San Diego Lawrence Family

Friday, October 16, 2020

Life is better at the beach

September and October are the best months in San Diego. It is the best weather and the tourists are gone! Now that our weekends are not filled with sports, we've had lots of beach time! We figure we may have 1-2 more weekends of beach weather so we are trying to squeeze in as many days as possible.

The kids LOVE the beach. With friends or without - they dig for crabs, look for shells, dig holes, swim, boogie board and surf - heaven! Emmy and Ryan have been bringing goggles a lot and have found a million sand dollars and seen lots of fish and string rays. Owen has taken up surfing - that's right - surfing. He doesn't know how to swim so wears watch wings! I have a few videos to share but it doesn't do the scene justice - it is the greatest this to watch!

Happy hour after the beach one day

Who needs an inground pool anyway

We met up with a few families and Josh bought all 13 kids ice cream :)

Owie - already a ladies man having Emmy's friends pull him around

My handsome hubby on his bday :)

We went to the beach last night for dinner and took Luci and Alex with us. It was the craziest weather - foggy and the sunny!

I tried to catch it - a rainbow!

Tales from Virtual School

One day we are going to look back at this moment in our lives and laugh. Well, I try and laugh every day but I am still trying to document our weird and crazy stories so one day Emmy, Ryan and Owen can share these stories with their kids. The saying "kids say the darnest things" has take a whole new meaning....

The other day Owen came home and said "Halloween is canceled because of corona virus. Once it is gone, we can have Halloween". Break my heart.

During all of the fires his class had to stay indoors because of the air quality, he came home and said "We didn't go outside from the air is broken". He has been using the word "from" instead of because. I am constantly correcting him but he really doesn't give a shit. Haha.

Emmy is miserable doing online school. She's doing fine but HATES sitting behind a computer in her room. I've been having her move around the house for a change of scenery. As boring as her classes are she has some pretty awesome stories.

1. Her science teacher apparently smacks his lips after every sentence. She does a killer imitation. He also has a 3 year old son who is often sitting on his lap or having tantrums in the background. You gotta do what you gotta do I guess!

2. Her AVID teacher (college prep and organization) also has two boys at home who are always harassing her to play on their ipads. Emmy said she's constantly yelling "Boys - do your homework!"

3. Her social studies teacher - well, I wish I could record her. She looks about 50 lives alone with a lot of dogs and loves the Padres. She says "mmm, hmmm" like 50 times an hour and talks like she is a 25 year old rapper. Emmy has been sitting next to me during this class and we both giggle the whole time. She also has starbucks delivered to the house in the morning and is constantly taking pictures of her dogs! She kicked some kid out of the zoom because he said he wasn't a Padres fan!

4. HANDS DOWN best virtual school story yet - some kid suggested the class download a chrome plug in to help convert jpegs to PDF so the teacher sent it around for everyone to download, which Emmy did. Turns out they all downloaded a virus and pictures of a naked women with HUGE boobs popped up on everyone's screens. HAHAHA. The principal had to send out an email to the whole school.

Ryan is as happy as can be - still singing all day long and drops in to say hi to his teacher every day during her office hours. Poor lady probably wants to eat lunch but hangs with Ryan for 20 minutes each day. Ha! He really is the sweetest.

Ryan has PE on Friday mornings

Science class

TGIF!!

Taking a math test

Poor kid really needed a change of scenery so we headed into the office one day. I set her up in a cube when I had a call and she thought it was the coolest place ever -which made me feel pretty cool too :)

Owie and school!

Saying a quick hi to his class

Thursday, October 1, 2020

5 week of virtual school

Believe it or not, we are about to wrap up the FIFTH week of virtual 3rd and 6th grade! My God time flies. Honestly, it has gone a lot easier than I had expected and we are actually in a "routine". We wake Emmy up at 7a to eat, get dressed and clean her room and then she hops on her zoom at 8a in her room. I take Owen to school rush home and get started on my day, sometimes I am able to squeeze in a walk with Sadie. Ryan is an early riser so has a lot more time to chill because his zoom doesn't start until 9a. We all wrap around noon and meet in the kitchen for lunch! I can hear Ryan participating in groups and asking questions and Emmy is constantly turning her video on and off. Ha! I am amazed by how easily they toggle between online tools and have the so naturally download, edit, save and upload documents. Ryan gave his whole class a tutorial on how to take a photo of your work using the computer and convert it to a PDF to turn into Google Classroom. So naturally he was nominated by his class as super star student this month for being so responsible :) Luckily he also has an awesome teacher! He sings throughout the day when he's working and on mute. Josh and I are always laughing, its so sweet. A sign he's happy right?! He's also still playing baseball which I think has made all of the difference in the world.

Emmy keeps a bit more to herself but seems to be chugging along just fine but I think she is really missing her friends. It is interesting how each one of the kids has struggled and exceled at different points of this whole pandemic. She's 11.5 so it is already an awkward time. Her few close friends who she would invite over are either so over-booked with sports so are never free or she doesn't know what to do when they get here. I am trying to find new things for her and her friends to do (future post!)

A whole lot of pictures!

Ryan is practicing in La Jolla at the nicest diamond!

In an effort to maximize every square inch of our backyard, we just took down the vines and replaced the fence. But before we did - art project!

Oh Sadie. I can't tell if she's happily content or completely bored

Owen has been watching A LOT of fireman Sam :)

And building a lot of magnatile buildings

We figured - we don't have to be on vacation to do a puzzle, right?!

This was one of the hardest ones we've done. Didn't help that we were missing 13 pieces. Damnit Sadie!

A little picnic to get us out of the house

Both Ryan and Josh have fantasy football teams... During Ryan's "wellness break" mid morning, he and his buddies stay on zoom and talk crap to each other about their teams. Ha!