April has been a different month for everyone. Schools and activities are still closed, going on 7 weeks now. The weather made a drastic change from down-pouring rain to summer temperatures two weeks later. Tim and Alicia were still able to get away to celebrate our 9th anniversary, thanks to Grandma and Grandpa watching the kids. As we close this month we’re hoping and praying for things to return back to normal very soon.
Cordelia continues to develop mentally and emotionally this month. We have been keeping up with school, supplemented by some video teaching by a well known home-school resource, Abeka. Cordelia has a great reading comprehension level and has been working through the beginning phonics lessons for 1st grade. She’s also been doing a small amount of writing. She has been working on her piano playing as well. Aside from the week of rain Corrie has been doing a lot of biking outside and this last week had her first experience using roller blades.
Anthony has also been doing school this month too, using the video lessons. We started him on the K5 phonics lesson 1 and it seems to be about the correct pace for him. He’s not quite as attentive as Cordelia but he’s two years younger, so that’s to be expected. He’s continuing to do reading practice though not every day and he’s getting the basic concepts of sounding out words. Outside, Anthony loves the small trampoline we bough last month. He also spontaneously decided to ride his bike without training wheels this month and had been doing an amazing job. He even learned how to start all by himself in the last week of the month. Unfortunately while Tim and Alicia were on their anniversary trip Anthony had a hard fall and gave his lips and front teeth a big bash. He’s still recovering from that so we’ve been keeping him off the trampoline the last two weeks.
Lydia continues expanding her verbal skills every day. She’s speaking in 4-5 word sentences now and is becoming more intelligible. We finally figured out one of the expressions she’s been saying a lot “Big Kid” although it sounds a lot like “bacon”. We’ve been working with her on sharing and not bossing her siblings. She can be a bit of a brute, so we’ll be continuing to work on that. We added a baby safety cover to the door handle between her “side” of the house and the office with her siblings, so that she can still be contained. She’s starting to show an interest in the potty and being a “big kid.” She successfully peed and pooped one time each over the past weekend. We’ll see if we can encourage that trend.
This month continues to be a very busy month for Alicia, though not quite as bad as last month. The management of the AWANA Sparks online support has added additional hours to her weekly tasks. She’s continuing to organize leaders to video-chat with the Sparks kids, and fielding emails and questions. Alicia also continues working from home and remains productive, busy, and engaged. It has been a pro and con working from home. It has been nice seeing the kids more during the day and getting to have some involvement in their schooling. The distractions of home life are apparent with kids in the background sometimes making it difficult to focus. Alicia has been enjoying the quieter evenings with much more time being spent out front of our house and getting to see our neighbors more often.
Tim has also been working from home for most of the month. He transitioned to his new division on April 20th. He went into work for the first week to show a physical presence for his new position. Unfortunately no one else has been in around to welcome him, so after one week of going in, he reverted back to work from home. Unfortunately things have not picked up for him in his new role. His team does have some minimal testing they continue to do but aside from a few hours during the day his work life is pretty slow and boring. Tim continues to maintain the house and yard; the raised bed plants do not seem to be surviving this year. This has been a major area of discouragement. Overall things have not been so great for Tim in his various areas of active work and home improvement.
We are grateful to be sustained by jobs and have childcare that enables us to both continue working full time. The forced experiment of homeschooling has actually been mostly a success and a fun thing to do with the kids. We have been enjoying the fun evenings at home, taking full advantage of our big backyard and cul-de-sac lot. We know that God is in control and taking care of us.
