Fall projects wrapping up, celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving!

October is marching right along! Kids are in a pretty good groove with remote schooling, both Lynsey and Nathan are doing really well with managing all their own assignments. Adam is getting into a great rhythm with his in-person schooling and doing really well. His teacher seems to think he is getting almost as much academics done in 2.5 hours as he did in full days, he is focusing well and his repetition at least up until now has not been a huge hinderance to him. His verbal repetition has gone way down - like there are days where it hardly happens at all! He is still doing repetitive movements, but a lot of them are much less disruptive than the verbal ones. It's funny how quickly you can get used to not having that constant disruption, I easily take for granted how easy it's been with him lately - it only takes him to have one bad day for me to remember that this is not a give in! It's definitely encouraging in any case. Here's hoping it's not just a blip in the cycle and that he will cycle up again soon - I am always hopeful for an actual lasting trend instead:-).

We were able to have a Canadian Thanksgiving meal last weekend with our friends the Vanees! The Daveys were going to come, but Kristy had gotten exposed to someone who tested positive earlier in the week, so they did the right thing and stayed home until she could get tested (she was negative thankfully!). We still sent them some dinner and they shared some veggies they had made, so they were as much a part of the meal as they could be under the circumstances! 

Brian just had a week off and we finished the door painting project, yay! We put the paint supplies away for hopefully a very long time! All the doors in our house are now white, except the closet doors in the bedrooms (except ours), which we are actually replacing soon. We got our carpets cleaned, and had a bunch of garbage hauled away - such a great feeling! Of course this feeling of accomplishment never lasts very long, but I did enjoy it while it lasted:-).

Brian's parents are coming to visit us in a few weeks! We are looking forward to their visit. They even agreed to watch the kids for a few days so Brian and I could have a little getaway, very exciting! Now we just need to work out exactly when and where we should go. I'm thinking Los Angeles, relatively short flight and not too expensive, and it will be warmer than here so that's a plus! Slowly but surely life is continuing on. The two things that are the most abnormal for us still is obviously school still being remote and the Canadian border being closed. Slowly but surely more and more people are out and about, they are even opening movie theaters at 25% capacity starting this Friday. It's an interesting thing to watch, as Covid numbers are not going down, actually going up a bit recently, and yet more things are opening up. I understand that businesses can't stay closed forever, but it's just such a strange thing to watch. People are over being shut down, so I guess we will just tolerate higher virus numbers now?? I'm glad I don't have to be making these decisions is all I can say, there really isn't a good answer until there is a vaccine - maybe not even then.

 

Family Photos by Melanie Smith Studios

Here are the family photos as promised! Definitely not the picture of perfection. My goal in life is that one day we will take just one picture where each of us are looking our best. Just one, that's all I am aspiring to. I believe that it's possible for it to happen. I see other families take photos with several poses of all perfect smiles, everyone looking at the camera, not a hair out of place. I can see that this is something that other families achieve, and I have to believe we can get there, too. 2020 is clearly not the year for such lofty goals, though. 

Fall life!

I guess I haven't had much to write about lately, seeing as it's been over three weeks since my last post. I am also not taking many pictures these days, not much to take pictures of! Brian finished the patio doors but I don't have an after picture of that yet for some reason, just an "in progress" picture. We have both been working on a lot of projects the last while. The door painting project is oh so close to being finished, we did the boys' room today and tomorrow we will tackle Lynsey's door, then next weekend we just have the bathroom door upstairs and we will be DONE painting doors. Yay! We ordered painted closet doors for the bedrooms so at least when those arrive no painting will be required, but I guess we won't be truly done the project until those are installed. Then every door in this house will be white. Finally. Looking forward to the end!

We did family pictures yesterday, and I definitely wasn't looking forward to the experience. It was far less stressful than it has been in the past! The kids did great, honestly Jasper was the only one that was even a bit annoying:-/. I haven't seen any of them yet but I hope they turned out okay. We have done a lot of shopping for clothes and everyone's been getting haircuts, we are all ready for the Fall now!

I went on a hike yesterday with Elisse and Kristy, it was a beautiful day! We are enjoying the last nice days of the year. Hopefully the rain comes back slowly to get us used to it again. We decided to book a mini holiday to Phoenix over New Years. Since we can't go back to Canada without quarantine, we decided we should do something a bit special for a while so we will stay at a resort there for 4 nights. It won't be super hot (average temps in December are in the high teens) but apparently it's a great time of year to do some hiking in the desert. And I do think the kids will do a bit of swimming in the outdoor heated pools at the resort, especially since there are hot tubs by the pools. It should be a lot of fun to just get away for a bit! Hopefully the flight is okay, the kids are excited to go and hopefully the extended mask wearing won't be too much of an issue!