March 14 & 15, 2020

Saturday; COVID-19 coverage and its effects have reached crazy levels! It was all a bit unsettling and I had a hard time staying calm today, especially as Spain announced they were heading into lockdown for 15 days. It’s frustrating to feel like you are not in control of your own life, and I realized that a big part of that for me is the finances and independence to go to my family in Spain if they need me. But! God is in control and we are trusting him to care for the people we care about.

Seriously though, this virus stuff is everywhere. We hung out with two different friends on Saturday, and every so often our conversation circled back around to how the virus is impacting all of us. The amount of events, activities and plans that have been canceled in the last four days has just been staggering.

We had new friends, the Saylers, over on Saturday for lunch. We’ve been trying to get together with them for a while, but they work early shifts which makes dinner get togethers hard. So we finally found a Saturday that worked for both of us, and it was lovely! In the morning we prepped a bunch of food and made our pies since it was Pi Day! Keilana made our key lime pie, Javi and Declan collaborated on the deviled eggs, and Cassandra supervised. The kids are such great helpers!

After the Saylers headed home, we cleaned up and relaxed for a while, and then got ready for the Flannerys coming over! We were supposed to head to a St Patrick’s day event all together, with Lana watching our kiddos, but it was canceled along with everything else! So we came up with an alternate plan; celebrating Pi Day. We made Shepherd’s Pie, Pizza Pie, and then our sweet pies were Banana Cream Pie, Apple Pie and Key Lime Pie. They were all really yummy and we enjoyed our evening with friends!

Sunday; This week we still had service, since our church is small enough to stay under the governor’s recommendation of 250 people or less. We will possibly move to online services in the coming weeks like so many others have done, but for today we were thankful to go to church with our friends! We walked like we often do, especially since it was such lovely weather. It was eerily quiet, even for a Sunday. On our way we let the kids know that we decided to cancel our trip to LA. We were supposed to leave on Thursday and spend a long weekend with my brother and his girlfriend in Cali. But – the CDC is currently recommending that everyone self quarantine for 14 days after domestic travel. Since we expect a similar lockdown coming like Europe has done, that could mean up to a month for us in isolation, so we decided it was wisest to cancel. Boo! We’re encouraged by the fact that we know we’ll have to go back at least once for our visas once we secure an appointment at the consulate, so it’s not like we postponed it forever. Still – it was disappointing and the kids were pretty upset.

Church was sparsely attended but it was still nice to see everyone. We are waiting to find out if our upcoming Easter events will be canceled (probably). This means that our big fundraiser for MOPS will also be canceled, so we are starting to brainstorm other ideas of what we can do.

We chatted with my family throughout the day, everyone is checking on each other and trying to keep up to date on the state of things. It’s definitely hard to be so spread out!

We spent the rest of our Sunday quietly – playing outside, sneaking in a nap, reading books and I got some writing done. I’m working on book 2 in my fantasy series and it has been very challenging lately! I’m encouraged with my progress, but the chapters I’m working on still need some tweaking before I can continue. Then we played Castle Panic with a new expansion. The expansion is really fun, but raises the skill level of the game quite a bit so it’s not the best fit for the kids. We’ll stick with the simpler ones for now. Then it was dinner and bedtime for kiddos, and Lover and I did our Sunday night “State of the Kodankos”. It was a little different than usual since we can’t make firm plans or even a strict menu plan. But it was still good to get on the same page on how we are tackling the week. And it’s encouraging to see how much financial progress we are making towards being ready to move to Spain.

And so, our quiet week begins!

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