2020 has been a very unique year for a wide variety of reasons. If people had tried a year ago to describe what life would be like in 2020, I am quite certain I wouldn't have believed them. In the middle of March when everything began to shut down, I kept telling myself surely things will be better in May. Then I adjusted that to "hopefully things will be better in June." And some things have improved. We have been attending a worship service in person each week, we can pick things up at the library, we were able to join a pool, and we were able to go to Long Island for six days, but life is still far from normal, and I no longer think normal is just around the corner as I did when this first began. I usually love to plan field trips and vacations. I have no desire to plan either of those until the pandemic is over. Having plans constantly cancelled this year is the reason I've changed. Instead of adding more things to our calendar my mind set is well we'll see how many more plans I had already made will continue to be cancelled. I am currently hoping that by next August things can truly be back to normal. Time will tell if I'm being realistic, pessimistic, or optimistic. I hear people say they can't wait for 2021, but I highly doubt much is going to change in January. I'd LOVE to be wrong. One way our lives have been different the past few months is we have been spending a lot of time doing puzzles. When I was a child we had a tradition of "family fun night." I loved that tradition. We would rotate through our family as to who got to pick what we did during family fun night. It might be as simple as playing Uno together. Sometimes someone picked doing a jigsaw puzzle together, and I have to admit that was probably my least favorite choice for family fun night. I was not a fan of puzzles. My mom would give us each a minimum number of pieces we each had to do before we could excuse ourselves. I generally didn't stick around once I completed the minimum requirement because I didn't think doing a puzzle was fun. I greatly preferred reading a book. Well in addition to being the year of face masks, social distancing, freezer shortages, and quarantines, 2020 has been the year of puzzles for our family. Over the last few weeks the kids put together 12 puzzles that they hadn't ever put together before. Some of these puzzles were done more than once. For example, Nadia did the 300 piece Toy Story 3 puzzle and then Ian took it apart and did the same puzzle himself. The 12 puzzles range in size from 150 pieces to 750 pieces each. Altogether the 12 puzzles have 4,750 pieces! We have two puzzles left to try for the first time. Both are 1,000 piece puzzles. The hardest puzzle by far was one of the 500 piece Snow White puzzles. I thought the Harry Potter puzzle would be harder because so many of the pieces were some shade of black, but that one took far less time than the one in the bottom right corner.
I'm hoping we won't still be wearing face masks in twelve months, but who knows. This is Nadia's self-portrait that she drew on Thursday. I enjoy comparing their self portraits over the years.
Today we spent about five hours with our friends. The kids swam, ate homemade strawberry shortcake with homemade ice cream, and played outside. It was a great way to celebrate the start of a new school year! The kids are 7, 8, 9, 10, and 12 years old at the moment. Tab also sent me home with a jar of her homemade spaghetti sauce that she canned this week. I was grateful that I made dinner this morning so we could spend the afternoon with friends. I made the meat and a dressing for a taco salad as well as a new recipe called chicken spaghetti. My kids generally avoid spaghetti noodles. They prefer just about any other shape of noodle to spaghetti, but Oliver and Nadia liked the dish, as did Paul. Ian didn't try it but opted to have the taco salad. I am always happy when I find a new recipe that several members of the family like to add to the rotation.
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