My kids are both participating in their school’s summer school program this month. The main reason I signed them up was to get a preview of what virtual school might look like in the fall. I hoped this would give me and the kids a chance to get comfortable on the platforms they’ll be using,
This week I’m registering my five-year-old for kindergarten. Like everything these days, the registration will be completely different. It’s truncated and sterile. I’ll wear a mask, there will be no colorful room with blocks and crayons, and I won’t even take my kid with me. (In fact, unlike the other two times when I showed
In the past few weeks, my church has been slowly and cautiously resuming in-person worship services. In an effort to love and protect attendees, and out of deference to authorities, there is a litany of strange, “never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine this” precautions. Once everything started shutting down, church was the
Several times a day I reflect on how different I am with my fourth child than I was with my first child. A friend of mine just posted a video of her firstborn — a two-year-old — drinking out of a normal cup for the first time. David didn’t drink out of a lid-less, straw-less
Sometimes I wish I could teleport every now and then, to be lifted out of a particularly draining moment of monotony and placed into a different phase of life. Maybe if I spent a day or two as the elderly lady in the grocery store, telling young moms to “enjoy it because it goes so
For ten weeks I faithfully documented our quarantine. I published week 10 just after Thomas’s birthday, and after that I started wondering how long I’d keep this up. See, when I started, I thought the quarantine would be temporary. And I thought that it would end with us flinging open the doors and returning to
If you’d like a quick lesson on the lunacy of Confederate monuments, you should explain them to kids. Pare it down as much as possible, don’t let your bias cloud the water. There was a war — the north versus the south. The south lost. These statues are to commemorate the soldiers that fought for the
I am always hesitant to write about current events. I go for it every now and then, but I do so tentatively, knowing that I (usually) don’t have any expertise to offer. Also because it’s easier for me to just sit inside the four walls of my quarantine and write about my vegetable garden and
Are you planting a Quarantine Garden? Or, to use the more hopeful name, a Victory Garden. A few weeks ago I packed up my face mask, hand sanitizer, and my best “don’t you dare come within six feet of me” glare, and went to a local garden center. At that point, I hadn’t been out
What do you miss? This is something I think about a lot. We’re 10 weeks into this and I’m no longer even considering things like soccer practice or our gym membership. It occurred to me this week that the thing I miss is being in relationship without fear. Remember running into a friend at the grocery store