The last time my kids were in a classroom was Friday March 13th. The last day of their 18 months at home was Friday August 13th. That's kind of a random coincidence.
Veronica had lost a tooth over the weekend and so the Tooth Fairy came on the first day of school. That was fun for her.
We were all very excited for the first day of school on August 16th. Brandon and I had been waking the kids up at a half an hour earlier each week for the past month so it wasn't too hard to wake up at 6:30 on the first day of school.
Brandon woke the kids up by playing Phantom of the Opera music really loud on our sound system. It was kind of an ominous way to start the year, but it did get the kids out of bed.
I made muffins to go with the cereal that the kids usually eat. All the kids were excited to get dressed in their new school clothes.
And then we realized we still had 45 minutes until school started. Maybe 6:30 was a bit early to wake up.
With all the extra time we had a lot of time for pictures. Here are the three girls in front of the house. (Derrick didn't want to be in this picture.)
We did individual pictures too. Here's Charlotte. She's going into 5th grade. At our elementary school 5th grade is the oldest grade. She was so curious if she would really be as tall as the 5th graders always seemed to her when she was little.
Here's Lydia. She was excited about 5th grade too. She'd made herself a little lama decoration for her backpack.
And here's Veronica. She was so so so so so so excited to start school. I'd thought she might be nervous or shy, but she was raring to get to school.
I think we went back into the house for a little bit longer, but nerves started to take over. So we decided to walk to school and just get there early. Brandon walked with us. Here are the kids heading down the street.
Car maintance and repair took up a lot of Brandon and my freetime this first week. Brandon had been taking apart the jeep to fix it's many issues. (The thing is 20 years old after all.) And ran into a problem with the Freon. It needed to be emptied in order for him to take off the air conditioner. But he couldn't just release the gas into the air. It has to be done with collection tank. So Brandon needed to take the Jeep somewhere. But so much stuff had been stripped off the jeep that it couldn't run any more. So Brandon had to call a tow truck to take the Jeep to an automotive shop just to have them empty the Freon. The tow truck picked up the truck on Tuesday and brought the Jeep back on Wednesday.
The school is barely two blocks away so it's easy to walk to. We found a good meeting spot at the front of the school where the kids could meet up and then walk home together. Then we went around back so the kids could find their places to line up.
As we walked around Derrick randomly started talking about finding his girlfriend so he could go on a date with her. I was like, "what or who are you taking about?" He literally NEVER brought up a girlfriend before. I'm still not sure what that was all about.
Charlotte and Lydia immediately teamed up with the other set of twins that are in their classes. And Derrick found a friend. (Who was not a girlfriend.) Veronica's line up spot was at a different part of the play ground so I walked over there with her and helped her find it. Then she ran off to play.
I planned to go to work soon after dropping the kids off so I was dressed nicely in my work slacks. I think a lot of people thought I worked at the school. A little girl came up to me and asked for help finding her class. I wasn't sure where she lined up, but I saw the Principal and took the girl over to her and she helped the girl find her spot. Then a mom came up to me and asked me to help point out a certain teacher to her.
Then the bell rang and everyone lined up. Brandon and I watched as all our kids went into the school. Each of them waved and then they were gone.
I thought I would feel sad, but really I just felt relieved. The kids were in SCHOOL.
I had a couple different goals for this week, but this day I really just wanted to clean my room before work. So I went home and straightened up my room. I told Brandon, "I'm going to be able to clean something before work, go to work, and then come home and it will STILL BE CLEAN."
After my room was clean I went to work. Later I'd adjust my schedule a bit to go into work later in the morning and through part of the afternoon, but I wanted to stick to my morning schedule this week. I wasn't sure if Derrick would make it though a full day of school so I wanted to have my work done in case I had to pick him up after lunch.
So I went to work. When I came home the house felt so quiet. But in a good way.
I did school work and then it was time to pick the kids up from school.
Two years ago I'd had to physically pick Derrick up from school each day. But this year I told the school that he could walk home with his sisters. But since that was a new concept for everyone I wanted to be close by in case something went wrong. So I went over to the school and waited on the other side of the crosswalk.
