Dispatches from the Distancing – Days 149-155 AND Saturday Snapshot

As you can tell from my absence, it hasn’t been an especially eventful week. Monday was fun–I’ll talk more about that below–but other than that the highlight was finding wine otter pops at Costco.

Distance Learning starts one month from today and we’re starting to get ready. I ordered a chrome book for Chris–technically, we could check one out from the school district, but I’d rather those go to kids who need them. Now, we just need to finish clearing off the dining room table which, believe me, is a mammoth task!

Lillie did start something new today. While her school is bilingual, she is in the mono-lingual classes, so she won’t be getting any foreign language instruction until middle school. So, I signed her up for Spanish Lessons online. She had the sample class today–it is one on one with a native speaker–and she enjoyed it, so we decided to take more classes. She will also have opportunities to speak Spanish. Our next door neighbors are native Spanish speakers and, once she finally gets back to school, there will be many kids to talk with.

I thought about getting lessons for Chris as well, but I don’t think he’s quite ready for that. He will have a lot of distance learning in the fall and I don’t want to add more on top of that. I may get him started on Duolingo (which I’ve been using to refresh my French), but otherwise we’ll consider starting up classes next year.

So, last Monday…Pat had taken the day off work (I think he’s going to take Mondays off for the rest of the month), so we decided to take a little hike. It was actually more of a walk, but we’re calling it a hike because Lillie needed one more 4 mile hike to finish a Girl Scout badge. We headed west of town to the Banks-Vernonia trail, which is a trail following an old railroad. The whole trail is about 20 miles long, but we walked 4 miles. There was no whining–which was nice after our last hike! It only took us a bit over an hour and, afterwards, we made a Dairy Queen stop on the way home (which was probably the best part of the day for the kids)