Lodge Life: Quarantine Week 6

We’ve officially been living out at The Lodge for over a month now as we’re at the beginning of our sixth week here. We are all healthy and doing well and feeling so very fortunate to be riding this out in the mountains.

This last week was filled with sunshine, frustration with our threenager, potty training, time with Alex during the day, enjoyment in having fresh produce again, and a quick trip for Alex to head back to Seattle and mow the lawn.

We spent a lot of time thinking and dreaming about our prospective garden and garage that we’re planning on building. It’ll come in phases and I am so excited to get started on the first phase of the garden. More on that to come…

The kids loved getting to plant their very own seeds in a little garden kit. It’s adorable and perfect for toddlers. We’re hoping to see some sprouting happen any day now…

It has been fun to check on the soil and make sure it’s staying moist. Honestly, though, we should have brought the pots in due to freezing temperatures at night, so I’m not sure these seeds are going to work.

Sort of on a whim on Monday morning I decided to start potty training Hannah. I went in with zero plan, limited motivation but a lot of energy and enthusiasm.

Within the first couple of hours, Hannah peed in the potty! I thought for sure this was going to be a walk in the park since we were out of the gate with so much success.

As the week went on, she peed in the potty a total of one other time. I quickly lost steam for truly trying to potty train her, as, good lord, it’s extremely difficult to manage while also managing another toddler.

My new approach is to keep her in pull-ups {per her demand!} and sit her on the potty two or three times a day to get used to the idea and then go from there. I found this article and liked the loose approach as compared to our previous strategy with Ben that promises he’ll be potty trained in three days.

It turns out that potty training a younger sibling can also cause tremendous jealousy in the older sibling and result in a massive potty training regression. That also caused me to back off from my focus on getting Hannah potty trained. I think we’ll take it slow and see what happens.

One fun highlight from last week is that wildflowers popped up in our forest and are everywhere. Ben is now obsessed.

We went on a “flower adventure” one afternoon and picked handful after handful of flowers. We have a local wildflower book that we used to identify just which flowers they were. These beautiful yellow flowers are called glacier lilies.

Our baking project of the week was making M&M cookies. On Easter we made carrot cake cupcakes, too. This coming week we’re going to need to join the rest of the country and bake some more banana bread to use up our overripe nanners.

The kids LOVE baking and I am really enjoying getting into it with them. I’ve seen a lot of growth and maturation with them just in these last five weeks. Both of them are becoming a lot more gentle when stirring, they know that we always wash our hands before we bake or cook, they know the difference between a hand mixer and a stand mixer and they know that sugar cookie baking is a painfully long process from start to finish.

We spent SO much time outside last week. The kids both have tan lines {thank goodness I was on top of things with sunscreen and hats at the beginning of the week!} and Ben’s feet are permanently black from dirt.

Hannah is getting so much stronger and confident and she is quite the little climber. It’s been especially fun to watch her independence and curiosity while playing outside.

Ben absolutely loves soccer. I ordered some soccer nets to give him something to shoot the ball into and we’ve been getting a lot of enjoyment out of them.

We’ve been learning as much as we can about nature and our surroundings. I thought it would be worthwhile to buy some bird feeders to hang up in our yard so we can all watch and enjoy the birds. We made nectar for the hummingbird feeder and hung that; however, the seeds for the other bird feeders won’t arrive for some time.

Surprisingly, it took less than 24 hours for a hummingbird to find the food! We have gotten so much enjoyment from sitting in the window seat watching for the hummingbird to arrive. I’m really looking forward to hanging the remaining feeders so we can enjoy more bird watching.

Here’s to another week of staying home!