I watched the kids meet up in front of the school. All four of them gave each other BIG hugs. It was adorable. Then they turned and came across the street.
When they meet up with me they all started talking at once. They'd had AMAZING days. All of them were so excited to be back at school.
At home we kept things pretty low key. And in the evening the kids went to bed easily at 8:00.
We got back into the swing of things pretty quick. I ended up not taking very many pictures over the next week so this recap will be a little short on pictures, but I do want to tell you about some of things that happened.
Derrick came home from school on the second or third day with a tooth in a little container. He'd pulled it out during class. When he'd gone out to the bathroom to get toilet paper for the bleeding he'd passed Lydia's class. Lydia said he'd called to her from the hallway, "Lydia guess what! I lost a TOOTH." She'd been so embarrassed.
On Thursday I took the Honda for an oil change and on Friday took it in for a tire rotation. It's been okay to do those things with the kids in tow, but it was really nice to do them on my own. I was able to study on the WGU app while waiting for both appointments.
Another thing that happened that week was Brandon and I went grocery shopping together on Wednesday morning. We'd been running low on food, but I hadn't wanted to do a big grocery run so we'd been just doing little trips to Smiths for the past week or so. With the kids in school Brandon and I were able to go to Winco and each of us filled up a cart with food. We had so much fun doing that. Brandon commented that I seemed more relaxed than I had been in a long time.
Thursday was a super social day for me. It started when I dropped the kids off at school. Charlotte and Lydia were making plans with the other set of twins for them to come over to our house on Friday. I talked with their mom to make sure we were all set for that.
When the bell rang I went around to the front of the school where the kindergarten moms were dropping off their kids. I said hi to Liz from Bible Study and asked how her day was going. She told me they'd woken up to their basement flooding that morning. That was not good. I made a mental note to check in with her later.
I was also able to see two friend from church who also have kids in the kindergarten class.
In the evening the social fun continued with a Progressive Dinner for Relief Society. The dinner was supposed to be in the yards for three ladies in the ward. But the weather had turned cold, windy, and was threatening rain. So the dinner was moved to the church.
We started in the Relief Society Room for appetizers, moved to the Cultural Hall for Dinner, and ended with Dessert in the Young Women's Room. I didn't care about the change in location. I was just happy to be around other women. It was so much fun to talk to everyone.
When it was all over I was loaded up with leftovers. I'd brought chocolate zucchini bread, and there was some left over. Plus my friend sent me home with a bunch of the sandwiches and wraps. So I grabbed some extra plates and made stops on the way home. I dropped some things off at my Ministering Companion's house. She'd been out of town until about an hour before the activity so she hadn't been able to make it. Then I stopped at Liz's house and gave her some of the zucchini bread. She was so touched. She took me in the basement and showed me all the damage.
The final stop was my friend Kaymie's. Kaymie has two kids in elementary, one in middle school, and one in high school. She is spread thin thin thin. She was also happy to have a plate of food.
And then I went home and basically didn't talk the rest of the evening.
Thursday was also special because it was our two year anniversary of buying the house. We've now lived here longer than we lived in Pocatello. And we are fast approaching the milestone of living here longer than we were in Texas. We've also lived in Idaho for 4 years which means that we've now lived in Idaho longer than we lived in the south.
We celebrated the two year anniversary of our house by having in appraised on Friday. We are in the middle of refinancing the house and so we needed an appraisal. So on Friday morning after the kids were dropped off I hurried home to help Brandon finish straightening up the house and yard.
We got the results of the appraisal the next week and WOW they were better than even our lender's estimate had been. This led to some really cool things with our refi, but I won't go into those details until it's all final.
At some point I told the girls I wanted to make a sign for the house that said, "Don't mind the mess - Future Engineers at Work." The girls loved that and made their own sign.
The kids get out of school at 3:00. At 2:50 I usually start walking down the street to meet them across the street from the school. I was putting my shoes on to go out the door when I heard stomping footsteps outside the house. I thought. "that kind of sounds like Derrick's stomping, but he's still in school."
And then I looked out the window and saw Derrick walking up the driveway.
He came in the back door and I was like, "Derrick what are you doing home?"
