I don’t think I posted any photos from Charlotte’s birthday back at the beginning of the month, but it was a good one! She was excited to have her own yard sign after seeing the ones I got for Jose and Emma, and opened her presents in the morning. She did have to go to daycare for most of the day, since Jose and I had to work and Emma had school, but they celebrated there with cupcakes and decorations. We picked her up as soon as Emma was done with the virtual school day, and came home to splash in the backyard pool. We topped things off with a pretty epic birthday cake. She was a happy girl!
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Virtual school is going well, and when Charlotte gets home from daycare, Emma is always excited to show her any fun assignments she had that day. (In the photo below, she was showing off a “would you rather” game she played in class.)
I have been surprised and really proud of how well Emma is doing with the virtual environment. She has learned all the online tools and can manage them herself, needing help only when something hiccups. She uses our Google Home to set alarms for each of her “synchronous” sessions, and is so diligent about getting all her assignments taken care of.
All that said, we made the decision to send her to school in person for the second quarter, which starts in mid-October. (Friday was the deadline to declare your choice for Q2, and we waited until the last minute.) Jose is going to have to start going in to the office soon, which changes the school-at-home equation, and I think in-person is the best decision for our family and our situation. I won’t lie though — I’m a little nervous. But I’m hopeful things will go smoothly.
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Jose recently got the new Microsoft Flight Simulator and he and Emma have been having fun flying to various places around the world. He “flew” over both Longs Peak (Colorado) and Santorini (Greece) recently, and I spent quite a while reminiscing about past trips and thinking about how much I’d really like to go on a vacation right now.
See? Vacation. Ahhh.
I could really use one.
In addition to just wanting to go anywhere for any reason right not, I have been reminiscing about all the group trips we took in our 20s a lot recently. I have been enjoying travel with family recently, but its a different thing with a big group of friends. I would love to take another one. You know our 20 year anniversary of graduation is coming up…
I too an reminiscing on trips. Would love to go on a month long one right about now!
Chris and I were both split on sending or staying home for Forest this next quarter. I leaned into keeping him home and he was looking to send him but I knew we would have an uptick in cases again and it looks like that’s possibly happening. Hopefully it will be a small bump and when the next 9 weeks comes around I’ll feel better about sending him. Hopefully it goes well for Emma!
We are assuming that she will end up doing school from home again at some point, but one factor in our decision-making was that this might be a good point to take advantage of at least a brief spurt of in-person learning and interaction for her before things have to shut down again. Hopefully we don’t regret it.
It’s nice that you have the option to send Emma to school.
While my kids will likely be able to go back to their private schools sometime soon, Seattle public schools has no plans to open and their current best guess is that they’ll stay closed until next spring.
Yeah. I don’t know what the right answer is. If we didn’t have the in-person option, I think virtual school would be ok to continue — I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how well it has gone for us.
We sent our kids to school. But it is a small private school. Get her a set of good fitting masks that are comfortable for her. We found Nolan actually needs an adult size make.
Yeah, I think comfy masks are key. I can see using an adult-size one just to put a little less pressure on the ears!