In March through early April, spring arrived. The kids and Mike had been at home for a year. Taking a look at where the kids were at after almost a year of distance learning, the kids had all fared differently. Lela, as a sophomore, had still been able to branch out and take on more responsibilities despite the severe constraints of remote learning. Ellie was doing alright, doubling down on her old friends from elementary school and doing okay in school. The new, young friendships she’d made in the first half of 6th grade had not survived distance learning. Her old friends, whose friendship had become rather bumpy in early 6th grade, had re-solidified their ties to Ellie, so those girls, along with Sarah in Switzerland, were Ellie’s main friends. Owen had the hardest time in distance learning. He had trouble focusing on school, which was understandable as he was at home all the time, which felt like a weekend or a vacation, and he was surrounded by his toys and games. School was just a little thing on a screen, instead of being an immersive physical environment that helped him pay attention. We talked with him several times about how school matters, even if it’s distance. He did understand, but it was an ongoing effort to help him stay focused. We cut off all video games in December and rotated his desk so I could see the screen, to keep him from playing games or surfing the web or drawing during class. We started math worksheets for recess and lunch to help bring him back up to speed and then get him ahead. The talks, math worksheets, and rotating the desk had worked and we felt much better about how he was doing… but it was still an ongoing effort to keep him from sliding sideways. Socially, he hadn’t been able to play with kids his age for almost a year. The girls could socialize through the computer, but Owen was still a kid and his way of socializing was to play games outside or build Legos together. This wasn’t possible through the computer. So Owen spent a year in social seclusion from his peers. Family is not the same, socially speaking – family members are different ages, different sizes and have different skills and authority levels. Owen is the youngest member of the family, so he is the smallest and least skilled at many things. He can be overridden by family, and he frequently must respect what the older members of the family want. At school, however, the kids in a class are all similar in size and skill level, so they must negotiate, compromise, take turns, listen to each other, and collaborate constantly to get things done, whether in class or on the playground. Students don’t have authority over each other – they’re equals who must work things out. It’s a constant negotiation, and that is a critical life skill. And for Owen in particular, he’s on the older side for his class, and he’s quite skilled at many things compared to his peers, so he is put in the position of needing to be patient with others, instead of constantly having people in the family be patient with him. All these social skills were put on pause for a year, during distance learning. But that would soon be coming to an end. We were getting lots of notices from the school that they were going to open up again. They were working hard on a new format for learning, to get kids back to school in person (if they wished) while keeping everyone as safe (as possible) while also continuing to teach students remotely (if they wished). We got many updates about this process and had to decide whether to send each kid back to school in person. The back-to-school movement was triggered by the teachers and staff getting their vaccinations, as essential workers, but the kids themselves were still unvaxxed. However, getting kids back in school was an extremely high priority for the county itself, because as long as kids had to do distance learning from home, this put extraordinary childcare pressure on parents who needed to work, so it had a strong negative impact on working parents. Just as important as tying down the parents, distance learning was very difficult for many kids, especially those without a quiet place to attend school at home, or those who had trouble focusing in this remote format. One of Lela’s classmates, who was a senior in high school, had to attend school in the back seat of the family car in the parking lot. This was the only quiet place with a good internet connection that he had access to. One of my friends was tutoring a student remotely and reported lots of background noise from the TV and siblings, which is normal in a home setting but not conducive to focusing on school. Distance learning was very challenging and difficult for a LOT of kids and their parents, so ending it as soon as the teachers were vaccinated and the school could be made safe for students was a top priority. We were very, very lucky that we could provide a quiet place for each child to focus, and also had a stay at home parent to supervise (and during the pandemic, a work at home parent too). But we were keenly aware that lots of families didn’t have this. So we watched the schools gear up for going back to in-person learning, and we had to decide what to do about each of our kids. Our kids were not vaccinated themselves, so this was a scary decision to make. It was the right thing to do for the county… but a more ambiguous decision for each family and each child. In person learning was definitely superior, but we didn’t want our kids to get Covid, either. In the end we gave Lela and Ellie a choice about what to do for the remainder of the school year. Lela chose to remain home for the last six weeks of school, as did all of her friends. About half the students in her high school chose this. Her rationale was that she had a good routine going, and a nice quiet place to study in her room and outdoor nook. Also it was only for six weeks so why rock the boat? Also, Lela had been more keen to go back until she took the PSAT in person during this time, and got a taste of being surrounded by students again. They were not as safe as she would have liked, with their masks put on sloppily, and pulling masks down to take a drink from a water bottle, and not always staying 6 feet away. She got home from the PSAT and the first thing she said was, “I need a shower.” The test had gone fine but she was freaked out by all the presence of all these humans, breathing and coughing and getting closer than she wanted, for the first time in a year. So that experience influenced her too, and she decided to stay home for the remainder of the year. Ellie, for her part, wanted to go back to school in person. She didn’t hesitate. She really, really wanted to go back. She wanted to see her friends, and be surrounded by classmates, and to meet her teachers in person. So we supported this decision. We did not give a choice to Owen. This was a parenting decision on our part. But we felt that he really, really needed to go back to school in person. It was worth the risk. He had been isolated for a year, with no ability to play with friends, and only family for company, which isn’t the same as peers. He really needed to go back to a social situation where he could play with kids his own age, be surrounded by school, and have the focusing experience of having everyone around him busy doing school too, and the full-sized teacher in front of him commanding the kids’ attention. This needed to happen