7 Quick Takes about Unconventional Social Outings, Out of Season Holidays, and New Developments in Urgent Care

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

On Saturday, a few of the kids and I took a walk with my neighbor and her boys. On opposite sides of the street.

A little unconventional, but it was really nice to be able to see someone who wasn't in 2-dimensional space over Zoom, and it worked out just fine to chat just a little louder than usual so you could do it across the road.

Phillip kept making fun of how weird it was, but the next day on Easter we were driving to a nature hike a few miles away and saw people visiting with their extended family in camping chairs on opposite sides of the driveway, so I'm not the only weirdo out there!

—2—

How was your Easter?

In our house, Easter is kind of a joint custody arrangement where the Easter Bunny gets Saturday and Jesus gets Sunday.

On Saturday we hid the kids' Easter baskets and ate jellybeans until we were sick of them, and on Sunday we got out our scriptures and read about the important events of the Garden of Gethsemane, the crucifixion, and Jesus' resurrection.

Our church did a series of Bible videos a few years ago so we paused between reading to watch the appropriate video. Overall, it took a few hours.

Some years we've followed Holy Week in real time and learned about what happened each day, but I liked going through it sequentially as a family all at once. I think we all gained a new appreciation for the Savior and learned to see Easter in a new way.

—3—

We didn't get around to dying Easter eggs over the weekend, and since it's not like we were going anywhere we decided to just wait until Monday.

Years ago we ditched the traditional dye kits for psyanky eggs. You've probably seen them, even if you don't know the name.

Pysanky is a Ukranian art made by drawing layers of designs on your egg with melted wax and dipping it in different colors. They're usually Ukranian folk designs that look like this:

These are NOT ours, they're just for your reference.

We learned about them years ago during our educational summer vacation and we've been hooked ever since the first year we decided to try them.

It's a lot of fun, but also a lot of work if you have young kids who need to be supervised around an open flame. Be prepared.

Here are our eggs from this year. First, there were the traditionalists:

Me, my 15-year-old, and 6-year old.

Then there were the free-formers, who rejected previously-held notions of line and structure:

The 3-year-old.

Some of us experimented with color. Making a landscape is harder than it appears when you've got to think in reverse to get the colors you want:

The 11-year-old.

When my violinist daughter started making a music staff (on left) and her younger sister started copying her (on right,) I tried to tell her that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. She was still annoyed:

My 14-year-old and 8-year-old.

This one was probably my favorite. Phillip made a resurrected Savior emerging from the tomb:

My 39-year-old.

Perhaps Certainly us doing our own thing with psyanky eggs is a bit of cultural appropriation, but like I said: imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I hope no real Psyanky artists were harmed in the making of this blog post.

—4—

During self-isolation, we been toying with the idea of doing an entire week of holidays, celebrating a different holiday every day just to keep things interesting.

We decided this was a good week to do it, since we were already doing Easter eggs on Monday:

Tip: put your finished eggs on a stand and they look so much more legit.

On Tuesday, we celebrated Halloween by watching Hocus Pocus and making these muffins (the kids call them 'Halloween muffins' because they have orange flecks of shredded carrots in them.)

On Wednesday we made sugar cookies and watched a Christmas movie:

On Thursday, we celebrated St. Patrick's Day with green shamrock-shaped pancakes for lunch. (This worked out nicely since the real St. Patrick's Day was totally forgotten this year since it happened just around the time the entire country shut down.)

Today, I think we'll do Valentine's Day and figure out some activities for the kids to be really nice to each other, because they've been at each other's throats lately due to social distancing.

—5—

Amid the fighting, though, the kids do play a lot together.

The three youngest have been out in the yard, inventing an elaborate game that appears to involve camping.

The 3-year-old must have been gathering firewood somewhere.

Unfortunately, disaster struck when they took these towels (I think they were pretending they were sleeping bags?) and hung them on the deck railing with a rock on top to keep them from falling off.

My 6-year-old forgot about the rock, yanked on his towel, and the the rock fell on his head, necessitating a trip to urgent care to get it stapled shut.

—6—

When we got home from urgent care, I went straight to bed. It was 8 PM.

An evening can be surprisingly emotionally draining when it involves watching someone staple your sweet kindergartner like a term paper (seriously, they have a little plastic stapler they press on their head to insert the staples.)

He got a popsicle afterward and was fine, but sometimes I don't know if I'm going to make it.

You know how Abraham Lincoln looked 40 years older after the Civil War than he did when he was sworn in as president? That's me.

I love that kid to pieces, which is exactly why it's so hard for me to see how accident-prone he is.

If someone gets injured, it's him. If someone throws something, he's in the way. If he falls off the couch, he not only falls off but splits an eyebrow open. This boy has had more medical emergencies than almost all our other children combined. In fact, he was making us go gray before he was even born.

At urgent care on Thursday they were asking the standard intake questions and said: "Does he have any chronic conditions?"

For a split-second I wanted to answer "Yes! Injury and accident LOVE him!"

—7—

Although I'm well-versed in visiting urgent care, we haven't been there recently so there's an all-new social distancing protocol for us to get used to.

When we walked in, a guy at a card table in the hallway took my phone number (which I gave him from a line taped on the floor 6 feet away) and sent us back to wait in the car.

A few minutes later, registration called with the standard admittance questions, and then the doctor called and asked me to text a picture of the wound to determine whether we needed to come in.

After she decided we did, she sent us back to the card table where we were directed to sanitize our hands, get masks, and then we were allowed in the waiting room.

Change freaks me out, so even though these new precautions are a good thing, they still unsettle me. On top of all that, I was also worried I'd forgotten how to drive.

I'm not exaggerating. I use the car for approximately five minutes every 10 days going to and from the grocery store, and that's basically it. My car has 3/4 of a tank of gas, and I filled in up in March.

ANYWHO. We all probably feel a little weird right now, so let's just watch this video of babies riding Roombas.

It's going to be alright.


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