Month: April 2020

How has your family grown during this time of staying home and being together?

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

This is a question I thought of this week while I was sitting in my office bored of work. I am an avid Facebook user and love all the things going on, where people are sharing stories and pictures about their life. It seems easier to complain about being stuck inside and how we aren’t getting along with your kids.  I’m going to be the first one to admit that this is rough! It isn’t easy to home-school your kids and to be stuck inside 24/7. I’m going to ramble a bit about my answer.

Busy Life

Being able to go to work, run to the store, go play with friends, go to church are things we would do daily. We were always on the go. I enjoyed going out on the weekends to visit Home Depot when I was bored. For the first time ever, I went 5 days without leaving my house. (I did go to the mailbox), and it was crazy for me. I was fine with it after a few days.

Planning

Our little family seems to be getting along so much better. We have learned how to better plan our meals, so we don’t have to go to the store for two weeks. We still forget stuff or need a thing or two, but we’ve tried to work around those things.

Space

We have learned how to appreciate each others space too. The boy seems to enjoy playing with LEGOs by himself for hours. I go and check on him and play with him from time to time, but he tends to push me away. “What are you doing here?” hmm. Rejection. 🙂 He doesn’t want me to interrupt his 3-4 projects he has going on at once. 🙂

I have been listening to books and I’ve found myself taking some personal time to listen to these books. It has been great and addicting! My wife loves her games and she gets a lot of time in when we are sleeping 🙂 *read: NIGHT OWL*

Family Time

I am failing as a parent, my boy had never played “go fish” until last week and we started playing it at night before bed time and he loves it. We are playing more games together.  My wife and I had fun playing a few games, that I kept messing up!   There is one game we are still working on though. My boy loves Roblox and that seems to bring more contention into his life than enjoyment. It’s rough to get him off, but we are working on it. If he isn’t playing a hard challenging game, then he does alright.

Church

Church time spent on our home is getting easier and we are trying to have more lessons and singing, even though it’s not very good. The boy has the attention span of a good fish, but that is getting better. It is always a fight to get him to come down and even get dressed.

Find the good

We aren’t perfect and we are trying to make the best of this situation where we are stuck inside the house together. Who knows when this is going to let up? I hope we won’t be stuck inside all summer long! The economy has to bounce back, or we are all going to be in trouble.

Please take a step back and look at the positive things in your life.

Spring Break Sabotage

Spring break was this week and we had big plans to visit Lava Hot Springs and our plan was to stay up there all week. I was going to work part of the week from the resort. Just like everyone else’s Spring Break and Vacation Plans, it was cancelled due to the virus. To try and add excitement to Quarantine and make it fun, I thought we would try and sleep in a couple different rooms.

Basement

We have a Wii in our TV room in the basement. There have been a few times where we have slept down there. The last time, the boy had his bus tent and I slept on the floor, but he has destroyed and outgrown the tent. This time, He wanted to sleep in the couch and I slept on the floor. We ended up going to bed super late and he wasn’t comfortable. He ended up waking up way too early. It didn’t go as planned. He had fun except for the cold.

We were going to try another room, but he said it was too cold downstairs. This is the same boy that wants to sleep with a fan on him when it is 60 degrees in his room. Go figure. We ended up not doing it again.

Our own Rooms

The rest of the week he slept in his room, but he kept waking up at 8am! We kept telling him that “It is OK to sleep in! You are on spring break!”, but he kept waking up at 8am. We tried a few things to try and get him to sleep in but nothing would work.

Jacob loves to sleep with music going in his room when he falls asleep, and he has some Christmas lights that he keeps on. The lights are hooked up to a WiFi controller that allows us to turn them on with a Google Mini.

IFTTT – If This Then That

Here is where the problem comes in. We would ask him “Why did you get up so early?” He would reply “Because it was morning.” Well he finally mentioned “Because the lights turned off, and I wanted to wake up before it got dark.” A few weeks ago, I had checked the WiFi device schedule to make sure it wasn’t shutting the lights off at a specific time, and I couldn’t find it.

This last week, I had an epiphany, I remembered I had set IFTTT up to turn the lights off, because he kept leaving them on when he went to school. Sure enough, it was setup to turn the lights off at 8am! I changed it to 10:15a, because who sleeps past 10:15a? (only my wife). That night he went to bed pretty late, so I wasn’t surprised he was still asleep at 10am the next day. He came down at 10:20a. I asked him “What woke you up?” He said “The lights went off.” SABOTAGE! I found the cause of my boys poor sleep! He is a light sleeper!

Easter

I fixed the lights to turn off at 12p, but unfortunately Easter had generated a lot of excitement in my boy, so he couldn’t sleep past 9am Sunday morning. School starts again on Monday, so I am going to update the schedule to go off at 7:15a, since tat is when I want him up. We’ll see how it works out!