On Thursday afternoon, April 23rd, Governor Cooper announced the three-phase plan for re-opening NC. The ‘stay home’ order remains in effect until May 8th, at which time as long as the data supports the decision, the ‘stay home’ order will lighten in restrictions. Basically a few more businesses will be allowed to open.
On Friday afternoon, April 24th, the second expected announcement was made by Governor Cooper and the state Board of Education leaders for the remainder of the school year to be done remotely. All school buildings will remain closed for the rest of the school year.
For us, this means summer will begin a little earlier. On our normal year-round track 4 schedule, the girls would be in school until June 28th. Under this new remote learning calendar, our last day of school will be June 11th.
Samantha will most likely not have a 5th grade moving-up celebration with her classmates and teachers. She most likely will not have the opportunity to stay goodbye in person to those friends not attending the same middle school next year or to the teachers she loves so much at our elementary school.
There is already so much to process regarding the experiences Samantha will miss in her 5th grade year and this entire situation as a whole, I do not have the mental or emotional capacity to think about the next school year. For us, the school year would normally begin in July, with open house on the 7th where Samantha would meet her teachers and walk the halls of her new middle school for the first time. We do not know yet if that will happen. The chances are likely it will not happen the way and in the timing we had hoped and planned. But like I said, there is already too much to think about just to get through this day and this week so we will save those thoughts for later, when the time comes.
So that’s how our weekend started off – hearing the official news and wrapping our minds around what the next couple of weeks will look like.
A few highlights from the weekend –
Samantha and I made strawberry shortcake. We may have misread the recipe slightly resulting in a very wet, sticky biscuit dough but the final product was still a delicious treat!
I reorganized and straightened up the pantry, making room for all of my small appliances and making it much easier to see what pantry items we have, what we need, etc.
Ed and I spent a couple of hours in the backyard working on our square foot garden. We finally had all three ingredients necessary for our soil composition and it all needed to be mixed together.
This may have been my favorite part of the weekend. The smell of the sunscreen on my arms and face combined with the smell of a brand new plastic tarp, took me back to childhood summers, swimming in our above ground pool in the backyard. Shoveling, raking, pulling on the tarp to turn and roll and mix the soil ingredients made my muscles ache but it felt good. Working those muscles, the trickle of sweat down my neck, the smell of the dirt and then seeing the progress we made. We are ready to order some seeds and plants which is when the real fun begins!
Another very fun and memorable part of the weekend was introducing the girls to vinyl! We have been talking about getting a turntable for months now, maybe even over a year. When I found out one of my new favorite artists – Drew & Ellie Holcomb – were putting out their ‘Kitchen Covers’ Instagram performances on vinyl only, I told Ed I really wanted to buy them but only if we knew for certain we could get a turntable. So Ed ordered a turntable and some speakers and I ordered the albums.
The company we ordered from is local so we were able to get it set up over the weekend. Ed still has a few records from his childhood and teenage days and we played a few for the girls. I am pretty sure the girls still think we are nuts for thinking this was necessary when we can listen to the same music on Spotify but they will come around eventually and learn to appreciate the crackling sound only vinyl can provide.
The weekend was a little bit of an escape from our current reality – we stayed up too late, watched too much tv, probably ate too much, and did a whole lot of laying around, being fairly chill and maybe a little lazy. It was easy to forget about the things we can not safely do right now, the things we are missing. While I don’t think “escaping” is necessarily the healthiest approach to all this, I think occasionally and for a brief temporary moment, it was good and fine.
Rather than reacting to this moment with fear or worry or even anger, each day I am learning, we are learning, how to best live into this moment. Each day requires an effort, intention, but I think in the coming weeks, as we return to at least parts of our life pre-pandemic, we will be better for it.