble Robots, though there was some frustration getting everything working right, then the tape would come off or the wire would disconnect again. But in the end everyone had success and enjoyed building their own robot out of a motor, batteries, tape and markers and a cup.

They attached a bit of an eraser to the motor to put it off balance just enough to make the motor, and therefore the cup, shake. As it shook, it would move around letting the markers draw in cool patterns.

As we get into our new schedule this week we'll be doing more Astrocamp stuff, Spanish, Family History, and each of the kids will have some individual work to improve typing, math, reading, writing, etc.