for him. So we told him he was going back in person and he was fine with that. For the students who chose NOT to go back in person, like Lela, there was an alternative path for simultaneous remote learning. Lela would basically continue connecting as she had been, but the teacher would be teaching simultaneously to kids on a screen, and to a bunch of kids in person in the classroom. This was definitely an experiment. Meanwhile, I had been approached by the elementary school to volunteer at lunch duty for these six weeks. They were approaching former parent lunch duty volunteers for this especially challenging pandemic lunch duty, so they wouldn’t have to train new people. I accepted, though I was a bit alarmed at going back into a people-and-kid bath without being vaccinated myself. But then we went over vaccine regulations, and school volunteers qualified as essential workers! So I got a letter vouching for my position as school volunteer from the principal, and was able to register to get a vaccine as an essential worker! I would have my first shot, but not my second one, by the time Owen’s school started in April. This was a big relief. This was all gearing up in the background in March, with re-entry planned for April, with different start dates for different schools. So March and early April ended up being the last full month of distance learning for Ellie and Owen, and so our last full month of having the five of us at home. I did more household organization: I tackled my hall office cupboard and the hardware drawers in the dining room, I got throw pillows for the windowseat in the home office to make it a comfortable place to sit, work, and read, and I did a lot of research and store visits to get a one-off piece of patio furniture so we’d have a fifth seat (and would thus be able to seat our entire family outside). I also continued working on organizing our pantry and task bins in the garage, to make our storage more dense and efficient (and clear). In another bit of news, Ellie’s flute teacher came to the South Bay for the day and did an in-person lesson at a park in Menlo Park! This was the first time Ellie had met her teacher in person. They stood twenty feet apart but it was still great. Ellie loved it. And confirmed that in-person teaching is much better – in just a few seconds her teacher was able to correct a positioning issue that Ellie had, that hadn’t been obvious on the camera. I got new leather collars for the cats (quick-release) and got new tags for them too, with their names and our contact information on them. And I fretted about the cats’ weight, wondering if Gizmo was getting heavy while Cricket stayed very thin, and made a feeding box with an entrance hole that ONLY Cricket could fit through, so I could feed her separately. This was a great idea but it only worked for a week, as Gizmo figured out what was going on and managed to SQUEEZE himself through the hole that was only supposed to be big enough for his svelte sister. (Ultimately, in case I forget to mention this later, his weight was fine – he’s actually pretty normal while Cricket is very petite – and on the advice of our vet we started feeding them in separate bowls so we could control their portion size. Problem solved). And in another cat adventure, I heard a crash but couldn’t’ find out where it had come from. Then, later, Cricket looked a little damp. We explored the house to see what had happened. We could footsteps in the hall by the kitchen. It turns out she’d gotten into the pantry, then had stepped on the lid of the used cooking oil container. The lid had pivoted and her leg had gone INTO THE OIL. She tracked this oil all over the house. We caught it quickly and cleaned up everything that we could, but close to the pantry the oil had soaked into the hardwood floor, so we now had oil spots on the floor. We scrubbed at them hard, and got a lot of it up, but some of them would not come out (depended on quantity of oil and which part of the hardwood had been stepped on). We were aggravated, but there was nothing to do except refinish the floor, and we didn’t really want to do that. Thankfully they aren’t all that noticeable as the hardwood has a lot of varying colors – I think we’re the only ones who can see them because we know they’re there, and they’re in the back part of the house. And in other news, in a moment of inattention in the kitchen, when Owen asked me to look at a lego spaceship he’d built while I was chopping something, I brought the knife down on the side of my thumb. The blade went in really, really deep. Right through the nail, sideways. I think the bone stopped it. I got it to the sink, then got it over to Mike, managing not to drip too much blood, then got it to the bathroom. Definitely half the of the end of my thumb was detached, about 1/8th of an inch from the tip. Not a good look, but the piece was not severed and was still pink so it was vascularized. I cleaned it, disinfected it, slathered it with antibiotic ointment, and made a bandage for it. A bandaid would definitely not work – too much blood. I ended up wrapping it tightly under a cotton bandage and taping that on multiple ways (across the tip and around the circumference of the thumb). Then covered that in a plastic sandwich bag so I could still work in the kitchen without getting it wet. Nursing this injury took several weeks. At the very first I needed to change the bandage several times a day as it would soak through with blood. But after a couple days it stopped bleeding. It took a couple weeks, but the flap re-attached, and it was pink and had sensation in it. The cut fingernail gradually grew out, and after a month or two the thumb was back to normal. But looking after this thing dominated my personal experience for a while in March. We also started doing a LOT of gardening. I went to the garden store multiple times and a bunch of pots, and really got into planting and container gardening, making little emplacements around the backyard, the patio, and in Lela’s nook, and running irrigation to them. Mike, meanwhile, started gardening at the elementary school, clearing a bunch of raised beds behind the playing field which had been built and abandoned many years ago, so they had become totally overgrown. Their state just emphasized how the whole school property had suffered and become overgrown during the pandemic year, and Mike wanted the raised beds to look neat and tidy and well-loved, so he spent several days (some with the kids and some by himself) pulling up a jungle of weeds, bagging it in black garbage bags, and disposing of it. They looked much better when he was done – they looked neat and cared for. Then Mike sprinkled some California wildflower seeds in the beds, which would be drought tolerant and shouldn’t require irrigation or much care. When the kids came back in April he had to stop, as parents were forbidden to come on the school grounds once the kids were there (to minimize contact and virus spread). Which was a bummer, but this entire period was a bizarre time and decisions like this were being made all the time to make rules that would safeguard safety (even if a parent on the far side of the field didn’t represent an actual threat of contagion). And so spring came, with our garden growing, spring produce arriving at the Farmer’s Market, vaccinations on the horizon, and two of our three kids planning to go back to in person school.