Your Kids Seem Happy and Other Pandemic Musings of 2020

We say a prayer each night at dinner. When I was a kid, the prayer was God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food. But now we say God is God, God is God, let us thank God for God's food. Amen.

This means, God just is. Relieve yourself of any notion that God will bestow good things on you if you are good. Bad things happen to all sorts of people, no matter how nice or mean or generous or greedy they are. Pray for them. Pray for yourself. Nobody deserves anything more than anyone else and none of this is really yours. Thank you for all of it anyway. Let's eat.

Frozen Mud Pie

The pain of the pandemic has been unevenly distributed, and we have been very lucky. We did what we could to support local businesses and charities. We tried to help neighbors and family when they needed help. We wore masks and practiced social distancing, recognizing that we could play a small but vital role in reducing community spread. We connected with our loved ones in new and interesting ways. We kept the Girl Scout troop going. M still logged 2,000 running miles, although he didn't run in a single official race. Our family is good at pivoting when circumstances change and this trait helps a lot when the world is in upheaval. 

Several people recently commented on how happy our kids seem. I assure you, they experience the FULL range of human emotions. But they continued to grow and learn this year and are generally happy and healthy. Yesterday we took a walk with our neighbors and found an ice-covered pond. After the kids had been playing with the ice for a while and had broken through it in several spots, a red-tailed hawk soared down from a tree and landed just yards away from us to take a drink of water. One of the coolest things I have ever witnessed. An auspicious end to a tumultuous year. 2020 was filled with extraordinary moments extracted from ordinary daily activities. Everything was stripped down slightly. Less people around us, empty calendar pages, very little reason to rush the kids out the door. There were so many times the delight expressed by one of us was infectious enough to raise the mood of the other four. 

This is what I wish for 2021, an unstoppable pandemic of delight over frozen mud pie or the thrill of catching a leaf in your hand before it hits the ground. Plenty of time for everyone to experience deep breaths and deep sleep and deep laughter. Happy New Year!

Happy Christmas, Pandemic Style

We are blessed with a huge extended family pretty local to us, so Christmas usually involves a lot of visiting across many counties. The pandemic has spread through every state, and there are no longer places with low transmission. The good thing is that treatments are better and several vaccines are starting to be distributed...an end in sight for COVID-19! However, the health care system is pretty overwhelmed at the moment. You aren't supposed to gather with people outside of your household, so we had to change a lot of our usual traditions. We are still having fun and making the best of it. 

Usually, Laurel and I kick off the holiday season by caroling with the Girl Scouts. In the past we have gone door to door in our neighborhood and to a nursing home. This year we made greeting cards and craft kits for our local food pantry to distribute with their Christmas food boxes. We aren't currently having an in-person scout meetings, so we met on Zoom with our troop, while we each decorated cards and made kits. It was actually a lot of fun. Our troop decided to use some of their money from the fall nut/magazine sale to donate to the food pantry since we probably can't go to winter camp this year, and they also started to organize a coat drive. Our scouts always have big plans!

For the past 5 or 6 years, we have gone to the Four Frozen Farmers Christmas tree sale, but they canceled their sale this year. Instead, we upcycled an artificial tree my neighbor was tossing. I pulled off all of the lights, which weren't working anyway, and cleaned it off and fluffed it up. It looks beautiful!

We couldn't do our usual celebrating with my parents, but we lucked out with some amazingly warm and sunny weather and had a campfire in their front yard and ate on the porch. We made a craft wreath by outlining each of our hands and pasting them on a piece of cardboard. The kids decorated their Christmas tree and we exchanged gifts on the porch. My mom even got a pretty good family picture of us!

We did a quick drop-off-presents kind of visit with M's family and on Christmas Day, we did a video call with them. Luckily, his parents and sister live near each other and are already podded up, so nobody was alone for Christmas.

Instead of visiting my extended family, we are going to do a massive video call with everyone. This is kind of cool, actually, because it will include some relatives that are usually too far away to be there in person. My aunts even organized advance delivery of the traditional Christmas poppers, which we will "pop" during the call and then somehow try to get a screenshot of all of us wearing our crowns. 

We did something kind of different with my brother and sister-in-law. It was way too cold that day for standing outside and visiting so we went on a car tour of holiday lights in his neighborhood. I printed out bingo cards with themes to look for and we put our phones on speaker so we could talk the whole time. We had a great time! It was snowing so everything was really pretty. 

We still celebrated with our next door neighbors, since we already have a lot of contact with them, but we opted not to eat anything together and we always wear masks anyway. We did crafts and exchanged gifts. I made my usual holiday version of Tic-Tac-Toe (Tic-Tac-Snow, lol), and holiday charades cards and my neighbor organized a candy cane reindeer craft and the most adorable mason jar lanterns with these really cool solar lights on the lids. 

It's been a lot more sitting around in our pajamas and reading books this year. I lost weight, exercised more, drank less alcohol and slept enough almost every night. We shifted into full "unschooler" mode for Christmas break. This means that I don't require any particular study or schedule but I log things the kids do that meet academic standards. For instance, we got a game called Sumoku that provides plenty of addition and multiplication practice. Reading books is another obvious one to track. They also keep up with Duolingo on their own (gotta keep the streak going). The kids feel like they are on a break, but never stop learning.

So, all in all, it has been a weird but still pretty fun holiday season. 

November Homeschool

November was...a lot. I really don't even know how to wrap my head around a lot of what happened in this country over the past few weeks. We tried to do a civics unit on the election process, but it's kind of difficult to wade through some of the speeches to use them with kids.

We got an epic library order from Ms. Molly, our beloved children's librarian. Everything is curbside right now, but she picks the best books, and there's always something we haven't heard about before. 

We started watching documentaries to learn about people who have different experiences than us. On the heavier side, we watched the Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which is a fantastic movie, but very sad and scary at times. On the lighter side, we watched a series on Disney called Becoming, which features actors, comedians, and professional athletes and what they had to overcome to get there. 

Marko started working on a lapbook project on Greek gods. Laurel became very motivated to sell nuts and magazines through Girl Scouts and did great at the sale, torching her goals and becoming one of the top sellers in our troop. Max started to sound words out a little bit and I gave him an official "reading lesson" from some of my decoding materials. Some kids don't need very much instruction in decoding, so we'll see if he asks for more lessons, or just starts reading. Marko is almost done with the second grade math curriculum. I'm not sure what to do about that for the rest of the year. He does Handwriting Without Tears every day with me and that does seem to be helping his penmanship a lot. He continues to balk at righting in a journal, but he does like dictating stories into Google Docs. 

December is always a tough month for school, whether in a building or homeschooling. I think we're going to ditch math for the month and double down on art and music. We made some silhouette art for the front window that is gorgeous at night.

Happy Thanksgiving! I am so grateful for friends and family who have adapted to new ways of staying in touch with us and making us feel connected and loved during this crazy year.