I couldn't get an answer that made sense out of him. He told me he'd just decided to come home. But I couldn't figure out how he got out of the building.
I hurried to send an email to his teacher, his SPED teacher, and the Principal to see if they knew what had happened. I wasn't mad but I was super curious how he'd managed to leave school early.
I knew that the girls would wait for Derrick at the school so I needed to go over there and tell them that he wasn't coming. I probably should also have gone in the school to talk to the people there to see what had happened, but this was the day that the other set of twins and their little sister were coming home with us. I didn't want to waste time in the school. So I just met up with the kids and we went back home.
Derrick's teacher called me a little later to apologize and explain. They'd been outside for some end of the week fun activities. The teacher had the kids bring their backpacks out because they wouldn't be going back in the building. He'd been keeping an eye on Derrick, but must have lost track of him.
This, combined with what Derrick had been telling me made so much sense. Derrick had thought school was over because he'd gone outside with his backpack. That's how he'd got out of the building.
I told the teacher that honestly I'd expected Derrick to have to come home early this whole week. So 10 minutes on a Friday was actually a success.
Meanwhile the girls were having a blast with the other set of twins. The twins had come over one other time before COVID, but that felt like ancient history. All the kids had a good time playing all over the house. Their mom picked them up at 5:00 and I told her that the girls were welcome back any time.
Derrick's also got picked up at 5:00 because Friday is one of his new therapy days. Mr Chris was taking him fishing at Deirkies Lake and Derrick was so excited. Brandon called me to let me know he'd be home late on Friday. He was on a mobile call all the way in Fairfield which is like 2 hours away.
So the girls and I had a lot of free time. We flipped through Disney + and Netflix and discovered that Beethoven was on one of them. So we watched that. Veronica got super worried about the dog, but I helped reassure her that it was going to be fine. She loved the end.
Then the girls saw a movie called Vivo and wanted to watch that. It didn't look that interesting to me, but I said they could watch it. I went upstairs and worked on school stuff. Vivo was a musical and as soon as the singing started I thought, "Is that Lin Manuel Miranda?" And Charlotte yelled up from the basement, "Mom, I think it's Hamilton singing!"
I didn't watch the movie, but I loved listening to the music come up from the basement. There is something so hopeful and sincere about Lin-Manuel Miranda's voice. It just cuts right into me. When the movie was over the girls all told me it was their new favorite movie.
Derrick came home so excited about catching fish. And later Brandon came home too.
After the kids were in bed Brandon and I stayed up watching "Here Today." I'd rented the movie from Redbox because I'd heard Billy Crystal talking about it on the Id10t Podcast. It sounded good and the movie did not disappoint. I LOVED it and have been thinking about it every since.
Here's the preview to get you interested.
On Saturday we didn't have to clean up the house because it was already clean from the appraisal. That was nice because we all needed a really chill day.
Derrick woke up around 7:00 and started talking about fishing right away. I told Brandon, "you better take him fishing or we are all going to hear about it all day long." So Brandon took Derrick to Dirkie's lake and they caught a whole bunch of fish.
I stayed home and did some yard work. Around 12:00 the girls and I walked over to a primary activity at a church kind of by our house. They complained about walking the whole way there, but I told them it was good for them.
When we got to the activity it was kind of boring for my almost 11 year old (and their sister who is just as tall as them) so we didn't stay long.
I went back to pulling weeds and taking care of the garden. Here are some picture updates of the garden.
We have really pretty sunflowers that have made the overcast days seem more bright.
There are some little things growing over there. Like another round of peas.
Well I'm happy to report that I've matured a lot since I was 20. Back then I just didn't have a lot of life experience to understand a lot of the financial concepts. This time around the material is still complicated, but it makes a lot more sense. But I do have to go through it slowly in order to make sure I'm understanding it. In the other classes I took I would fly through 6 or 8 lessons a day. This time I'm doing 3 or 4 a day.
While I was doing home work the kids played downstairs. They made a living room with a Television set.
After church Veronica had a zoom meeting with my sister Lindsey. Lindsey recently went through some certification to be able to do dyslexia certification. She needs some practice giving the tests. I have some suspicions about Veronica and learning disabilities. I've requested Veronica be tested by the school, but they are still gathering data on that. In the meantime it seemed like a good idea to let Lindsey do a little practice test on Veronica.
