It’s been a minute since I posted.
A long minute.
The last time I visited this space was the end of Summer of 2019. I had just been camping with my two year old, four year old, and eight year old.
Today as I write this there is a foot of snow on the ground outside the window. It’s Saturday morning. My four year old and six year old are playing games together on their Kindles. The six year old is wiggling her third loose tooth. My ten year old is at her dad’s house for the second time in almost a year.
There are a million things that are different about our lives now compared to 18 months ago. No one sleeps in a crib anymore. No one has a binky. There’s no potty chair sitting in the living room because everyone is potty trained. Everyone faces forward in the car. And for a few hours a day each day I’m not a stay-at-home-mama anymore. I drop the fifth grader and kindergartener off at school and then I drop the preschooler off and then I go to work for a few hours until I preschool pickup time.
Those changes alone would be a lot, but they just so happened to fall at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic, which arrived in March of 2020 and is still going strong today. My fourth grader and preschooler went to school one day in March and then all of a sudden there was no more school. Restaurants closed, schools closed, shops closed, and everyone looked around and wondered, “What the hell do we do now?”
It’s been a weird year. We are still to close to it all and still too much in it to really reflect fully on the weirdness and the hardness and the lasting consequences of this year, so I won’t try to do that.
When school started back up in August, we were given the option to do eLearning rather than go back to in-person classes and we took it. So my kindergartener’s first day of kindergarten happened over Zoom, as did my fifth grader’s last first day of elementary school. eLearning wasn’t for everyone and I can totally understand why, but for us it was a gift. I got an extra semester at home with my little chicks tucked safely under my wing while the storm raged around our little bubble. Was the decision to do eLearning in large part due to my selfish reluctance to send them all out into the world before I felt ready? Maybe. But I don’t regret it.
Still, when the decision to discontinue eLearning for the Spring semester was made, I knew I couldn’t hold off the inevitable any longer. Pandemic or no, my kids were headed back to school in masks. We are three weeks in now, and the change has not been without its challenges, but I know it’s for the best. After all, the goal of parenting IS for them to be able to go out into the world. Or so I’m told. Whatever. (#homebody)
So that’s the quick and vague update. I stayed home with my kids for a year in the midst of a pandemic–no children’s museum or library or family vacations–and I didn’t write a single blog post the whole time.
But oh well. Here we are. Dropping the ball isn’t such a big deal if you’re willing to pick it back up again and again.