[Seriously, if I’m boring you, skip the background posts. Pictures will start soon!]
The following two weeks were a blur of trip preparations and end-of-the-school year activities.
Our school district gave us the same choice each 9 weeks of the school year: 100% on campus (mandatory masks and physical distancing) or 100% remote learning. The initial deciding factor for us was the risk to the teachers and staff.
Our remote learning experience the prior school year wasn’t particularly positive, but we knew we could make it work, much more practically than many families, and we hoped that by us (and others) choosing remote, it would make it easier to physically distance those that really needed to be on campus.
Many others felt the same way, so we had roughly a 50/50 split the first 9 weeks. (It was ~70% on campus for the final 9 weeks.)
Our pediatrician really didn’t think on-campus learning would last over a month or two. Turns out, the protocols were really quite effective when followed. But when they weren’t…
We (rather reluctantly for me) let DS16 participate in cross country in the fall after reviewing the protocols. They would be outside as much as possible (remote learning kids weren’t supposed to be in the building except for something urgent, like to use the restroom or unexpected lightening). Masking outside within 6’. We felt like the coach was committed to these, and from what I observed, they did a pretty good job. Maybe 4’ rather than 6’ at times, an occasional high five after a race, but overall pretty good.
December was the switch from XC to soccer. I knew it would be riskier than XC, but I observed portions of several football practices when dropping off DS16 for XC, and they were also following the protocols. But soccer turned out to be a different story. Right from the start, corners were being cut here and there, and It quickly became apparent other parents didn’t really support the protocols.
We made the difficult decision to let DS16 continue soccer, but we tried to cut off our ability to potentially spread it further as much as possibly, namely cutting off visits with DH’s parents. They live about 25 min from us, and we’d only been seeing them for the ocasional outside visit, but we stopped even those because they are in the high risk age group.
Sure enough, DS16 caught Covid. Followed by DH, DD20, and DD20’s boyfriend (he stayed with us for the school year and did college remotely; he’s now off at basic for National Guard). It felt kind of futile, but I had kicked off room quarantining as soon as DH tested positive.
Amazingly, I didn’t catch it (rapid tested negative at the time, and antibody tested negative when donating blood since). The DS11 twins showed no symptoms, so we are presuming they didn’t catch it either. (DS11-2 had a bad reaction to a blood draw in December, so we’d seen no need to confirm, well, until the mask changes started.)
Another piece of data is that the twins may…or may not…be at a higher risk of Covid complications.
Details on that are here:
So that takes us up to the last day of school on Thursday. For me, packing and final trip planning day. And then rumors came Thursday evening of Universal dropping their mask requirement. I plowed on with the trip preparations, but the news totally took the wind out of my sails.
Coming next…the trip begins…maybe…