July 2020, Part 1 - Coronavirus Quarantine & 4th of July

We usually go to Utah for the 4th of July, but because of the quarantine we weren’t able to drive up to Utah this year. We still wanted to do something fun as a family, so we decided we’d have a camp out in our own yard and set up a movie with a projector. Tyler decided that our new front yard grass would be big enough for a couple of our smaller tents. Tyler and I created a screen with PVC pipes and an old sheet and hung it on the side of our house. Here are a couple pictures from our tent which was behind the tent that the girls stayed in. They loved the led lights that were in their tent. You can see the size of the screen and movie we watched from inside the tents.

It was so fun and different to have the stay-cation. We ended up sleeping in the tents for two nights. We had started watching all the Harry Potter movies, so we watched the 2nd one over the two nights that we were outside. I took a picture of the set up during the day. It was really hot even in the middle of the night so I didn’t get a lot of good sleep, but the girls said they liked it and enjoyed sleeping outside. On the 4th of July, we did a BBQ with my parents and swam in our pool. Aubrey wanted to make dessert, so she made a red, white, and blue dessert pizza which was delicious. We ate it while we played games. Even though we weren’t with extended family and we didn’t get to see any fireworks, it was still a really fun holiday spent with our immediate family.

We still have church at home, but for the holiday, I dressed up with red, white, and blue colors and wanted a picture with my girls. I love that we get to have church at home. Tyler is able to bless and pass the sacrament every week and we share a spiritual message or watch a church video. I love being able to feel the spirit as we have church at home. I love that the prophet has prepared us with the home-centered, church-supported gospel learning. We’ve grown a lot as we’ve studied at home together and since we’re not going anywhere, we’ve been really good about reading scriptures every day and studying the gospel together. I really do love the gospel and I love my family.

Some of our Sunday activities have included doing puzzles and cross stitch, but the biggest one that we’ve spent our time on is indexing. Our stake asked us to do indexing weekly and our ward had an indexing challenge for the month of July that had everyone, even the primary kids, indexing names for family history. Our ward indexed and reviewed over 15,000 names, which was awesome. Our family did hundreds of names every week throughout the month. It was a perfect Sunday activity. I also wanted to include a picture of the new curtains that we purchased for our tall windows in our dining room. They used to be an orange/gold color but they had a lot of tears in them, so we got these new maroon curtains that I love.

 

We continued our chalk drawings to cheer up people who walk by our house. I drew this picture from Emperor’s New Groove, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. And I love the quote too. I’ve been saying it long before it even fit with this time of quarantine. Aubrey decided to do a drawing of Forky from Toy Story 4 and I thought it turned out so cute.

Tessa’s friends, Ethan and Taryn, had a double surprise birthday party, so she was able to go and swim and hang out with friends one night. I got this picture of all of the kids from one of the moms and thought it was pretty cute. Tessa’s on the end of kids sitting on the edge of the pool. They had fun with body paint, a piñata, and chicken fights in the pool. These kids are excited for middle school even though they don’t get to go back to school quite yet, so they’re enjoying any time they have to get together.

The girls still love to bake and cook as often as possible. In July, Aubrey had multiple chances to create in the kitchen. One night we had a bake-off with the missionaries in our ward. After a zoom spiritual thought that we had with the missionaries, they asked what the girls do to keep busy, so when we told them they like to bake, the missionaries came up with the idea to make cookies and have an exchange that night. The problem was our girls couldn’t decide on one type of cookie, so the three younger girls each made a different kind. Aubrey chose coconut macaroons and tried a recipe for the first time. They were very yummy. Tessa made lemon and Taryn made chocolate chip. They were all very good, so we gave the missionaries a plate of a variety of cookies when they brought us over a plate of chocolate chip cookies that they had made. It was fun to do something a little different and to be able to share our treats with someone else. Aubrey also made her very own caramel sauce one night for a caramel frosting she wanted to make. This was the caramel sauce before we added it to her other recipe. She was very proud of the perfect caramel color.

She was making the caramel frosting for chocolate cupcakes. Here was the final product of chocolate cupcakes with caramel frosting and caramel sauce drizzle. They were delicious cupcakes that she had made just because. They really like making desserts, but it’s been hard for me, Tyler, and Abby because we’re trying to eat healthier and having goodies in the house all the time has been hard for our self-control - especially when they look and smell and taste so good!

