We wish you a Happy isolation Birthday Duncan! I wonder how many Birthdays will happen in Lockdown style this year? We considered decorating the dining room as a jail but while I thought it would have been hilarious, the children though paper bars on the sliding doors would be mean.

Here we are second week, house fully cleaned and all done in time for Duncan’s Birthday.

We Wish you a Happy isolation Birthday

Week 2 of lockdown starts on Monday 30th March. Duncan’s Birthday, While most of the UK are all furloughed Duncan is still working so we have the day to prepare for his birthday tea.

For the first time since full lockdown we have been able to get online at first attempt. whoop whoop. Therefore they all did school work in the morning online.

Emilia managed to get on to college without problems and both girls managed to access both IXL and Elephant this morning.

For those reading this in the future our service provider Virgin stopped all perks to those on their higher packages like us to share bandwidth services for a short time to make sure everyone could get on.

We are a family with a full smart home so we use a lot of band width and the disruptions caused issues with keeping everything connected. However, it wasn’t really a problem just a little inconvenient.

The postie brought lots of nice things for Emily in the form of her crates. More interesting to Emily was her order from Button and Squirt. she was off immersed into a world of animals.

  • Emily having unwrapped her first deck of animal cards from her delievery.
  • Opening an other item this time an exercise book all about animals
  • A picture of both girls looking through the amazing products from button and squirt
  • 10 card packs, 2 activity notebooks and one blank writing book later
  • Both children looking through the packs of animal cards
  • Emily has laid the cards out reading each one to Jessica
  • Jessica helping Emily to read through the instructions of the Atlas crates activity checking they have all the pieces
  • Jessica supervising Emily as she puts together the activity from her Atlas crate.

So with them occupied unpacking and playing with Emily’s new cards. I cracked on with the housework.

The girls soon moved onto finishing their dads Birthday cake ready for him coming home from work and before we knew it. It was time for Emily’s music lesson. Unfortunately, it really didn’t go well. Julie was amazing but Emily was not interested at all.

So Emily’s lesson was instead spent Introducing Julie to 35 different types of Sharks. We did at least get the violin in there by getting Emily to make ‘shark’ sounds with her violin. Online is looking like it could be hard for Emily on the Violin.

Once Duncan was home we then had some dinner while watching a short Ballet (Peter and the Wolf) before Birthday cake and a ‘we wish you a happy isolation Birthday’ special song. then we played with a new feature on the Google app before bed.

  • Jessica and Emily putting in the butter icing into Duncan's birthday cakes
  • Girls presenting duncan with his cake complete with candles and new isolation style happy birthday song
  • Family sat around the table eating dinner while watching the ballet
  • Picture of duncan pretending to be scared of the tiger which appears in the room compliments of a google app
  • screenshot of a pando sat eating bamboo above our beagle dogs head
  • our miniature poodle cross scratching while a computer generated  Eagle swoops down on him.
  • A picture of duncan sat playing on his phone while an emperor penguin stands on the sofa back behind him

Isolation Day 10: Tuesday 31st March

This morning we thought we would try a little ballet for our exercise today. Emily absolutely loved the ballet we watched last night and wanted to give it a try.
After a little googling last night between panda visits I found an online ballet class and we all gave it a go.

We then moved onto English and Maths before making a start on history with the help from Emily’s first history crate from Mysteries in time and we ploughed into the life of Ancient Egypt.

  • Emily opening her newest crate for History thanks to Mysteries in time
  • All three kids following the online Ballet lesson's warm up
  • Emily stood over a hob and a saucepan full of a special Quinoa milk pudding recipe found in Emily's Peru Atlas crate

Isolation day’s 11-13 (1st to 3rd April)

The girls both did really well over the next few days.

Jessica had her Art course online.

Emily wrote a story on the computer using animals from her extinct animals cards

They did English and Maths in their books when they couldn’t get online. We finally hit a burnout on the Thursday and spent most of Thursday and Friday watching documentaries on Ancient Egypt and even found a few on some of the Animals found in her cards. Duncan’s awaited order finally arrived and he spent a few evenings starting the work on the soon to be office.

Weekend

Other than the normal housework and bedding changes. We helped Duncan with the Office conversion.

We also cleaned patio, weeded patio, got the Lazy Spa out washed and filled.

If you want to read more about Emily’s postal crates or Scouting adventures check out the links.