February 2021 in Review

I’m starting to write this as a polar vortex is engulfing the country. It’s a bit weird to have weather in the 20s. But, at the least the first week of February has gone well so far. I’m a little curious to see how the rest of the month will go.

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February Week 1

I think most of these pictures are ever so slightly out of order.

I had the Awkward Unicorns over to decorate mini cakes, and they had a lot of fun decorating and laughing as they added way too much frosting to those little cakes. They were fun to eat afterwards, and they all enjoyed it.

I may have sent a rather obnoxious text to one of my children hinting the recycling bin needed to be emptied, and gotten ever more obnoxious with my reminders to take it out.

Said child might have remarked I’m like a 5 year old sometimes. I only grinned in response. I was not sorry.

In school we’ve started reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin as we’re starting on the “Fight over slavery” (I’m calling it that so I can go back earlier than the Civil War and get into the whole legislative fight to start with). I was originally going to have us read Roots, but I wasn’t sure I could stand up to what I was sure would be descriptive scenes of the brutalization of the people. I knew the same things would be happening in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but not as graphically described, and emotionally I can handle that a bit better. Also, Uncle Tom’s Cabin does have that whole idea of being one of the causes of the Civil War (according to American legend). We’re 1/4 of the way in and it’s been interesting to discuss it so far.

I snuck a picture of Superman working on Teaching Textbooks. I’m amused at how much homeschool curriculum has changed over the years, and curriculum completely on a phone amuses me still.

We went and played laser tag on Sunday, it’s amazing how empty things are on Super Bowl Sunday. I also discovered it’s really hard to get a good non-blurry picture before we headed in there.

I got a huge laugh out of the sign on the mirror telling me going to the bathroom is the original social distancing, like what’s the point of this statement?

February Week 2

In all honesty, the second week of February is kind of a blur for me because of week 3….

But, we finished learning about Norway with a lesson on Edward Munch and recreating The Scream. Which the kids had all sorts of opinions on.

Then we made two meals from countries, now I’m trying to remember exactly what countries they are without consulting my notes. I think it’s pirogis from Latvia (and like half a dozen other countries) and some new version of meatballs, which I can’t remember where it was from….

I got Jeff a murder mystery subscription box to solve mysteries each month and he was having fun solving it with Superman. I need to try my hand at solving the two months worth of mysteries we have, because I’m curious how I’ll do.

I have an astonishingly large number of pictures of Leezard sleeping. We took her to a doggy neurologist to figure out what’s going on with her seizures. It boiled down to, finding the right medicine for stopping them unless we want to pay $6000 for an MRI, which is crazy a lot of money.

Then the week ended with the start of our winter storm. I spent Saturday going out and taking tons of pictures of the frozen trees, flowers, fences, and a few trees that were already breaking under the weight of the ice.

February Week 3

The great snowstorm, the first time Snowpocalypse hasn’t been used sarcastically by Texans.

For the second time in a month, we got more than an inch of snow, which then turned into single-digit temperatures with windchill in the negatives. Then friends and family started losing power. Then people started losing water.

Meanwhile, we never lost power, but all the friends who lost power were too far away to feel safe driving to my house to huddle up because of the icy roads.

We spent the entire week playing our new family campaign (those two top middle pictures are the map I made of the house we’ve inherited and my character’s theory on who was causing the problems), and playing in the snow.

Batman in particular loved it, and we went out a few times pulling the kids behind the car in the wagon. It was hilarious to watch, and Batman and Princess loved it. Superman thought it was cold and wasn’t a fan.

We also tried sledding, but we don’t have any hills particularly nearby to try sledding on, so that trial was not successful, but we did have fun slipping and sliding down the frozen playground.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Babybel cheese, but as a kid I used to take the wax around it and sculpt it into random things. As a joke a year or so ago I made a sculpture of Mac for Princess and gave it to her, which she promptly returned to me, which started this whole thing of both of us trying to hid that stupid “wax sculpture” on the other person’s desk.

This of course meant I had to make a new dog sculpture of Leezard and give it to Jeff. He was not excited by it, and we all spent 10 minutes throwing the sculpture at each other and trying to keep Leezard from eating it.

I do recognize this isn’t as hilarious as I think it is.

And that final bottom middle picture is Princess’s Valentine’s Day card to one of my boys. I think it’s quite cool.

February week 4

You know, after I put this collage together I realized there are several events not pictured in the collage, that I really had meant to include. Sigh, oh well, here goes.

We’ve started a new family campaign, this time we’re quadruplets (maybe quintuplets) and have just inherited our family estate. Jeff gave me a fancy new notebook for it, and I had to show it off.

Monday I went grocery shopping with Batman, and had a real flashback to the start of quarantine as the stores were bare. That photo is of the meat aisle in Sams Club, there was NOTHING. They had rationing on a lot of items, and it was odd to see.

The boys finally had their final Christmas present from their aunt come in, they got cool t-shirts saying, “there are 20 sides to every story” with a D-20. I rather like the shirts.

Leezard was trying her best to steal my dinner, and when I wouldn’t let she was subtly chewing on my lap desk. A friend of mine wanted pictures that made us happy, so I snapped a quick picture of this.

We went on a field trip to the Williamson Museum, and they had two main exhibits. The first was a law enforcement exhibit, which included this old “police wagon,” which two of my three kids obliged to pose in with me. the third kid was not willing to get a picture, so he took the picture.

The other exhibit was on Victorian mourning, which is so incredibly weird to see. We had a very long discussion about that.

Oh, and there were was a small exhibit of local artwork, and a cool exhibit for Black history month of people from Williamson County, it was nice small bits of history, like the man who founded a local school and was principal after being freed from slavery. I spent a long time every single person there.

Not pictured was our Co-op’s Valentine’s Day party, which finally happened two weeks late thanks to the Snowmageddon 2021.

The boys and I played another round of Seafall and I’m now sadly in last place, it was quite a shake-up for the end results.