We managed to survive the summer of 2020 with our sanity largely intact, despite the fact that we were mostly cooped up in our home while the COVID-19 pandemic raged. I’ve been working from home since mid-March, and the kids spent the last two-and-half months of the school year doing distance learning with varying degrees of success.

The unusual circumstances made the end of the school year a bit anti-climactic: we were all home all day, anyway; only the schedules changed. Because of the circumstances, we were a little more relaxed about things like screen time than we would have been otherwise. In William’s case in particular, playing Minecraft with his buddies was the only meaningful social interaction he had.

This isn’t to say that the summer was entirely without stimulation. We put together a vegetable garden after having taken a year or two off (in the process of turning over the soil, I learned that William is deathly afraid of earthworms, which greatly limited his participation in that phase of the project), and we are still reaping the benefits of our labors in the form of a seemingly unending supply of tomatoes.

In July, Julie and Joe took on the task of repainting our patio furniture. This project got off to an inauspicious start when they went through several cans of paint without coming close to finishing the first chair. Even after a return trip to the hardware store for more paint, the problem persisted: each can stopped working after a minute or so, which didn’t bode well for the cost effectiveness of sprucing up the chairs.

Fortunately, after a phone call or two, the very nice folks at the spray paint company speculated that the hardware stores in the area might have gotten a bad batch of paint, and offered to send replacements. When the new paint arrived a week or so later, everyone was much relieved to find that it actually worked, and we now have patio chairs that are a beautiful shade of sage green. The refreshed chairs—Julie also bought new cushions—helped to make the patio a really pleasant place to spend time, which came in handy when I was forced outside to work because the boys were playing with their friends online in our bedroom.

For the first time ever, we even managed to grow actual sunflowers!

After a bit of cajoling, I convinced Joe to try his hand at a little bit of programming. I’m not sure it’s his favorite thing to do—there are, after all, limitless videos on YouTube to tempt him—but it was fun to work through some problems with him and see things through the eyes of someone who hasn’t been coding for the last 30 years. He got the hang of things pretty quickly, and though there are still a few chapters left in the book we’re using, I’m hopeful that he’s seen enough to know that it’s something he could do if he wanted to. We’re planning to spend more time working our way through the book during the school year.

Of course, all things come to an end, including—no, especially—summer vacation. School started for everyone in the second week of August the same way they ended in June: at home. We’re very fortunate to high-speed Internet and access to the equipment the kids need to participate and do their work. The older kids have hand-me-down laptops and spend their days holed up in their rooms. William has an older, but still functional, iPad in a ruggedized case to help it survive the rigors of being handled by a first grader on a daily basis, and he hangs out at his craft table in the dining room, which is bright and sunny and close to busy spaces like the living room and kitchen so he never feels too isolated or alone.

The change in circumstances called for an update to our usual first day of school pictures. Instead of posing in front of the car with their backpacks and lunchboxes packed and ready for departure, we snapped some photos of them holding their devices, ready to face a day of video chats, online lectures, and electronic assignments.

The album also contains a few shots of one of our last summer projects. For weeks, William had been asking to to make a special snack that one of his substitute teachers brought to class last year: rainbow jello. Through no small effort, Julie was able to acquire the seven (!) jello varieties required and, with a little help from William, put them all together to make the delicious treat you can see in the pictures.

Update: Please note that the rainbow jello pictures were taken by Julia.

Update #2: Corrected the color of the patio chairs from forest green to sage green.

Gallery: Back to School 2020

We’re approaching the end of the school year, and as summer draws near, we’re faced with the usual array of events, commitments, and stressors: open houses, band concerts, field days, and, looming largest of all for the older kids, final exams. The next week looks to be very busy for Julia and Joe, with one or two finals each day through Thursday, including Monday, which happens to be Joe’s birthday.

Julia, at least, is already in a finals frame of mind, having stayed up past 11:30 at least three times last week in an effort to wrap up projects and stay on top of things going into finals week. Miraculously, she made it through the week without killing us (and vice-versa) and proceeded to sleep until noon on Saturday. Our goal for the weekend is to pay back that sleep debt and go into finals on steadier ground.

Joe has it a little easier this year, if only because his schedule is a little less intense. That’s probably just as well, because he’s started taking online math classes with the goal of skipping ahead so that he’ll be a little more challenged next year. Currently, he’s in Math 7, which is on the normal track for seventh graders at UPA. The normal progression would be to take Math 8 next year, and then either Integrated Math (IM) 1 or 2 as a freshman, depending on how well he does—Julia is in IM 2.