The girls watched the entire series of Kids Baking Championship, so for weeks Aubrey begged to make eclairs. One night while and Grandma and Grandpa were over to play games, we let her finally attempt making eclairs. She found a recipe and with the help of Tessa made eclairs from scratch. I remembered to take some pictures while she made them and also of the final product. She filled the eclairs with a homemade pastry cream and dipped them in her own chocolate ganache. They were delicious.

  

The Kasallis boys like to bake too. One day the kids were playing together at their house and they talked Audrey into letting them have a cupcake wars. Teagan and Aubrey baked together and made berry cupcakes. Sam and Taryn baked together and made cherry cupcakes. They even brought some back home for me and Tyler to try. 

AJ, Tessa, and Abby were the taste testers and judges. They said they were both good and very sugary which cupcakes made by these kids always seem to end up that way by the time they add a filling, frosting, and toppings. At least they have fun being creative, learning to bake, and working together in teams. I had another girls night with my friends to celebrate Jessica’s birthday. Tessa had been wanting to bake a cake, but with all the desserts in our house, I kept putting her off. But once we planned for the girls night at my house, I let Tessa bake the birthday cake. She made a chocolate cake from scratch and wanted to do a crumb coat and fancy frosting decoration, but we didn’t have enough chilling time, so the frosting wasn’t as clean as she would’ve liked. Jessica was very sweet about it and we loved the taste of the cake. Tessa even made a homemade marshmallow fondant that she used on the top where she wrote Jessica’s name. 

Our garden continues to grow and we love watching how tall the sunflowers are getting. Abby and I play volleyball regularly in the evening on our fake grass and we accidentally knocked off one of the sunflower leaves and the girls and I were shocked at how huge it was. I took this picture with Tessa holding it in front of her face to put it on Facebook. I also took the next picture and a video showing how tall our tallest sunflower grew. I’m glad I got the picture when I did because the very next day after I took this picture, the wind was really strong and it made all of our sunflowers really droopy, so this was the last day that it stood this tall even though the flower wasn’t fully grown yet.

June 2020, Part 2 - Coronavirus Quarantine & Father's Day

The girls did more chalk drawings in June. It was easy to find examples of what to draw online, so the girls would look up Disney chalk drawings about the quarantine and then copy what they liked. Tessa did this drawing of Olaf one evening and I’m glad we took a picture when we did even though it’s kind of dark because it rained the next day sadly. He still lasted a little longer, but it wasn’t as clear as this first night. I’m always super impressed with Tessa’s drawing abilities. She’s so talented! Tessa also did this drawing of Sleeping Beauty. There are so many creative drawings and quotes that go with Disney and the quarantine.

Taryn picked the drawing of the Little Mermaid and did a great job recreating it on her own. The quote says, “Look at this stuff. Isn’t it neat?” The white stuff under Ariel is supposed to be toilet paper because at the beginning of the virus, people starting buying and hoarding toilet paper for some reason, so stores were bare and people were worrying about having toilet paper. So a lot of quarantine jokes have to do with toilet paper now. Luckily we had our 3-month, Sam’s club pack supply of toilet paper, so we weren’t ever worried about it, but once we did have to buy more, Tyler did have to stand in line to get one pack because the stores started limiting how many you could buy and they would have workers hand them out one at a time as people waited in line for it. It’s been crazy. Aubrey chose the Tangled drawing with the quote, “Oh you’re tired of social distancing? That’s cute.” Once Aubrey wrote the quote and started the actual picture, she got bored and didn’t finish, so I went out one day and attempted to finish it for her. I’m not a very good artist, but I did my best to copy the example online. I was happy with how it was turning out until I finished her face and realized it didn’t really look like Rapunzel at all. Her face looked pretty manly to me. Well, it was a good try and with the hair, people could still understand what I was going for. The girls had a good laugh anyway and decided it was the eyebrows that did it. They’re just too heavy. I was happy with how the long braided hair and flower around her window frame turned out.

After the next rainstorm that cleared away our drawings, Tessa did a new one with Dory that turned out awesome. She was a little sad when someone rode through it the very next day on their bike or skateboard and smeared a couple blue lines through it, but it lasted for quite awhile on our sidewalk regardless. Aubrey and Taryn had also done their own chalk drawings that I didn’t get pictures of. They were just their own creations with uplifting quotes like “we’re all in this together” and “it’s going to be ok” with hopes that as people walked along our sidewalk, it would make them smile. Taryn did another online enrichment camp through the school and this one was a camping/s’mores class. They spent the entire week working on making a solar oven out of a shoe box so that on the last day of the week, they could cook s’mores in their homemade oven. She was very proud of her box and happy to share the treat with her family. We’re not sure how well the contraption actually worked in “cooking” the s’mores, but with the Texas summer heat, it doesn’t take long for a marshmallow and piece of chocolate to melt no matter what kind of box it’s in. Everyone enjoyed the treat and Taryn had fun creating the box.

