The Bunch In Quarantine in Week 10

D is ready for his Zoom Court appearance

Things maybe opening in Texas, just like the rest of America, but things are still very different. The local donation center was finally open AND accepting donations so D and I were able to drop off all the donations that were just sitting in the back of the SUV for the past 2 months! One of the first things we did in lock down was to clean the garage and afterwards we realized it could be awhile before we could take our donations in. The kids also have been bored enough to thoroughly clean their closets and dressers out. Basically, we had a lot of stuff to drop off and I am so happy to have my car empty again. Afterwards, D and I went out for lunch. Correction, we tried to go out for lunch. Many restaurants were either still completely closed or only doing take out still. We finally gave up and just went to Taco Cabana's drive thru and ate in the parking lot. It doesn't make a whole lot of since to eat in the parking lot when they have patio tables that were more than 6ft apart that they could have allowed customers to utilize, but we made it work...kind of. I spilled a little.

Ahhh, our lunch date in the car.

We still have no plans to really go out just to go out. We weren't really big on going out before all this happened and we are still not. We do want to go camping and hiking so hopefully we will be able to do that soon. We have always been pretty busy with doing things for the kids. We normally have sports practices and games each week. Plus, the kids volunteer at church camps and go places with their friends, but for the past 2.5 months the kids have done nothing. A asked me today, for only the first time I might add, how much longer this would go on. I can tell even my most introverted child is wanting to get out and do sports, see friends, and go to gym classes. With our usual summer activities consisting of library classes, water parks, summer camps, and the lake all closed, I have no idea how we will not get overly stir crazy this summer.

We have had over 5 inches of rain this past week. Since everything was so wet, for the first time ever we decided to burn our old hay. I have to say this took WAY longer than we thought it would for hay to burn. We had about 300-400 lbs of hay we needed to get rid of and instead of bagging it and hauling it to the dump to pay $25 to get rid of it, we decided burning it might be way easier. It was really muddy so we set up chairs on pallets that we normally store our hay on and watched the show. The amount of smoke coming off the pile was crazy. Our neighbor kept flying his plane over us, I guess to make sure the fire was under control. It took 4 hours before we finally gave up on the burning pile. However, it did mostly burn it all and took as long as hauling it off, but was free and less work for us...except maybe for D who had to keep turning the pile. I was the designated supervisor, except at the beginning when I was the official freaker outer. D said I was even making him nervous, but the fire was so big at first it was really scary. After it burned down about halfway, I felt a lot better about our ability to control it. You would have thought the fire would have scared the horses, but it didn't. At the beginning, they looked at us to see how we were reacting and once they saw we weren't acting crazy or anything then they went on their merry way and didn't really pay it any attention unless the smoke shifted in their direction. We will burn again when things are really wet, but probably start with a smaller pile and just add to it as it burns down.

You have no idea how long this takes to clean off of her!

She doesn't have a lot of mane to get mud rocks in so Gwenie is a lot faster to clean. She has lost so much weight she gallops and bucks around a lot now. It is really cute.

I felt so back country, but it actually worked really well and kept the chairs from getting muddy.

This was after it had burned about halfway. There was still a lot of smoke.

When we started the pile was about 5ft tall and 7ft wide. I felt a lot better when we got to this point. It felt more manageable.

The kids have been big helpers this week. The horses have needed to be cleaned up twice this week because when it rains a lot they love their mud baths. However, since we have horrible black clay here, once the mud dries it is like trying to remove cement from their hair. T also helped me mow the backyard. Basically, I outlined about an acre for him to mow and then walked in front of him for awhile so he could see where he was suppose to go. He only did the backyard because it has the fewest sprinkler heads and other things I don't want him to run over. He did pretty good. I enjoyed having someone else mow, even if it was just part of the yard and it took him just as long to mow that as it normally takes for me to mow everything. T finally was able to get his braces on this week. He will only have his top braces on for a few months and then he will get bottom ones on also. I guess his top teeth had more that needed to be corrected than his bottom teeth did.

Now that everyone is seeing patients again, we had multiple doctor appts this week. In one day we went to get eye exams, visited the orthodontist, the rheumatologist, the ENT, and would have had dentist appts thrown in there also, but our dentist unbeknownst to us is now only open on Mondays and Friday and yes, they got an earful for not contacting us to let us know that important piece of information. All we have left now is to have the vet come out to give shots to the dog and horses and we should be all set on "nonessential" care.