So Lindsey did a very short version of some of the tests with Veronica. This turned out to be a very eye opening experience for me. Veronica did WAY better with Lindsey over zoom than she ever had during the whole year of homeschool with me.
I told Lindsey, "this is a completely different child than I was teaching last year." I don't think all of it was due to Lindsey. I think a lot of it was from just one week with her second grade teacher. Every day Veronica was coming home telling me something new she had learned. She went from being completely indifferent to being a little knowledge sponge. A good teacher really can make a big difference.
Our second week of school started off well. It was a little harder to get the kids up in the morning, but overall they were still excited for school.
Here's Lydia drawing one afternoon while I read to the kids.
On Tuesday I went to Symphony rehearsal in the evening. I'd been on the fence about doing symphony again this year. I'm already so busy with my school that I wasn't sure I could fit practice into my schedule. But I realized I'd be sad to miss out on it all. So I decided to do it again.
This year we don't have to wear masks to rehearsal. (Apparently, Idaho has decided that if we pretend COVID doesn't exist it won't bother us. This is a terrible plan, but it's what we are doing right now.) So here I am posing without a mask with my bass.
This is my 2nd year with the Magic Valley Symphony and it's my 10th year playing the bass. We have some really good songs lined up and most of them are going to be fairly easy. So I'm happy to be back.
On Wednesday morning Brandon and I dropped the kids off at school and then went to the Twin Falls Temple for a session together. We've wanted to go since the temple reopened, but decided to make it a priority this week when we found out the temple was closing for scheduled maintenance in a few weeks.
I'd renewed my recommend back in May, but all during April I'd had a big internal struggle about whether or not I even wanted to renew it. I'm frustrated by A LOT in the LDS church, but because I pay tithing and have a temple recommend it looks like I'm just fine with the church. I was considering letting my recommend lapse as a form of protest. But ultimately I decided that was like drinking poison and hoping someone else would die. I still fit the qualifications for a temple recommend so I figured I might as well still have one. (I refuse to use the word "worthy" because I DON'T need someone else to determine that for me.)
This was my first time back at the temple since the pandemic and I wondered if I would view it differently because I feel like I've changed a lot in the last 18 months. There were definitely some things that I noticed that I didn't notice before, but overall it was still a good experience so I'm glad I decided to keep my recommend current.
Here's a look at the Jeep. All the blue are little pieces of tape that Brandon put on the end of each hose and wire as he disconnected them. He wrote on each tape what part they went to.
He has plans to get this all apart, cleaned and then put back together again.
I'm glad he knows what he's doing because it just stresses me out to look at this.
Our neighbor Kathy had the girls come down to her house to pick up some barbies that she no longer needs. The girls were in HEAVEN.
They played with them for a long time.
A really long time.
On Thursday night there was PTA meeting at the school. I had a feeling that if I went to the meeting I would end up in a leadership role. I hadn't heard anything about a new president or any other roles so I figured there was still a need for those to be filled.
I've secretly wanted to be PTA Treasurer for a while because I really want an chance to count a lot of cash. (And because I know I'd be a good treasurer.) But I just wasn't sure if I'd have room on my plate to add PTA to all the other things I was doing.
So I debated not going to the meeting. Then I decided I'd be mad at myself if I didn't go and someone else ended up treasurer who didn't do a very good job.
So I went to the meeting. There were a total of 5 people there. And one was the outgoing president. And she was looking for a new president and treasurer. I said, "Well I won't be president, but I'll definitely be treasurer."
And within 24 hours I was added to the PTA bank account, given a whole tote Treasurer stuff, and signing checks.
I'm actually super excited about this. Yes it's another responsibility, but managing money is such a natural thing for me that I'm not expecting this to be very difficult.
On Friday morning I had Bible Study again with the Twin Falls Community Church. I really love this group. Every time I go it amazes me how Liz can pull so much information out of a handful of verses. Before this class I'm not sure I'd ever even read Titus all the way through before. And now I've sat through a total of two hours and 15 minutes on the book. And we are only to Chapter 3.
