This week had a lot of trademarks of a regular late April in the Great Lakes region: lots of rain and cool days toward the beginning of the week, warm and sunny days following, plant growth that seemed almost watchable, days of staying in completely and days of being able to go out for walks. But since it’s not a regular late April, I’d add in that the COVID-19 stay at home order here and across the world of our blog readers has been changing and moving to a new season of sorts too. As of May 1, Illinois opened…

So we’ve passed six weeks, and staying at home is feeling like a new normal. John and I figured out some ways to better handle busy work weeks (order food instead of cooking everything was the big takeaway!), Miles and Ashton kept up with classes and started the accelerated workload as they approach the end of their semester, and Nyx founds all kinds of new stuff to get into. And we’re happy to report that there was no snow this week. Sunday evening Miles and Ashton built a fire in our fire pit. During the week, we got news that…

I had intended to post about Miles’s birthday during the week, but this week ended up being very busy for John and I from a work point of view, and also fairly time-consuming in terms of regular household stuff like cooking, so that didn’t happen. But looking back, the birthday was one of the more exciting things to happen, so it’s good to have it to report on now! I found this octopus mural while out on a walk earlier in the weekend and decided what better gift than to bring Miles to see it on his birthday. Here’s Miles…

Hello, everyone! I’ve been gearing up for our 4th week in quarantine update when this delightful piece of content landed in my lap. Nyx has been having a great time with twisty-ties that came off a bundle of parsley. John captured just 15 seconds or so of Nyx’s half an hour playing with the ties, check out the video here: https://youtu.be/Qwy_KUb068I. After a big play session, Nyx likes snuggling with John. He and John both really like the same chair so it’s hard to know if they are snuggling or each asserting their right to sit there. This is birthday…

Looking back on week 3 of work from home, which is the starting point that we’re counting from, this week had a “getting used to the new normal” feeling. Miles and Ashton had a full week of online classes, reconvening after spring break; our work from home schedules seemed to regularize a bit more; and John and I kept to pretty good exercise schedules, most days running in the morning before starting the work day. Miles spent a little of that quarantine time dressing up in clothes raided from his, John’s and Liam’s closets for his first day of zoom…

Quick mid-day, mid-week post to share some breakfast stuff happening around here this year. Not sure if I had mentioned this previously on the blog, but John and I stopped buying milk at the beginning of the year in an effort to lower our carbon footprint. We used to eat muesli with berries and milk every morning, and we switched to toast with almond butter and bananas to cut out the milk. Cutting out berries that were being brought in from far away was a bonus. And we found bread we really liked baked at West Town Bakery in Ukrainian…

So we left off in the last post with the stay-at-home order going into effect, and I would stay that this week has been about adhering to the order and figuring out along the way how to do so. As readers know, we plan meals and cook a lot anyway, so one would think we would be prepared for planning and doing consolidated shopping trips. Somehow it’s been trickier than I would have thought – factors like having more people around for all meals and scheduling meals so that certain ingredients are ripe on the right days (yes, avocados, I’m…

I don’t think it’s too wild a guess that you all feel, like we do, that the changes happening in the world feel so sudden that the last 7 days could have been better paced to have taken place over months or even a year, rather than a week. I’ll round up the photos from our cameras here and also add commentary along the way about the first week that coronavirus prevention measures hit close to home. Last weekend was the end of early voting in Chicago, and I meant to vote on Saturday but the lines were really long…

Last weekend, we had brunch with Liam and Kat and then went to a new exhibit that is getting a lot of attention here, called The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China. Liam has been interested in this new gallery space in Lincoln Park, and when they saw that this exhibit was coming early in 2020, they got us all tickets to go see the exhibit. The other half of the show is at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, so we hope to see that part too! The space and exhibit are both really amazing. The…

Miles and friends signed up for a College Outdoors trip last weekend and went to the Oregon Coast. They had a great time, and in fact Miles has already signed up for another trip – cross country skiing at Mount Hood this weekend! The natural areas around Portland are really amazing, great that he’s getting a chance to get out in it. The group pooled their photos in a Flickr account, and I pulled off some that showed one of the highlights according to Miles – a hike through dunes, then through a forest, and ultimately ending at the beach.…