Covid 2.0

Well, this week has been a doozy.  As you know, last Sunday Jeremy tested positive for Covid.  Immediately, he went to the basement, and I began holding down the fort on my own.  All cooking, cleaning, homework, carpool, getting ready for school and bed, all everything fell to me and it was rough.  Tuesday, we had Merrick's choir concert.  Jeremy was thankful for a valid excuse not to attend, but that also meant he had to miss his basketball game.  We made it through the concert, barely.  Merrick has grown to hate choir with the fire of 1,000 suns and while he managed to drop it for next semester, he had to make it through the concert to get a decent grade.  It was painful, but we made it.

Wednesday was a busy day with lots of driving, school pick up, horse stall cleaning, basketball, baseball, and church activities.  When I picked Merrick up from basketball, he didn't look well.  He said that they had just worked them really hard, but I knew he really didn't feel well when he said he just wanted to go home and not to his other practices or activities.  He said he felt fine, but Jeremy (from the basement) and I decided he shouldn't go anywhere else until he took a Covid test.

Thursday morning, Elsie woke up with a nasty cough.  I told her she couldn't go to preschool unless we knew she didn't have Covid.  She agreed and her test was negative.  Merrick got up and I told him that Elsie's test had been negative so his probably would be too.  I helped Merrick do this Covid test before running out the door to get CC, Elsie, and I to school. 

When I got to the school, I had texts from Merrick asking me how to read his Covid test and asking if the picture he sent, of a test the was as positive as it could possibly be, meant he was negative.  I called him and Jeremy to coordinate his move down to the basement and since Elsie's test was negative and her cough had calmed, went to preschool.

By Friday, Elsie's cough was worse and I wasn't feeling great either.  I don't know if Elsie's test was a false negative or not and I never took a test, but we decided it was time for a quiet weekend at home with lots of rest.

Since then, we have watched lots of movies and had lots of couch time and just took it easy.  Carrigan has not gotten sick, Merrick quickly rebounded and is just fine (although he still has a couple more days of quarantine) and the rest of us are on the mend. Some of us (Jeremy and CC) will be back to real life tomorrow.  Some of us (Merrick, Elsie, and I) will take one more day.  Hopefully, after that, we will all be good as new.

It wouldn't be January in the Clifford house without Covid, but thankfully January is almost over and it's time to move on.

New Year, Newish Goals

 As January barrels onward, we are working on big goals and big changes as a family.  Some of them are new, some not so new.  Jeremy continues to plug away at growing his business. He is gaining clients and experiences, but it is HARD and slow going.   I have tried to do what I can for him along the way and now I am making a big change to help further our family's goals.  After 11 years, I have decided to sell the preschool.  Truth be told, it makes me sad, but I think back to why I started the preschool in the first place and the needs that it served for my family at the time, and it just doesn't serve those needs anymore.  In just a few short months, Elsie will go to kindergarten, and I won't have any of my children in the school anymore.  My time will be freer and, now that Jeremy is self-employed and no longer on an employer health plan, I have the ability to do something that will get us insurance again.  What that is, time will tell.  It will likely be something with the school district so that I can still be home with the kids during the summers.  I had a buyer all lined up for the preschool, but unfortunately it fell through this week.  Thankfully, I had a backup buyer and hopefully we will still be able to move forward.

Other than those big, life changing goals and decisions, we are working on some small changes.  Adding in daily Kefir smoothies to get in our fruits and vegetables and improve our gut health and drinking lots of water.  Carrigan has really embraced the smoothie idea and almost always wants to be the one to make them.  On the water front, my sister bought me a gallon water bottle and I have been doing a gallon a day ever since.

We are working on a lot over here, both big and small.  Who really knows what 2023 will bring, but one thing is certain, it won't be boring.  Exhausting yes, boring no.

P.S. As I was writing this, Jeremy has been at urgent care.  He just got home and turns out he has covid.  You know, just keeping it interesting.

  

Welcome 2023 (Family Pictures)

Halfway through January, I am fully embracing the fact that it is a new year.  This week was pretty quiet as we slowly got back into the rhythm and routine of normal life.  I, for one, was grateful for the chance to get my feet back under me.  We didn't even have a basketball tournament this weekend so things have been extra quiet.  Due to the slow news week, I think today I will take the opportunity to post our Clifford family pictures from Arizona.  It's difficult to coordinate so many people and some of the little people (probably some of the big people too if we are completely honest) were less than enthusiastic about being there. The photographer did a fantastic job though and I am really happy with how that turned out.  The only bummer part is that I just, finally, got our family pictures from June up and now I am behind again.  Oh well, such is life, at least mine anyway.