Abby made a big deal of her half-birthday on June 19th. Since the other girls are always looking for a reason to bake in the kitchen, they asked if they could make her a cake for her half-birthday. She of course was very agreeable to that idea, so they made her a chocolate strawberry cake complete with homemade chocolate frosting and fresh strawberries on top. Abby celebrated her half-birthday with a photo shoot. She loves to take pictures and edit them using filters and stuff. She took this black and white one right outside our house by our roses.

 

She always takes a ton of pictures and I pick out my favorites to include in the blog and have on my phone to show off or put on Facebook. These were a couple more of my favorites. I can’t believe that Abby is now 15 and a half. Half way to 16 years old! She’s so grown up. I love how much we hang out and how well we get along. We are great friends and I love that we can talk about anything together. She’s one great teenager!

The week before Father’s Day, our ward put together a drive-by social where the families could drive through the church parking lot and get a root beer float courtesy of the young women organization. We had three stands each manned by one family so we could practice social distancing. Abby, Tessa and I were in charge of one of the stands. I wish I had taken more pictures, but I did get a picture of Tessa as she used the down time to decorate the parking lot with a Happy Father’s Day sign. The families who drove by were very appreciative of the ice cream treat and it was fun to say hi to our ward friends. On Father’s Day we had our usual Kasibbons dinner and we added to the fun by playing a game of bunco. It was so much fun. We set up four tables for our 15 people to play.

 

I was happy that my parents were able to attend too and I could spend Father’s Day with my dad. Bunco is a dice game that’s perfect for large groups where you switch tables and partners after every round, so you get to visit with everyone while you play the game. It has treats for the top winner, the top loser, and other silly reasons, so it was perfect for our two families with a lot of kids that are very competitive. Everyone said it was a lot of fun. I had planned it out for a couple of weeks and was very happy that it was a huge success.

We celebrated the dads with lots of cakes. Audrey made a lemon poppyseed cake and a chocolate Texas sheet cake, so we grabbed a picture with the three dads before digging into dessert. It was a great Sunday. We love our Dads! The girls spent a day learning how to cross stitch and had a fun time picking out designs and working on the pattern of a small cross stitch design. They got the hang of it pretty quickly, but it didn’t take long for the mess to take over my enter dining room table.

Abby picked up cross stitch later the same day, but wasn’t in the picture because she’s been taking summer school classes. She decided to get ahead on her required credits, so she took Health and Speech as a summer class and after five weeks of daily zoom conferences, she aced both classes and now has those requirements complete for high school. Here’s some pictures from another photo shoot that she did with her friend Sabrina. She sent me her favorites and I love them all!

I dropped them off at a church up the hill from our house where they took most of their pictures. The church has these beautiful blue windows and Abby really wanted to take pictures there. As they walked home from the church, they took other pictures along the way. I love her beautiful smile and her happy demeanor. She’s such a beauty - inside and out.

 

Sam Kasallis’s birthday was the end of June. He’s been very into Harry Potter lately, so he had a Harry Potter themed birthday. We dressed up and ate Harry Potter themed food. I even made pumpkin pasties two ways - a sweet one that tasted like pumpkin pie, and a savory one that I thought tasted like garlic bread, but no one else really liked that one because of the pumpkin texture. We took a picture of both of our families in our costumes. I love this picture so much! Everybody was so in character, from the kids with their wands, to the adults who were the professors and of course Tony as Voldemort. So funny! Abby dressed up as Professor Trelawny, the spacey divination teacher, but the funny thing to me was she looked exactly like my childhood best friend, Bente, in high school. Just the way her hair was and the scarf and glasses, every time I would look up at her, I would see Bente and just smile. I had to send a message to her the next day to let her know how much my daughter reminded me of how she used to look in high school. It really was a fun evening.

Abby has been doing volleyball still for school. They did a couple of weeks of in person practices, but then ended up going back to zoom workouts by the end of the month. One of the requirements was a square piece of wood that could be leaned against a wall for some volleyball drills. But when Abby told Tyler what she needed, he ended up making an awesome hitter’s box complete with wheels so she can move it around easily. It’s so nice to have a dad who’s handy and likes to build things. She’s really liked having something to hit the volleyball against that’s not the side of the house. We still play a lot of games as a family and one day we played a goofy game called Quelf that has you do silly things. Abby had to wrap her head with toilet paper until she rolled a four or something like that, so I had to get a picture of our teenager playing a silly game with her family.

