Covid Containment

Friday, April 23rd was the kids' LAST DAY of online school. The school district moved to 5 days a week in person on Monday, April 26th! The kids still have to wear masks and all of that jazz, but they are allowed to sit only 3 feet apart in classrooms instead of 6 feet apart, which is what made it so the schools could go five days a week. I'm pretty sure I've written these details lots of times, so I'm not working too hard to explain it thoroughly. It all seems so normal right now in the moment, but I wonder if any of this will make sense if I ever look back at my feeble explanations in the future. 

Same Song, Different Verse

Just over a week ago, our Sunnyside School District announced that hybrid learning was ending, and students would be going back to school in person for five days per week starting on Monday, April 26th. It felt so sudden! I was scared to believe it because every time I have thought I could depend on my kids actually going to school full time over the past year, it has been ripped away from my bosom and left us with one to two days of in-person school and three to four days of at home online learning per week. But this was real. Real school was going to happen for real! 

March Books

March was so busy with cross country coaching that many days my brain was too fried to want to do much more than scroll on my phone if I ever had time to sit still. In spite of my overall fatigue, I did manage to finish reading/listening to twelve books during March:

Clothing tidying

Generally I don't tend to embrace current fads. Something in me resists being a herd animal and following the latest trend. It's probably just plain old stubbornness--nothing fancy or unique about that! I tend to wait until the hype has died down and then see if the fad is still intriguing or palatable before trying it out. I held off on jogger pants for a long time, but now they're my main wardrobe staple. I never got into the patterned leggings craze a few years ago, and I could NOT do skinny jeans. Nay to all fad diets. No thank you to random new-age parenting strategies. Yes to waistband-free swing dresses. And so on. I'm a selective fad-consumer. 

Rediscovering FHE

When the church instituted the Come Follow Me curriculum two and a half years ago, family home evening fell by the wayside in our house. Thanks to the Come Follow Me manual, we have a mini gospel lesson five (ish) days per week, so an FHE lesson was not necessary. Since we also already spend a lot of family time all together (thanks to the excellent teacher schedule), FHE felt superfluous and stopped happening. Last week I felt the need to set aside weekly family time again. Coaching cross country and track seasons leave us feeling a bit disjointed and starved for family time at home, so the recent end of cross country season and nearly simultaneous start of track season definitely made FHE feel more necessary. 

New Bikes!

Our Big Spring Break Activity was getting snazzy new bikes for the kids. We've always made do with heavy old repeatedly-refurbished kid bikes, because kids grow fast and bikes are expensive! Now that Jay and Rose are big enough to ride adult sized bikes, we decided it was Time to Take Some Action. As the lucky youngest child, Amber snagged a new bike too because we want her to be able to keep up with all of our sleek wheels. 

Spring Break

Last week was spring break. We stayed home, home, home and relaxed in non-scheduled, commitment-free comfort, which felt extra decadent after months of filling cross country coaching commitments. Jeff went to track practice four days. I ran, biked, and read fluffy books at home. The kids earned their daily screen time with equal outside time. Our tulips bloomed! The wind blew too strong for too many days. But the sun also shined a lot and we enjoyed that happy vitamin D in and around the wind. The girls did a lot of trampoline-jumping. All of the nearby neighbor-friends went out of town, so our house was even more of a quiet haven. We slept in past 7am more than once. On Tuesday, we went to Richland to get the kids new bikes (that's a separate post). On Wednesday, I did my longest-ever mountain bike ride, 21 miles! On Thursday, we had three friends over--one friend for each kid--and they played happily all afternoon together. On Saturday, Jeff went to coach at a track meet jamboree. 

Easter Weekend

Easter weekend was also General Conference weekend and the first weekend of spring break. We made tentative plans to repeat the trip we took during last General Conference Saturday to Walla Walla for a family bike ride and lunch at Fast Eddy's, listening to conference on the way there and again on the way back (it's an almost perfectly timed driving distance from our house). The aftermath of our second round of Covid shots ended up being much more intense than the first round, so we stayed home. Jeff woke up on Friday morning feeling feverish, achy, and exhausted. Somehow my body handled both Covid shots like a champ and my only symptoms were a super sore arm and very slight fatigue (which could've been just general tiredness, not vaccine-caused tiredness, it was impossible to tell). But Jeff was down for a full day after shot #2 and only feeling about 50% better on Saturday, so we stayed home rather than venturing forth on a family bike ride. 

Season Finale and the Pink Frosting Plague

Last week held the busiest four days that we've seen in over a year. Everything we did was worthwhile and good; it just seemed to happen all at once! 

Monday: In-person school for the kids during the day, cross country practice in the persistent wind that afternoon, then the team banquet and awards ceremony that evening. Since the wind was making the temperature quite cold, I layered on two thick wool shirts underneath my team apparel shirt and wore my flannel lined jeans, wool socks, plus a lined jacket. The wind did not die down in time for us to hold our traditional team bonfire and weenie roast outside, so we piled into the large home of one of our team captains and roasted hot dogs in the fireplace in their family room (it was super weird wearing a mask inside a house). When I walked inside their house, I was immediately too warm in my many layers. I shed my jacket but couldn't get out of any more layers, and spent the evening on the edge of overheating in all of that wool. Jeff and I spent a feverish 15 minutes organizing all of the certificates, varsity letters, pins, and awards for the team before presenting them one by one with much clapping and warm hearted smiles (Jeff did all of the talking, I handed him the papers and pins). We stayed till after 8pm socializing, which is late for us homebody introverts. We love our team and their parents.

Weekly Words

My words for this week consist of captions for 25 pictures:

We love our wild, carefree Amby!

Crocuses, Clouds, and Leprechauns

Springtime is here! The sky in our valley is at its best in March: rich brilliant blue hues with just enough cottony-soft clouds to give it a fascinating depth. The bulbs we planted five months ago are beginning to bloom all in a cute crooked row along the front of our house. Sixty crocuses sure seemed like a lot when we were digging holes to plant the the bulbs, but now that they're blooming, the row looks so fragile and thin. Numbers notwithstanding, the blossoms are beautiful and feel extra hopeful coming through that gray ole dirt. This was my first time planting flowers, and watching them grow has been more fun and satisfying than expected. The canals were filled this week, flooding the veins of our dry valley with life-giving water. The asparagus fields have been plowed (and maybe planted? I can't tell). The Yakima Valley is poised for growth and greenery!

February Books

February was a month for literary fluff. Fluffy February! I did manage to sneak in a few more substantial books into my intellectual diet, but for the most part I floated forward on fantastic fluffy fun. Part of the reason for the quantity of easy reading was a free trial of Kindle Unlimited. My free trial ended on February 27th, and I had assembled a whole list of guaranteed safe authors to try during the trial. I didn't even have time for any re-reading--I read all new-to-me books in February. I downloaded a pile of books from Kindle Unlimited and read like wildfire. By the end I did suffer from a touch of genre fatigue from all of the regency romances that I crammed into those last two weeks, but it was worth it because tucked into that pile o fluff were some hilarious treasures.