Today was a very short run. My runs are getting shorter and shorter due to taking care of some work issues.
Our Monday lunch was just lunch in my kitchen using what we had in the house. Bagels turned into tuna melts with smoked Gouda cheese, cottage cheese with fresh pear, and grapes. Not bad for just throwing lunch together.
Today wasn’t a fun Monday lunch because I had to go to work that evening. Paul was my support and had to come with. To be short, it involved an employee termination and the police. While I was taking care of business, Paul and Eli were having fun with mixing drinks!
On the nibbles menu was strawberries with clotted cream, chocolate chip and macadamia nut sandwich cookies. For the sips, it was juice with an incomplete tea set. All I have is a tea pot and one cup. Eli didn’t care, he thought it was perfect!
We had to learn how to pour the sips while keeping that little lid on 🙂
Eli said the best part of the party was drinking out of the tiny cup.
Things have started to slow down. Panic shopping has stopped and businesses are reopening. We went bowling one night. Eli had a wonderful time. We are going again, right after I purchase some bowling shoes. Not renting those things again!
Eli is still going to school 2 days a week, home schooled with me 2 days a week, and he is home on Friday’s with Paul. Paul puts his schooling in front of him, but has to concentrate on his job. So Eli really plays video games/TV until I get home.
What has changed with church? We have home church every week at home, and one Sunday a month we go to the church building for a 45 minute sacrament meeting. Just 45 minutes, so we can’t be late, or we will miss the whole thing!
June 1 everyone is required to wear masks when they are out and about. I have been forced to make masks for my employees, so when they forget theirs, I will have a back up for them to wear.
I made one for Eli, but he refuses to wear it. I have played games with him, saying he is now a PJ mask and he going to save the day and to wear the mask. He won’t. Oh, well.
Everything else is almost back to normal. Not much has happened in June, which is good.
How is the pandemic affecting us? Paul is still working from home. Eli goes with him on Fridays. Eli goes to school 2 days a week, and I’m home with him the other two days.
May 1. A few things are still a hit or miss at Sam’s. A lot has been stocked and almost back to normal.
May 4. Monday lunches are still at my house.
May 11. Monday lunch at my house. We don’t social distance very well…. okay, we haven’t social distanced since the first of April.
What has changed at the store? As of May first all fast food must wear a mask. I still feed the missionaries. Customers are allowed to dine in again, but every other table. Sales have been increasing, but not to where they have been or should be.
Other than that, things have been calming down. Still wondering how long this will last. Everyone can’t stay home for too long, right?
Look at that smile. He was thrilled to be dressed up in his cap and gown! My little Pea graduated from Kindergarten! Well, his first Kindergarten 🙂 Like I have said before, he really is supposed to be in Preschool, but he was acting out EVERY. DAY! And I was getting phone calls EVERY. DAY. We had to do something, SO finally the school and his teacher worked on ways to keep Eli engaged. They bumped him up to Kindergarten and he did fantastic! The bump up in grades helped until the middle of the year…
First day of school/ graduation
He started acting out again! His teacher started teaching him 1st grade reading and that helped a lot. Throughout the year to keep him engaged, with every assignment his teacher had him read the instructions to the class. 🙂 At the end of the year in reading groups, Eli was at the top of the group and reading 2nd grade reading books!
Mrs. Nichole has been wonderful with Eli throughout the year, I can’t thank her enough. She found ways to teach him accelerated lessons and teach the other Kindergartners their lesson at the same time.
Due to his age, I officially enrolled him into Kindergarten for next year 🙂 The school we choose is an accelerated charter school, so I think this school will be a good fit for him. He went to his placement testing and he placed almost into 1st grade. They were really impressed with him. The school said they want to keep him accelerated with his academics and they will walk down first grade curriculum to him when needed. They were also impressed with this math testing as well, he got EVERY math problem correct!
Mother’s day is always an emotional day for me. Many years I wanted to be a mother and many years after that our birth mother emailed us asking us to be parents of her little baby. That was five years ago, but I remember it VERY well.
My day started out with french toast, berries, real cream, and Kneaders brown sugar syrup. Like my goblet with orange juice? Eli picked that out for my Christmas gift. I love it!
This year my little Pea drew me a picture. He said it is a picture of a castle and a tall, tall flower. 🙂 The flower is the same flower we were cutting out of paper the other day to decorate his door. He remembered !
I truly love it!!
Since church has been cancelled, and we are doing home church, I was wondering ALL morning about my bunt cake. Every year our ward gives out bunt cakes to each sister on mother’s day. This year even with church being cancelled, they didn’t disappoint. One was left on our porch. Did I share? Nope, I ate every bite.
Paul made us dinner. He grilled salmon and topped with a honey mustard sauce. He made coconut rice out of jasmine rice. The salad was an apple, pear, and cranberry salad. He is a really good cook!
How has this pandemic affected our Monday lunches? They now include Paul which as been fun, but they are in my kitchen instead. We get take out at any fast food that has a drive thru.
Paul is still working from home. We think for the rest of the month.
What has changed at the store? I now eat breakfast alone. I really miss my breakfasts with my dad.
And since we don’t have customers to purchase cookies, I must take one for the team and eat one so they don’t go to waste. 🙂
April 8. Every time I go grocery shopping I go down the rice isle to see if they have any rice, and today I finally found Jasmine rice!
Stay home orders for the elderly. Paul and I have been grocery shopping for both our parents. Not as much for mine. They don’t stay home. 🙂 I called my parents asking if they needed anything and my dad said he already went to Costo for ice cream and they were out so he went to Arctic Circle to get some. Priorities. 🙂
April 17. Sams had stocked up on toilet paper.