Our final picture for June is of Taryn who got all dressed up fancy and went over to the Kasallis house to help Sam and Teagan serve dinner to AJ and his girlfriend, Brynn, who were having a date. I talked her into wearing the black dress because I told her that usually servers  or waiters wear black and white, but the first thing she told me after she got home was as soon as she walked into their house in her black dress, the boys came downstairs in their blue suits. Oh well, it was just the thought I had, but didn’t remember that their boys currently have blue suits, not black. They had fun and did a great job. Coming up with creative ways to stay busy and not get bored has been the thing of the summer. We are very glad to have good friends and neighbors who our kids can play with so they can still have a fun summer even though we’re all stuck at home.

June 2020, Part 1 - Coronavirus Quarantine & Chloe Visits El Paso

One of the benefits of staying home all the time is the extra time we have together with our family. Tyler taught Abby how to change a tire when his car had a flat. He showed her how to take off the flat tire and put on the donut. It made me think this is what a teenager daddy-daughter date looks like. Abby was very proud of herself. It was a good refresher for me too.

When my parents drove home from San Antonio after visiting Scott’s family, they brought Chloe back with them. My girls were so excited to have their cousin here to visit. They had so much fun together playing, swimming, doing crafts, and playing with the bunnies. One day they did a cupcake wars. Chloe worked with Tessa and Aubrey and Abby worked with Taryn. 

Grandma and Grandpa Black and Tyler and I were the taste testers/judges. Tessa, Chloe, and Aubrey decorated their strawberry cupcakes with decorative white chocolate and Abby and Taryn made a s’mores cupcake with marshmallow and graham crackers on top. It was fun to see their creativity and taste their creations. They had so much fun baking.

The kids played with the bunnies a lot while Chloe was here. They would take them out to the grass in the front yard and let them run and hop all around. The bunnies are getting so big.

Chloe loved holding the bunnies and would sometimes take them out by herself. It really helped my girls keep up their interest in their pets too. Chloe and Taryn did chalk drawings one afternoon, but it was so hot, we had to bring out a blanket to sit on to keep from burning our skin on the cement.

The kids did a couple summer camps online in the month of June. Taryn picked a Zumba dance class, so I grabbed a picture while she and Teagan exercised during one class. She had a lot of fun and thought it was funny that her teacher thought Teagan was her brother when she saw him dancing in the background.

One day the girls wanted to have a spa day, so we pulled out all the face masks, nail polish and foot spas so everyone could have a relaxing time. Everyone enjoyed the face masks the most and they even invited Sam and Teagan to participate in the spa day, so we had to get a picture to send to their parents. They thought it was cool.

We spent a couple days doing Lego challenges while Chloe was here. The girls spent the morning organizing all the Legos by color and then the first small challenge was to create an animal. Aubrey made a horse and Taryn made a pair of monkeys.

Chloe was the winner with the sea turtle and Tessa also created a monkey.

A big challenge that they worked on next was temples. Here are the pictures of all of the girls together. The first with their animal creations, and the second with their temples. We were short on white Lego pieces, but the girls were creative in coming up with their temple creations.

I really liked Taryn’s take. Besides the temple, she also built a baptismal font and the car and snack space to go with it. 

Aubrey and Tessa’s were both heavy on the white pieces and clear windows. I loved how you could see inside. And I really loved how they all created the angel Moroni differently, but they all looked so good.

Chloe was left with other not very many white pieces, but she did an awesome job improvising. And like I said before, such creativity for the angel Moroni. Another big build they did was spaceships. Chloe did a space station complete with planets.

Tessa’s spaceship had slides and smaller ships that could take off from the bigger one. Aubrey not only created a spaceship, but also the parking garage where it was kept when it wasn’t flying.

We had so much fun with Chloe. They watched movies every night and switched up who slept on which bed, so they didn’t have to fight over who got to be closest to Chloe. We played a lot of games and they swam every day. She was with us for almost two weeks. I know her family missed her, but we loved having her. Next time, we promised Nevla that we’d send Abby to help at her house when we take Chloe away from them. Chloe went home telling her family all the fun things she got to do. One of the things she told her mom was that they can bake any time they want at my house. That’s been kind of a new thing now that we’re stuck at home, but it really has helped the girls be more confident and independent in the kitchen. It leaves for big messes, but it keeps the girls happy an entertained for hours and we usually get yummy, edible desserts out of the deal. We love our family!