The Covid Diaries 3 (April)

And so it continues. Very much the same as before.

I do a bit of work. Ian does a bit of work. The kids do a bit of school work. We appreciate the garden and the moor and the sunshine.

We appreciate the blossom.

I am watching the moor with interest. May is my favourite time there, when all the buttercups suddenly emerge and you can loose a 2 year old under their waving stalks. But what will it be like this year? I've never before paid so much attention to the ebbing and flowing of the informal paths across the grass. There are more people walking on the moor, so are there more paths? I simply don't know, though I suspect there are. It's not rained for the whole of April, so with the additional feet, are the paths more trodden down than usual? I don't know, but I suspect they are. I also suspect that the paths are wider now than usual, does this mean less buttercups?

I shall wait and see! The cows come back this week, so everything will change again. I'm rather enjoying watching it so closely.

But with the lovely weather, all walks are glorious!

There are lots of normal things happening. Lots of reading. Nathaniel is reading and re-reading all the Harry Potter books - it's convenient that they are so long. Dorothea is reliving the 1980s through Woof!

We've played board games that haven't seen light recently (so much so that we were forced to buy an expansion pack for Dixit!), and lots of music.

 

Ian is cooking lots of tasty things. Last night we experimented with cabbage and leek fritters, and although they didn't seem promising, they were really tasty and we'll have them again. It's a shame the kids weren't so convinced about the garlicy vegetable stew (I loved it!), but we all enjoyed "posh" fish fingers which involved coating fish in cornflakes. We mocked it, but it was delicious! The fact that the butcher is friendly and open, has loads of veg and eggs and is not a supermarket means that we are eating more meat than we might usually!

We celebrated a friend's birthday with a banner (one of many in the roads around us) for her to enjoy on her walk, and made her ice cream which we presented in a basket. Of course, we had to do a bit of experimenting first. The hokey pokey ice cream (made with the remnants of the honeycomb made for the Easter bark), was a bit of a disaster. The honeycomb dissolved during the churning, and the resulting cream-honeycomb solution was so sugary that it wouldn't really set. So we were forced to eat slightly runny, sweet caramel ice cream sludge. We survived the ordeal!

And then there were special covid activities, like PE with Joe Wicks, which I have become very fond of. He is such a nice man - I so appreciate his enthusiasm for getting kids to engage with PE of some sorts, and I love all the extra touches he adds to his sessions - the spot the difference, crazy spin-the-wheel games, quizes as you go along. He is one of the nice things about this situation, and its fun to all jump around together in the morning.

We've got a bit obsessed with kahoot quizes and have been creating them for every group of friends we can think of. One of Ian's involved identifying dinosaurs (useful if you are a 4 year old) and star ships (useful if you watch a lot of sci fi), and I was pretty proud of my kids TV one which catered for all participants by addressing 80s UK and French TV as well as modern shows!

And Scouts is pretty ace too. This week was junk modelling and we had four challenges to complete with anything we could find in the house in about 10 minutes. We made a musical instrument (a very fine cello), something that you could use on camp (Han's compass was picked out for particular note), a dragon (Thea's favourite) and anything you like (we made a USS Enterprise). We enjoyed ourselves!

  Hope you've been enjoying the pictures of N's hair, because it's all gone. Now it looks like this:

Not a disaster, if I do say so myself!

School has restarted, and it's a good thing (though N doesn't always agree when I suggest he does the "boring" writing bits). Last week's whole school topic was the weather, and D enjoyed learning and performing a poem. (You'll have to turn the sound up - the weather got in the way a bit!)

 And today we broke out the compasses to work out how to draw equilateral triangles (and other things).

The highlight of most days has been hanging out with the blackbirds. The female has been our friend for a couple of years, and has often come to join us when gardening, jumping into freshly dug beds as soon as the fork was out of them to find juicy worms. Over the winter, we gave her the occasional sultana, and since then she has been our best friend! As we've been around so much for the last few weeks, she has got very brave and come and chatted to us in the garden. She's got more sultanas for this, and so has developed the habit of flying at us when she sees us in the window to ask for more. She started to come pretty close when we were feeding her:

It was only a matter of time before we wondered if she'd take sultanas from us.

She's not entirely stupid - she'll only take them from Nathaniel in this position, where she is on a different level and can get away quickly, but she has hopped up to me when I've been sitting on the grass and pretty much wrenched them from my fingers!

Two days ago, her hatchlings were booted out of the nest for the first time and we spent a day trying not to feel responsible for chasing magpies away, and trying not to follow the female when she took sultanas to her young. The male has stepped up now, and also asks for sultanas, but he insists that we leave them and then walk a long way away. 

Yesterday one of the hatchlings decided to sit under the climbing frame, giving us a great view of it having it's lunch.

We are enjoying them!