When Veronica came home on Friday she said, "We don't have homework, but I have some work I want to finish from class. Then she pulled out a math packet and sat down and did all the math BY HERSELF. She even explained to me how to add things like 7+8. I was like, "who is this kid?"
Derrick showed me a picture he'd colored. He had me take this picture and send it to Miss Wenda.
On Friday night we watched The Mouse and the Motorcycle movie because we'd finished the book. The only copy I could find was on Youtube and it had been recorded off TV. It had snippets of old commercials and the "after the messages we'll be right back" claymation things. Those brought back memories. The movie had two parts and Brandon and I tried to explain that when we were kids we would have had to wait a whole week to see the second half of the movie. And if we were out of town we would have missed it and NEVER been able to see the end EVER. The kids could not quite understand what we were talking about.
Saturday was another day with nothing big planned. We cleaned the house really well. We decided to rearrange the living room. We put the couch in front of the window. We all like how open it makes the front room feel.
In the basement we switched out a light in the corner for a new bright LED light. It changed that whole part of the room.
After the house was clean we went to the pool for one last time with our summer pass. Brandon came with and watched the kids pass the swim test and then go off the diving board. We had a great time at the pool.
Then we came home and Brandon worked in the garage while I did some stuff in the garden. Here are the tomato plants. One of then is nearly as tall as me.
Charlotte was playing with some binder rings and pretended they were hoop earrings. They make her look so grown up!
Brandon had decided that he wanted to put his Powerplant certification to good use. He decided to take the engine out of the jeep and inspect it along with everything else. To do that he'd need an engine hoist so he'd bought one earlier in the week. (We ran the numbers and it was better to buy one than rent one.) So he put that together.
Lydia was going around looking at lots of things with a microscope.
Charlotte helped me harvest some yellow onions.
On Saturday night Brandon surprised me with a date in our tree house. He'd set up blankets all around the railing to make it private. Then he laid out sleeping bags. He had chocolate, a candle, and romantic music. It was so cute.
It's good that we were in the house in the morning. Around 8:00 Lydia came out of her room crying that she couldn't breath. She'd been complaining about a sore throat the night before. Now she was all congested and coughing.
When the kids had started school I'd known that the Delta Variant of Covid was running rampant through the US. And I knew Idaho wasn't doing a very good job of stopping it. Our school district wasn't even requiring masks. So I've been expecting something like this to happen from the very first day of school. And I've kind of always known that Lydia would show symptoms first. She gets sick the easiest out of all the kids.
Did I think it was Covid? Not really. I was willing to hope that this was just a regular cold. But we have a trip to Yellowstone planned for Labor Day. I wanted to rule out Covid before we went on the trip.
I logged into the hospital's self triage tool and put in Lydia's symptoms. Then I scheduled her an appt for a COVID test. We are 18 months into this pandemic and this was the first time any of us needed a test. She and I drove over to the testing site for her test.
She was super worried about the test and started crying a little bit. When the lady came out to do the test she saw Lydia's tears and so she explained that she didn't have to put the swab very far up Lydia's nose. She just had to put it a little way up. That made Lydia feel better.
So we did the test and then were told that we'd have results in 48 hours. That was good. But then I had to decide what to do about the other kids. There's not great advise on what to do with siblings while one is waiting for test results.
I decided the most responsible thing to do would be to keep them all home from school until we had Lydia's results back. That kind of sucks, but it's really the best thing to do. Plus Derrick seemed to have some symptoms by the end of the day and that kid NEVER gets sick so obviously we were dealing with something contagious.
Lydia and I were back home in time for our stake conference to start. We were already planning to watch it over Zoom so that wasn't a big deal. There were a lot of changes to the boundaries of 3 stakes and a whole new stake was created. Lots of ward boundaries were also changed. Our ward stayed intact, but we were moved into the new Twin Falls East Stake. Brandon and I are excited about all these changes.
And that gets us caught up.
This next week will look different than I'd thought, but I'm hoping Lydia has a negative test result and we can get back on track. If it's a positive test we'll deal with that too.
I'll keep you updated.
Thanks for reading.
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