  

Arizona Vacation Part 2- Goodbye 2022

 What to say about our Arizona trip that hasn't already been said? The second half of our trip was lots more park time, but the main highlight was all the family time.  We spent just about every day letting the cousins play and making up for lost time.  Here are some of my favorite cousin/family pictures from our time.  For our cousin gifts Christmas gifts this year, we gave everyone unstuffed Build-a-Bear stuffies and went the day after Christmas to get them filled.

As promised, the other big thing I wanted to talk about today actually happened two days before Christmas.  You may remember that for Jeremy's 40th birthday I promised him a skydiving trip.  Well, in Arizona we made it happen.  I had not considered that it was two days before Christmas and I had roped 3 of my mother-in-law's 4 children into participating.  If anything had happened to them, she would never have forgiven me.  Thankfully, everything went off without a hitch.  This blog will not do justice to the experience so if you get a chance to talk to Jeremy about it in person, I definitely recommend it.  What I will say is that the night before, neither of us slept.  Sometime around midnight he said, "I don't think I can do this".  I assured him that he didn't have to.  In the morning, the first thing he said to me was, "I don't think I can do this".  I again assured him he didn't have to.  He decided to go and just take it one step at a time.  We got out there about an hour later and he was still unsure.  He had signed the waiver and decided he was going to go up in the plane.  He just wasn't sure how he was coming down.  The plane left and we watched the clock.  Meanwhile, there were yard games to keep the girls busy.  About 7 minutes later we heard the plane kill its engine.  We watched, first, as about every 30 seconds a white dot appeared out of the plane until there were three and then we watched as three parachutes opened.  There was a moment of panic when Jeremy's brother, Bryce, disappeared into the sun and Jeremy's mom declared that she could only see two parachutes.   Soon, he came back into view and then we had three perfect landings.  All walked away perfectly unscathed and totally pumped.  I am not sure the last time I saw Jeremy so excited about something.  It was perfect and now we totally have no need for a midlife crisis.

It was a blast of a trip, but we are home now and plowing ahead into 2023.  While I will still post our family pictures we took while in Arizona, I am going to call that a wrap on 2022.  It was a whirlwind, and we are wiped.

Arizona Part 1

Ok.  I am a little overwhelmed here.  I missed writing the blog last week due to Christmas and I don't know how I could possibly catch up.  I think my plan is to try to catch us up to Christmas today and they next week we will finish playing catch up. So, since last I wrote, we have been enjoying our best Arizona life.  We have been soaking up the sunshine and checking out more parks than you can imagine.

Here are Arizona highlights part 1:

Gilbert Regional Park- the girls particularly loved the zip line.

Mesa Temple Lights:

The girls trying on Grammy's wigs after they saw her without hers and got a little freaked out:

Exploring Cactus Yards: A local baseball field with 8 fields that are all replica fields of famous fields (past and present).

Riding the two story carousel and ride on animals at the local mall.  This was apparently what Elsie needed to do to "complete everything on her Arizona bucket list":

Decorating gingerbread houses:

Christmas Eve: We started the day with a hike.  Full disclosure this was more of a low light of the trip. It was called the Wind Caves but we now affectionately like to call it the Wind Carve Out as, after hiking up over 800 ft, we discovered there was not a cave but just a slight carve out in the side of the mountain.  Add to that that Elsie accidently touched a cactus and at the very end she and I tripped and her face got very scratched up.  It was definitely not the best part of the trip.  That evening, we went to Jeremy's Aunt Kay's for a Mexican feast and a white elephant gift exchange.

Christmas: Christmas was magical.  Santa came first thing in the more and brought slippers for Jeremy and I, a new baseball glove for Merrick, a microscope for Carrigan, and a Chelsea Barbie and Barbie firetruck for Elsie.  He also brought the girls a huge LOL surprise set but it was too big to bring to Arizona so it is waiting for us in Oregon.  After we opened Santa gifts, we went to church.  It was a wonderful music based program.  We then came home for brunch and all the cousins came over for more presents.  After much relaxing, we ended the night going to look at Christmas lights.  We went to one house that had a huge display with songs, a video, dancing lights and even snow.

There was one other HUGE pre-Christmas highlights, but given the length of this post already, I think I will save it for next time.  You will just have to tune in next week for Arizona Part 2.