The Covid Diaries 2 (April)

We've had the first week of the Easter holidays and survived it! I was a bit worried as it meant that the kids weren't occupied with school work, but actually it has all been fine. We all get on and are such hermits that no-one has really minded being stuck in the house!

We started with a splendiferous cello concert. Everyone played a solo from their own living room with everyone else on mute. It was surprisingly fun, and lovely to hear all the kids' playing and see everyone else's faces. Thea amused the masses by playing a early piece with great panache - the first repeat was played relatively straight with an accompaniment from Ian on the guitar, and then for the the repeat she donned shades and Ian cranked up the guitar and they played a rock version. Lots of fun!

Two whole pages of tiled cello concert attendees!

And I needn't have worried about the kids entertaining themselves. Within 2 hours of the holiday starting, they had retreated into a den in the corner of the room, so well insulated that it was a while before we realised that they were both in there listening to audio books!

The weather was warm, so like half of the UK, we put up a tent. We get a pretty cold wind across our garden, so we decided to make the most of having tent choice, and put up the nylon monster which would heat up really quickly. I'd hate to be in it in France, but it was perfect for April in the sun - got lovely and toasty!

The kids quickly decided it was too hot and played elsewhere, but slept in it for several nights.

Nathaniel spent a happy hour working his way through some Good Food Magazines and found himself some biscuits to make. He "ordered" the ingredients before the supermarket trip and then got to work, making cashew butter to start with!

The resulting biscuits are amazing - cashew, cranberry and chocolate cookies. They are far too sweet, but the cashew butter in the mix is inspired, so I can see us adapting the recipe to make something similar albeit less tongue tingly!

Our friend created an amazing game of zoom bingo for us and another family. We had to draw our own grid and then select from a variety of items on the table to populate it. There were then endlessly entertaining methods by which the items were selected until someone could cross off all the items in their grid. A very happy evening's activity.

Before this all started, I borrowed a massive box of Kapla (1000 pieces!) from the STEM Centre to take to a school. When we all got locked down, they kindly suggested that I just keep hold of it, so we are currently in possession of what seems like an endless supply of Kapla. Just the thing to entertain us for a morning.

Thea was the most ambitious and was intent on balancing things precariously.

 

Nathaniel made a series of star ships.

I needed something to balance my tea on.

And when it became hot the next day, we simply decamped outside and added a new audiobook (The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell - it's great!) to entertain us all day!

The good weather has inspired us to start our annual gardening. We are mostly just playing around, as we seem to lack the discipline to get very far, but the front allotment has been very nicely dug over and some good things planted.

Easter is a good time to eggs-periment with chocolate, so we had some ideas. We made some clay egg moulds by wrapping the clay around real and shaky eggs. 

We then attempted to fill them with chocolate. Turns out that there is a reason why people buy plastic moulds! Our chocolate stuck to the mould, or if it was cling-film lined, it didn't make an egg shape. We've ended up with some odd, crinkly splodges. They should taste nice though!

The kids were inspired by some "easter bark" which was basically just melting chocolate and then sprinkling smashed mini eggs on top. But it wasn't as simple as we originally thought. Admittedly, we did up the ante a little by deciding to embed honeycomb in it. Our first attempt at that was a bit bendy and not at all suitable (though still tasty!). The first attempt at eggs into the bark ended up looking like reinforced concrete. Lesson - don't just pour the smashed eggs and candy "dust" onto it. A little more precision is needed. The final attempt was pretty good though!

More successful was the Easter Egg hunt. A friend and I put our heads together and combined efforts to make a treasure hunt that went around our local streets and park (appropriate for our daily exercise). What resulted was a 26-clue hunt that required you to solve problems to get to the next clue. At the end, you found your egg! It was a fine 90 minutes! 

 

We only had two hitches. The clue that asked you to count the number of colours of tulips in a garden was thwarted by a sudden emergence of a multitude of previously unbudding tulips! Fortunately, the two different answers took you to a similar location, so we could get ourselves back on track with a little deduction. Some of my clues were deemed to be too impenetrable and I was forced to send improvements on to the others!

The bunny ears weren't an intrinsic part!

But we got there in the end.

Unfortunately we broke the other families - no-one else managed the whole thing (no stamina!!!). [Update - I forwarded it onto a couple of other families as well, and it is now reported that they enjoyed it, so maybe Family 2 and 3 were just having bad days.]

We attempted the crazy - a game of Mysterium over Zoom. We needed two fixed cameras, photos displayed on google drive (so that people could see the fine detail), and the ghost in a separate room, but we managed it and even though the psychics lost (they often do at the last minute!), we had lots of fun, and most importantly, proved it could work!

All in all, it's been a pretty good Easter. Easter Monday included a lovely walk in the sun and a Bond film (you can't have a bank holiday without a Bond film!), and that seems quite enough to keep us all happy!