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!