Monday
I went to work all day! I did a math lesson with James in the morning before I left and then Sam herded them through the rest of it while I was gone. Watching Kanopy (a service through the library):
James out on the deck:
Leah likes to be pushed on her tricycle:
Sam made an avatar that looks like him:
My avatar doesn't look nearly as much like me, but I went ahead and gave myself glorious hair, because why not?
I'd seen some other parents who let their kids design theirs and they seemed like better likenesses (and I thought it might have a funny result or be fun for them to do at least) but James just wanted to make funny cartoons and also all three kids complained separately that the clothes weren't right, meaning that the clothes I was currently wearing on didn't match the avatar the way that Sam's did.
Tuesday
James designing some kind of game:
Monkey see, monkey do:
James wrote several comic book adventures in lieu of his journal - and other than that, I don't remember much! Here are two samples - this is the cover of The Supers 1.
And this is a page from maybe my favorite, which is called Batt vs Bird vs Nothing.
Sam wanted to have a painting-and-margarita party after the kids went to bed to come up with some art to fill his work-from-home corner of the basement. He painted on a big wooden board we'd gotten from some friends who were moving (a couple of years ago!)
My goal was to paint something small for the bathroom - I just used a small canvas board.
In progress:
Finished products:
Here's the painting Sam did:
And the photo James took that was the inspiration for it (I posted it a few days ago):
Wednesday
The big event from Wednesday was going to school to collect the kids' things. James's teacher came out to the van and put two giant paper grocery bags full of stuff in for us. We found all of the library and curriculum books except for 3 (of course I found one more almost as soon as we got home) and she turned all of those in for us - we can return the strays in August. Then I quickly masked up and ran to look through the lost-and-found and retrieved Amelie's lunchbox that I didn't realize we were missing. The kids got their yearbooks in addition to their journals, pencil boxes, workbooks and all of their other school stuff, so they looked through those most of the day. There were also many exiting options for lessons with all our new materials (I'm not being sarcastic - they were happy to get some fresh stuff!) After pick-up, I went to Skylark Bookshop and they put Amelie's books for her birthday present right in the trunk, and then I did the same at Treats Unleashed, where they brought nail trimmers for the dog out to a table in front and then I picked them up. It was super nice not to have to get Leah in and out of the carseat at all those places.
James took a small spill on his bike. He came in the house shouting "Bleeding! I'm BLEEDING!"
Leah insisted on a band-aid in solidarity:
For some reason, James had his end-of-school Zoom today. Leah joined in.
The teacher asked for a thumbs-up at one point, and Leah stuck her thumb right up.
Amelie turned 10! (I'll go ahead and make that a separate post.) It was also the last official day of school for CPS. We cancelled school in honor of Amelie's birthday (how magnanimous of us), but Amelie still wanted to attend a couple of last-day Zooms. She was supposed to write a poem for the last day, but we were interrupted by Leah flooding the bathroom, which required the removal of all of the things from under the cabinets. On the plus, the bathroom is now satisfactorily decluttered.
Here is a collaborative limmerick celebrating the last day of school for the 2019-2020 school year:
There once were some students from Ridgeway
They learned via Zoom as a bridgeway
Corona's so lame
It cancelled every game
The teachers had planned for Fun Day
Sam took James out of the house to give Amelie some peace and quiet and they went to Rockbridge State Park. Since all the other photos are of birthday-type stuff, I'll post those:
Yay! They passed! We've now got a second grader who'll be in Unit B and a fifth grader who'll stay with her same teacher in Unit C next year.
