June 2021

2020-2021 school year ends after 43 years

Boy, did we limp to the finish line — dragging everyone across, bitching and cursing and almost-late every single day — but we made it! Yaaaaaaay! Ami and I organized a strictly unofficial, after-school get-together in Parma Park for Lukas and Manir’s class, which I think every kid in the class attended; we brought coolers full of water for filling up water guns Mrs. Felsoci provided, and that plus the sheer joy of running around in a park with your friends was all they needed to have a great afternoon. We also did our traditional last-day-of-school meetup for ice cream at Willow Glen Creamery, which was delicious fun as usual, but the marquee event of the day was Annika getting her second Pfizer shot! wooooHOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Again, she had no ill effects; that’s one more step toward normalcy. 

Gettin’ back out there
This was the month we started to venture out more, with all precautions; covid cases and hospitalizations were way down locally, lots of people were vaccinated but mask mandates were still in place, and there seemed to be more possibilities. Both kids hung out with their friends, Lukas kept doing skateboard camps (and Saturday drop-in sessions), and we added a few more exciting things:
—We kicked it off with two separate trips to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk: One with Ami and the kids, and one with the Grants (R. came to that one as well). I was so nervous — about going at all, because PEOPLE! EVERYWHERE! — and about driving Hwy 17 (which is a nightmare at the best of times). But we went, and it was SUCH A BLAST! We all really needed it, I must say — just getting to see the sunlight on the ocean did wonders for the soul, no kidding. The kids wanted to ride everything; even Amira was willing to ride the big rides if Annika was the one riding with her, lol. Season passes were bought by the end of the first trip.
—Bowling is back! Ami texted me with a thought: What if we tried going bowling, getting there right at noon when it opened, so there’d be nobody there? And so we held our breath (almost literally) and did it — got those Summer Games passes (which, for $48, let the user play up to three games per day, with shoe rental, every day between Memorial Day and Labor Day. We had missed it so much! We all kept our masks on, of course, except while eating or drinking, and our respective games were a little rusty, but the fun more than made up for it. And once we’d gotten started, we were unstoppable — we started going at least once a week, sometimes three or four, often with the Patels and/or another family (Anne and Grace even came once, and the Grants got summer passes as well), and nearly every weekend we’d go as a whole family — R. had missed the alleys too!
—Blade Team returns: Lukas’s friends in the group he created in second grade, the Blade Team (him, Manir, Sam + little bro James, Reid, Ben Grant, and Owen), fresh off the success of the class park day, decided they wanted to meet up, so we picked a Monday morning and got out there — the boys with their Blade Team sticks and a scooter or two. We moms thought they might last an hour; the first meetup went more than three, when we finally had to pack it up because there were no bathrooms and we were running out of water. At the end, the general consensus was that we were definitely gonna need to do this again, so we decided Monday mornings for the duration would be the plan.
—Petra! With the general health picture as good as it was in June, we figured it was time to have Petra start coming again (we’d paid her all through the pandemic, though she said several times she’d rather be actually working — but it wasn’t safe, and covid wasn’t her fault, so). Anyway — R. stayed in his office with the door closed, and the kids and I cleared out; we picked a different outdoor-seating restaurant for a leisurely breakfast, then did stuff like a Target run or hanging out in a park (often the one by the Patels’, and the kids would come over to join us while Ami and Ritesh were both at work). The house got clean all at once, Petra had her job back, and things felt the tiniest bit more normal. 

Pool Party, Baby!
Just kidding, no party — still don’t feel OK being around people unmasked. But the pool finally got finished and filled and HOLY CRAP IT LOOKS SO AWESOME!!!!! For real, the travertine, the retaining wall, the amazing finish, the lights — just gorgeous. It was so hard to wait to use it — once it was filled, the temptation was strong, but the finish had to cure for a few weeks gaaaaaahhhhh. Finally getting to have our first pool day, mid-month, was the absolute BEST. 

Father’s Day
We had a packed day to celebrate R. — we started with donuts, then visited Grandpa, after which we went bowling (at the honoree’s request), came home and jumped into the pool, and finished with a couple of epic rounds of Uno to cap it all off.