High school

Colin is back in school.  For now. Or at least today.  There is an emergency school board meeting tonight and we are all convinced they will go all virtual again.  Chesapeake stayed open last week when all school districts around us went immediately virtual.  Joel is hoping to stay in person.  Colin is not.

We thought virtual was bad. Colin has a French teacher who keeps giving him zeros for work he has submitted. Then he has to take screen shots to prove its submitted on his end and the teacher finally accepts it but marks it late. She is doing it to everyone we talk to. You'd think 9 weeks into the school year she would figure out how to have things submitted. 

 In person is even worse.  They are treated like prisoners.  The teachers are teaching both in person and virtual at the same time and instead of using the extra in class time for more instruction, the teachers tell the kids to just play on their phones.  Its apparently not fair to the kids at home who wont get that instruction time.  Its really not fair to the kids in school getting dressed and wearing a mask for the entire day either. All the neighborhood high schoolers are hoping they go virtual. Its so sad. These kids hate school.  I told Colin today would be his last in person day. If they don't go virtual I'm changing him from in person to virtual student.  He has never hated school so much and would much rather be home than stuck in his classroom in a mask with nothing to do but play on his phone. I do get texts from him during the day so that is fun. But sad. Usually its about how much he hates it.  He also has an assigned seat in the cafeteria because of contact tracing (all the eye rolling here) so he isn't making friends. 

A good part of high school is he has been going to conditioning practice for basketball. At first they could only do a few drills. Then they could pass the ball between another player. Now they can pass the ball between 4 players. He did go to the football conditioning practice one night.  He has to go late because it overlaps basketball but the corner back wasn't doing his job so the coach was yelling at the players (both varsity and jv varsity) and looked around and pointed to Colin and had him go in. Colin did such a great job the coach praised him in front of everyone. 

Right now Colin goes in person Mondays and Wednesday with Friday asynchronous (they can do their work on their own time that day

Joel is in person Wednesday and Friday with Monday asynchronous. 

We will see after tonight what the school board decides.  

What a strange year. That keeps getting even stranger. 

 

Adventures

Norah has been able to enjoy some really fun adventures this fall. She got invited to a birthday party at the Adventure Park and loved every  minute of it.  She was thrilled it was finally her turn to go. The boys have gone and she was always too young.  She had no fear and did it all so effortlessly it seemed.  She did get suck on a zip line and had to use her arms to pull her to the end. She didn't weigh enough to go the entire way. 

She kept going higher and higher on the courses. 

Then she had a field trip to the indoor skydiving place at the oceanfront.  A friend of ours started her own school in her home this year and teaches a bunch of 3rd graders and kindergarteners. She asked this summer if Norah would want to be apart of the school.  Even after we declined and homeschooled her ourselves, this woman had graciously included Norah in all her field trips and weekly art classes.  

The kids had a 3 hour STEM class that included learning the science behind it all and a few experiments. Then they got to fly.  

 It will be hard next year for the public school to top this field trip! 

Pumpkins

The past few years I always throw our pumpkins in the garden to rot and hopefully come up in the spring. Usually the pumpkin plants that pop up die off pretty quick. But this summer we had several plants come up and take over the garden. My favorite was a Cinderella pumpkin but that only produced two small ones and something ate one. But we ended up with 120 of these smaller ones. We gave them away by the bucketfuls. A few friends took some for their students. 

We want to try to grow them again but have to find a different spot so they don’t choke out the garden again. 

 

Photos

Mary sends us cute pictures of Elizabeth almost daily. We all love it. Joel decided to recreate one of them.

I hope this continues! 

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween! We had a fun filled Halloween weekend.  Saturday morning we went to a birthday party in costumes because the birthday boy was born on Halloween. And then we came home and I finished working on Joel's costume and got it finished just in time.  He wasn't sure his robot vision would be ready in time but his mother came through.  

He had boxes on his feet but it was hard to walk in so he took those off

For Harvey's birthday party Joel didn't want his robot to get damaged since it was outside at a park so he wore the hotdog costume again.

I do love making his costumes. He has such great ideas and while its a little stressful getting inside his head to figure out what he is really thinking it always comes out great.

Colin wore his alien costume from last year to the birthday party and had a lot more fun in it. No freshly broken bones this year.

Norah was adamant this year that she was not going to be any kind of princess.  She wanted to be a baker. And I think came out really cute.

This is the first year brent and I didn't go around with children. Juliauna took Norah and Joel (and chloe) around with her and then Colin went with Matthew. We sat and watched all the kids come up and get candy - we had ours out on a table. 

Joel dressed up his little piggie. 

Matthew had the best costume. Watching him walk in it was priceless. 

Colin wasn't sure what he wanted to be and just went into the dress up bin and picked whatever fit. He told me that this was his last year legally trick or treating. I told him in our neighborhood he might have a few more years. Or we might have to just have all the kids over for a costume party. 

I matched our guinea pig.....

A bunch of neighbors made these candy shoots that sent down the candy to the kids. They loved that.  That's one good thing from covid. I hope that stays. Our neighborhood also went all out in the decorations. We would go on walks at night to look at the lights. None of them had anything scary. Just lights and blowups. I think people needed something to cheer them up this year. And apparently most of the neighbors gave out full size candy bars.  Another mother and I made a deal that if she goes full size candy bars next year to let me know so we aren't the only ones not giving out the good stuff.  Kids ran around until 10/11pm just playing. We brought out our fire pit and sat and talked with neighbors for hours. I do love our neighborhood especially nights like this.