Joe is working through the IM 1 curriculum via an online class offered by BYU. If he can finish it by the end of the summer, he’ll be able to start out eighth grade in IM 2. One challenge he’s facing, however, is that he got a bit of a late start due to circumstances outside his (and our) control. As a result, he’ll most likely have to start the second semester curriculum before he’s finished the first semester, and for some amount of time over the next couple months, he’ll be working on both at once. He and Julie are working very hard now to get a bit ahead of the game so that the overlap can be as limited as possible, but there’s a fair bit of ground to cover.

William, of course, has no such concerns. His biggest question over the last few weeks was whether he would be graduating to kindergarten immediately after his TK class finished working through the alphabet at a rate of one letter per week. As much as he loves his current class—and Ms. Pak has been fantastic—I think he was a little disappointed to learn that he’ll have to wait until August to move up.

Last Friday was field day for William’s class, in which the kids spend most of the day outside playing games and participating in other activities, such as cornhole, bean bag toss, and lawn darts (disappointingly, they didn’t look anything like the deadly instruments I remember from my youth). Julie, as one of the room parents responsible for organizing the activities, was a little concerned that they might not have enough volunteers to man each of the stations, so I stuck around after dropping William off in class to help set things up.

As the kids were arriving, it became clear that there were more than enough parents to keep things running, so Julie released me to head into work. It’s rare for me to see William during the school day, so before I left, I made my way over to the lawn dart station where he was waiting in line to give him a hug. Normally, he’s a very enthusiastic and affectionate (and enthusiastically affectionate) guy, so I was surprised when he pulled away from me, muttering something indistinct. I couldn’t make out what he had said—he can be a little tough to understand under the best of circumstances, let alone when he’s surrounded by a couple dozen other kids energetically throwing things around the schoolyard, so I approached him again to say goodbye and to tell him that I loved him. Once again, he shied away from me as I approached and did his best to act as though I wasn’t there, so I was left to make my way back to my car wondering what I’d done to offend my five year old.

It wasn’t until I arrived home in the evening—greeted, as has often been the case the last few weeks, by William running to meet me at the door shouting, “DADDY! DADDY! DADDY!”—that we figured out what had happened. It turns out that Ms. Pak had been very clear in letting the kids know before they headed out to the yard that the parents were there to work and to help all the students; as such, they would not have time to give their own kids the kind of attention and affection to which they might be accustomed. With that in mind, Ms. Pak warned, if a student ran off to his or her parent, distracting them or preventing them from giving their full attention to the other kids, the errant child would be asked to sit out the activities.

So, William was concerned, not altogether incorrectly, that I was potentially jeopardizing his participation in the fun and games. Luckily for me, all was forgiven by evening.

Although we don’t have a full set of photos to share at this time, we recently received William’s spring portrait, which you can admire below. He picked out his outfit on the day pictures were taken, and when the photos arrived in electronic form, he selected the backdrop from among the options provided by the photographer.

If you’d like a higher quality version of the portrait or a copy of his class picture, they’re both posted in William’s school picture gallery.

Gallery: William’s Class Pictures

It’s been a while since we posted any new pictures—largely because we’ve been busy with other projects—but the new school year has arrived, which means that it’s time for our annual back-to-school pictures.

Julia is starting high school this year, which is scary on any number of levels (though it will actually be more of a shock to me when she starts her sophomore year, for reasons that are specific to my situation). She’s found a nice group of friends and is going into the year with a great deal of enthusiasm that has yet to be damped by the workload, which one of her school administrators promised at the eighth grade promotion ceremony last spring would be heavier than what the kids would encounter in college. I have my doubts about that particular assertion, but nevertheless, the specter of testy late-night study sessions hangs over us.

Joe is moving to UPA for seventh grade this year, which makes this the first time since 2014 that he and Julia have started the year at the same school. He’s a little bit nervous about changing schools after having spent a single year at Willow Glen Middle, but we are hopeful that the change in context will give him a fresh start socially; as our old friend Michael Kimmitt has pointed out, middle school boys are generally awful (though he typically uses more colorful language in his description).

He’s especially nervous about his placement in Advanced Band, where he is the only seventh grader and one of only two middle school kids. He’ll be fine once he gets the music and starts playing—the intermediate band at Willow Glen does a great job of pushing kids’ abilities—but his trepidation reminds me of how an age difference of just a couple years can feel like a yawning chasm in seventh grade.

Lastly, William is starting TK, or transitional kindergarten, this year. It’s a relatively new program at Booksin that provides a bridge to kindergarten for four-year-olds who were born between September 2 and December 2, and thus just missed the cutoff. They start off slowly, with half days for the first couple weeks of the year, but after that, he’ll be at school all day, just like his brother and sister. As you can imagine, this is all very exciting for William—and also for us, even if it means we have to make three lunches every morning instead of two.