First Day of School 2020

The first day of school this year was most likely a historical one.  With a large part of the country turning to a virtual school year (at least in part) this year, things looked very different than the first day of school from years passed.  Loudoun County is 100% distance learning at this point, so Lyla’s first day of 7th grade and Nina’s first day of 9th grade were virtual this year.  

 

Virtual learning certainly has it’s pros and cons in this day of COVID awareness, and while I’m hoping all kids get to return in-person to school at some point this year, we’re focusing now on making the best of virutal school. The pros so far seem to be a more relaxed pace to the day, getting to go to school every day in sweat pants, walking downstairs for lunch (and for me, NOT PACKING LUNCHES!!!), the obvious minimal COVID exposure, and having Cayenne as your school-time buddy.

 

The cons so far seem to be the obvious lack of friend/people interaction,  the experience of actually starting high school in person (for Nina), being able to get instruction in the physical classroom from teachers, decreased physical movement throughout the day, and having to spend most of the school day on a laptop.

 

So, while this may not be the way we envisioned the start of the school year in 2020, we’re committed to doing our best to keep the morale up in the Simpson house while this stretch of virtual learning lasts. We don’t know when things will return back to “normal”, so for now we’ll focus on the present and identify what’s working well with virtual and what’s not working well, and count our blessings that we do have all we need to make this work effectively.  So many other families are in a truely difficult place with virtual school, so recognizing that this is more of an “inconvenience” or “unfortunate situation” for us rather than something dire, helps keep the perspective that we’re thankful to be healthy and managing to do alright in this unprecedented time! 

Labor Day Weekend 2020

We had a really fun Labor Day weekend just here at home.  On the Tuesday before the weekend, I hurt my back pretty badly teaching, and I didn’t do much all week other than just sit around and try to rest.  A visit to our favorite sports therapist friend on Thursday though did wonders for me, and while I didn’t know if I would be able to do the hike with the family, I decided to give it a try and just do what I could.  It was too nice of a day to sit inside or not go, and I figured that the worst case scenario was that I’d have to stop part way up the trail and just meet up with them back at the car, but all worked out for me to do the full hike and it was an awesome day to be out hiking!

  

Ravens Rock is one of our favorite hikes, and Mark and I have probably hiked it 6 or 7 times.  It’s a pretty strenuous hike, but Nina and Lyla do a great job with it.  I still remember the first time we tried to take them when they were much younger and they coudn’t make it to the top and had to stop so many times.  Now there’s a lot of enjoyment to be out hiking with them, and it’s a reward to get to the top and look out over the valley and just sit and enjoy the view (which my camera phone does not do justice to) before hiking back down.

 

 

It’s gotten to be a bit of a tradition that after hiking Raven’s Rock, we stop by Bear Chase Brewery afterwards for more great views, music, beers, slushies, enormous soft pretzels, and pizza.  It’s such a cool place, and we were really looking forward to going back there after this hike, but it was beyond packed when we arrived - so much so that we wouldn’t have even been able to find parking, and with COVID still being an issue, it definitely didn’t seem like a safe place to stop in unfortunately.  Although we were a bit disapointed about it at first, we decided to go home, make the girls Frappuccinos, pour a cold beverage, make a plate of snacks, and sit on the deck.  It was a great solution and then we ended up just cooking burgers and hot dogs over the fire pit and followed those up with s’mores.  It ended up being a great finish to a fun day.

  

Sunday was slated to be another beautiful day, so we had planned to try a something with the bikes we had never done before.  Fountainhead Regional Park is known for their mounain biking area.  They have three trails of varying difficulty but say that even the beginner loop should be approached with extreme caution, and now we know why.  It was tough!  Even though it was a real chalenge, we were all proud of ourselves for finishing (and in one piece!), so we treated ourselves to ice cream at Peterson’s afterwards.  

 

  

We rounded out the holiday weekend by having a good friend family over for BBQ.  Mark smoked a pork shoulder (which clearly had Cayenne’s attention) which was delicious, and we plenty of good food, good conversation, and a fun way to close out the last day of freedom before school started!