Flying the Drone

Taking her out for the first time:

Easter 2020 (Quarantine Style)

Turns out we usually spend all of Easter Sunday at home, so this felt very much like business as usual:

Trying to figure out the first riddle in their basket hunt

They found them! (in the laundry room)

Looking through their loot

Easter brunch

This guy stole one of our hidden eggs - we spotted him out the window while we were eating brunch

Ready to hunt for eggs

Some hidden eggs in our flower garden

We found a real robin's egg during the hunt (it was on the ground)

Abby definitely got more eggs

Examining the contents

Ready for the reverse hunt (the kids hid eggs for us)

Dying eggs

And that's a wrap on Easter

Happy 12th Birthday, Benji!

To end off our spring break week, we had a full day celebration of the boy. We tried to keep most of our annual birthday traditions and come up with some fun twists for a quarantine-style party:

He still really likes us to streamer his door to crash through on his birthday morning

Traditional birthday bagel (Asiago cheese, from Panera. We ordered a dozen for delivery the day before his birthday)

A special birthday surprise. A local real estate company offered to come out and decorate lawns for quarantine birthdays.

A closer look (but no touch) at  the cool decorations

Back up to the bedroom to open presents. Birthday bear made an appearance, of course

Abby folded her gift up into origami. She was trying for a goose

The note inside was for Untitled Goose Game for Benji's new Nintendo Switch

More Nintendo games

Always excited for new comics

And a  new and better drone from Grandpa Steve

Also a ridiculous video call from Grandpa Steve

By request, lunch from Bodos (his favorite, egg and cheddar on everything)

We had cake after lunch since we had a special birthday dinner surprise

I tried my hand at an "anti-gravity" cake and added color changing candles to blow out

He requested strawberry with vanilla frosting. I added chocolate to the center.

Pinata time

This is one where you pull the strings one at a time and one of them opens it

We took turns, but Benji was the one who got he magic string (here, he's helping the m&ms come out faster)

We found out Melting Pot would deliver so he could still have his traditional fondue dinner, which he had very much been looking forward to. It was definitely not as fun as being at the restaurant, but we still enjoyed it.

Especially the dessert

After dinner, we had a video call with Grandma and Pop-pop. Pop-pop got to show Benji his cool birthday poster, which will get mailed post-lockdown

One of our favorite things was that we collected videos from Benji's friends, family and teachers and put them together into a 15 minute video compilation. We added a small piece of a longer video that the Lamy-Petersons made for him, but also showed him that (very cool) video in it entirety.  Here he is later in the evening re-watching their video.  He has since re-watched both videos several times