Playtime

This year, the call to keep Christmas from seeping into Thanksgiving was coming from inside the house, if you will. So while a few of the tiny trees made it onto the table before Thanksgiving, by Friday I was chomping at the bit to put up my other countertop tinsel trees without (as many) comments….

October is hockey and Halloween heavy at our house. The NHL’s newest expansion team, the Seattle Kraken, have started their inaugural season. The best way that I can quantify what a big deal it is in our orbit is that our oldest son’s hockey game was rescheduled once they noticed it would conflict with the…

Hearing drums from outside at our house is akin to hearing the ice cream truck. It means that most of us are going to run out of the house toward the end of the street where, at least once a non-COVID fall, we see a drumline from what we assume is a local high school….

There was a lot to learn in the first full week of school. For starters, the Kennelly Keys in Lynnwood doesn’t seem to have the same hours as they had pre-pandemic, but then again, I don’t have the same memory as I did pre-pandemic. I found this out when I got two days notice to…

My first experience with “Friday Night Lights” as an adult was in 2006. It was a week of record-low temperatures while I was around 39 weeks pregnant. With little to no awareness of the goings on at Edmonds Stadium, I had just been admitted to what was then Stevens Hospital to have my first baby….

This has been a big week for back-to-school information in the Edmonds School District. We have had an Edmonds School District News email, many virtual school information presentations, and on Friday, a message from the Superintendent. If you missed your school’s virtual meeting, many are posted on YouTube.com/EdmondsSD. I checked the district site and there…

The Back-To-School talk is inevitable at this point, even though I have been informed by a teenager that it’s “cringe” to talk about it ahead of time at home. I don’t want to be a summer buzzkill so I try not to bring it up too early in August, but there have been some Edmonds…

We are right on that line where it’s warm like summer but I got a response to a text that was basically “I’m at PTA meeting right now.” I was just in Target and entered the school supply section lightly, no list, no stress, just the aisle in front of me. This is when I…

Sometimes the hardest part about making dinner is deciding what to eat. There are just so many variables with ingredients you have on hand, time, energy and — when you have kids, what will they eat without me explaining that they will like it. Picking things to do with the kids can be the same…

A young reader and his family, including a few other kids, came into the Edmonds Library while I was there to pick up the Find It! Scavenger hunt flyer and as it turns out, renew my almost-expired library card. This young person said “Daddy, this is amazing,” motioning to all of the books in the…

This week, my kids went to camp. It was pretty exciting to get a taste of the before-times and see kids find familiar faces and new friends even though they’re still wearing masks and some camp activities have been amended to follow safety guidelines. We are also starting to see more and more of the…

As I get older, I struggle more and more to choose the name of the member of my family I am trying to address on the first try. Add in over a year of COVID and the “ding” associated with the kids being let into their Zoom classes and I sometimes resort to “tall one”…

Any heat wave brings out the “I had to walk to school, uphill both ways” in me. I had an infant during the heat wave of 2009 that you’re hearing about in the news this week — the hottest day on record was 103 degrees on July 29, 2009. Over the boring retellings, which I’ve…

On our kitchen table, there is a piece of foam core with rows of different color Post-its, one Post-it per item needing to be done for school this next week and another set of rows for To-dos, Works in Progress, and my favorite row, “Dunzo.” Our current design is based on Kanban, which is a…

Grouping local options for each week’s Edmonds Kind of Play is usually pretty easy. Sometimes it’s library or Parks and Rec offerings, other times activities based on the weather we’re expecting. This week, there doesn’t seem to be a way to tie a bow around vaccines, the Edmonds School District’s eLearning program, Sno-King Youth Club…

Spring fever is described by Wikipedia as “any of a number of mood, physical, or behavioral changes, which may be experienced coinciding with the arrival of spring” with restlessness and laziness among the options. Anyone who has been in a classroom around this time knows the feeling and those of us trying to find new…

On April 22, the Edmonds Family Fun Center posted this announcement on Facebook, “After having to close our doors over a year ago due to the pandemic, we must share the difficult and sad news that the Edmonds Family Fun Center location will not be re-opening and has permanently closed.” They go on to thank…

Do you remember your high school orientation? I remember parts of mine so vividly, in part because of the seriously dated outfit I wore, including a goofy hat, and that the school felt big and different. Secondary students in the Edmonds School District, 7th through 12th grades, who chose a hybrid schedule will return to…

National Library Week is April 4 -10 and there are certainly reasons to celebrate it. The Edmonds and Lynnwood Libraries are now offering limited in-building services on top of the current contactless services. Recently, I stopped by to pick up a hold at the Edmonds Library and was offered contactless pick-up or the option to…

Shortly after quarantine started, it felt like we were seeing more and more birds in the yard. Our initial intermittent efforts to identify the birds we’d seen over the years — Steller’s Jays, different kinds of woodpeckers, an unidentified hawk, robins and a ton of “little brown birds” — took a more intentional turn once…

On the school front, we went from telling our high schooler to prepare to not go back in-person this year, to “do you want to do an in-person hybrid model,” followed by “if yes, did you grow out of all of your pants suitable for leaving the house?” Turns out, we don’t have enough pants…

Planning things for the summer feels as hard to comprehend as the anniversary of one year in a global pandemic. Information on both what options lie ahead and what we have already done seems to be showing up at the same time and feels dizzying. On the same day, I saw a social media post…

During our most recent snowy weekend, I got a text from a neighbor that included a video of her two little ones playing in the snow wearing snowsuits that we had handed down to them that had been previously handed down to us, they were now on their third family. I find this kind of…

Each year when the Edmonds School District Calendar comes in the mail, I put it aside as a “present” for a friend of mine who uses not one but TWO of them in her house each year. When it came this year, it felt so weird to be looking at a school-related calendar that I…

Last week was the end of the first semester for the Edmonds School District. Semesters weren’t even really on my radar until I had a middle schooler and didn’t have the full “I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record” feeling until I had a high schooler — last weekend…