April 20 Sam’s sold out of EVERY pack of toilet paper. People are still in a panic for toilet paper.
Most shelves have been filled. My essentials must not be part of the panic shopping. Mascarpone cheese is a staple in our house and they never ran out of it!
How has this pandemic affected my parents. It has forced them to stay home and rest like retired people are supposed to do. Funny that they social distance in their own home. I had to laugh.
April 20. Costco put a maze in front to keep people 6 feet apart. Again, I have to laugh at all of this.
April 27. The Costco line. Weaved in the maze…
And lined up around the building!
Crazy! Wondering how long this pandemic is going to last.
Paul was up early to check on the hive in our yard. He was really worried. The hive was crazy! He didn’t want to get close to take video or pictures, because of the wild bees. Without a queen they were flying EVERYWHERE. They were flying around the house, buzzing around the windows and doors, and many were landing and hanging out on the back of the house. It was quite scary.
We needed to get a queen quickly. Paul called Knights bees to see if they had a saskatraz queen. They had one and told us to come down and get her.
Paul went into the garage to get the queen to take with us, and….
And she was was alive!!! She must have warmed up in the garage over night. Good thing Paul put the plug in the cage!
We fed her some left over sugar water from last night. How do you spoon feed a bee? With a toothpick!
We dipped the toothpick in the water and put it in the cage. I was surprised it worked. She ran over and started eating the droplets of sugar water.
She was getting very nervous, so we put her in the little hive on our kitchen island while we called Knight bees. We weren’t sure if the hive would accept her, because they were without a queen for some time. They told us to just put her in.
Again no pictures, because of the wild bees. Paul duct taped his pant legs shut, and taped his veil on because the bees were acting so wild he was worried they would fly up an article of clothing a sting him.
Again, no pictures 🙂 After the queen was put in the hive, a few minutes later ALL the bees went into the hive. All the bees that were hanging out on the side of the house flew into the hive. It was pretty amazing. It was pretty amazing the bees were so lost without a queen. Next time – if there is a next time- I will make sure video is taken.
It’s finally spring and warm enough to go pick up our bees!
We purchased our bees from Knights bees.
Look at all those bees! Each bee bus has 10,000 bees. This year we purchased 4 hives worth of bees. So 4 bee buses with 40,000 bees!
We are going to put 3 hives at Paul’s parents house and the other one at our house. I’m a little nervous to have a full hive in our yard with Eli running around, so we will see how it goes this summer.
Eli feeling all the bees legs that are poking out 🙂
Several bees were flying around in the jeep as we were driving home. This is the part I dislike, having 40,000 bees in the back and all the stow away bees flying around.
Paul surprised me with my very own veil. Last year I was without and was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt filming, now when I’m covered in bees I will have a little protection.
He even purchased some gloves for me as well!
Where was the 5 year old? Feeding the horses, of course!
With the first hive we tried something different. Instead of shaking them out, we just set the bees in and let them crawl out. In a week we will come back to see if they crawled out and if this is an effective way of putting bees into a hive.
We removed some of the frames.
That was easy enough. Now my turn to put bees in a hive! 🙂
I started with the queen bee. Removed the cork, put the candy cork in and placed her in the hive.
The I dumped the bees in. That was pretty fun!
We did the same thing with the third hive.
Each hive is a little different. Each hive opens differently, has a different size of frame and different breed of bee.
The hive above has Russian bees. The hive is a simple, traditional hive with long frames. A light top with a rock on it 🙂 They all have rocks on top.
Our second hive is the first hive we had last year. We put Carniolan bees in there. This is my favorite hive. It’s so cute, with lots of detail carved into the wood. This hive has smaller frames.
Our third hive has Saskatraz bees. This is our largest hive, has smaller and larger frames and opens differently. This hive will have a post of it’s own!
We left to our house to do the last hive.
It was quite late when we got home. I put Eli to bed and Paul decided to put the bees in the hive by himself. He was doing fine, and was almost done, when a bee got into his veil. Paul dropped the queen in her box trying to let out the trapped bee.
It was so cold out, we didn’t find her in time and we lost her. We found her crumpled up body and put it back into her cage, put the cork back in and put her in the garage. We are hoping Knights bees have extra queens. We will have to call in the morning.
Our hive is complete, minus the queen. This is a smaller hive, but significantly larger than the cute little hive last year. This hive is small, but long , has smaller frames and lots of wood carved details in the side. The breed of bees in this hive are saskatraz as well.
It was a very busy day, but we got all 4 hives done!
Five years ago we were sealed as a family. Time has flown!
Every year we do something special for his anniversary and try to make it memorable for him. I didn’t know this little boy remembered last year. He told me he remembered the pouring rain causing me to slip up the stairs and smashing the cupcakes. He remembered us being a family that day eating dinner outside the temple. I hope he continues to remember these fun anniversaries.
This year we let Eli plan his day. For dinner he chose to go to Nielson’s.
Due to everything being closed, we had to go to a restaurant with a drive thru and it was packed. Look at the drive thru line!
After dinner we went to Harmons to pick up his cake. They decorated it just as Eli instructed. It was too cute to have a 5 year old describe all the flowers and colors he wanted and what he wanted it to look like. I wish I got it on video.
This is one happy boy! He was so excited and couldn’t believe they made a cake just for him! We packed up the cake and headed out to the temple.
This year we went to the Oquirrh temple.
Our little Pea!
The temple grounds were closed this year with everything that is going on, so we only we could take were outside the temple gates. This year was also simple with just dinner and cake, but I hope he remembers today.
Love you little Pea! Thank you for coming to our family and making us a family of 3!
