2020, A LOOK BACK: SEPTEMBER

 Hey y'all - 

September marked your return to school in this strange new world we were living in. Missoula decided students would return to school in a "hybrid model," meaning you'd do half of your learning in the school building while wearing a mask and staying 6 feet away from your classmates, and the other half of your time would be spent "remote learning" from home. Kids with last names A-K would go to school Tuesday and Wednesday, and kids with last names L-Z would attend Thursday and Friday. 

And so Laney began sixth grade - junior high! - taking two classes per day instead of the nine she would take in a normal year to minimize exposure to others. 

Reactions to the hybrid model were mixed in the community, and even in our house. Laney missed seeing all of her friends and having a locker, but you know who loves it?

This guy:

Turns out having half the number of kids in the classroom, not having to eat in the noisy cafeteria and not having PE inside are awesome for a kid with sensory issues. Hagen is able to concentrate more and is less overwhelmed by all the ambient noise and chaos of a typical school day, and is able to take his sweet time doing assignments at home.  Making friends at school is hard, but at home, he gets to spend time with his favorite friend of all:

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OK, I think it's time we mentioned the yurt. 

Two years ago, we bought a crazy sloped lot and the redneck hoarder trailer that came with it at Seeley Lake because it was cheap we loved the view. We knew we wanted to build at the top of the hill to maximize the view of the mountains and the lake, but we'd usually get overwhelmed and move on with our lives when we realized how much work it was going to be, and how much it was going to cost. When we'd visit Grandpops there, you two would take the guest room and your dad and I would camp out in the backyard. This was not a sustainable solution because it gets cold at night and I was starting to wake up looking like a character from South Park. 

Your dad pitched me on the idea of building a yurt on the property. "It'll be cool!" he said. "What the hell do I look like to you? A Mongolian communist?" I said. I was not building a damn yurt, as God was my witness. 

So we ordered the yurt in July, and got to work ciphering on the deck and platform required. It turned out that one of the best yurt manufacturers in the world is here in Missoula, just behind the grocery store. Oh, Missoula. For anyone reading along who may not know what a yurt is, it's one of these round, canvas-sided structures like this:

^ You can tell that's just a sample photo and not OUR yurt, because that one is built on flat ground in a reasonable climate, which is the kind of thing normal, smart people do. WE were going to build a yurt on a 30% incline in the snow. Speaking of how we do things: When I was in college, I worked as a hostess at Outback Steakhouse. We had a formula we'd use to determine how long the wait for a table would be. You'd take the number of names on the waiting list, times two, plus five. I employ that same formula in my current life whenever your dad tells me how long a build project will take and what it will cost. Thor's Estimate x 2 + 5 is almost always accurate. 

Because of the slope of our build site, it was going to be such an undertaking that the county made us hire a structural engineer, and that process took so long it pushed our start date into October, which is a super dumb time to start building something in Montana. 

But whatever. Away we go!

Love,

Mom

2020, A LOOK BACK: AUGUST

 Hey, y'all - 

The month of August only exists to host Laney's birthday party.

We decided we'd combine two of Laney's favorite activities for her birthday celebration: swimming, and baking (specifically, inspired by the Netflix show "Sugar Rush"). First, we had a truly breathtaking campout at a secret waterfall spot where Laney and her two best friends could jump into a swimming hole ad infinitum. We let the girls have the new camper to themselves because they love acting older than they are, and I'm sure they pretended it was their college apartment. 

Let me say this: Once, for a TV show I was working on, I got paid to travel with a rock band of questionable repute on their tour bus. They were known as greasy rockers and had an overweight male back-up dancer named "Tony Potato," and still their tour bus was cleaner than the camper when the 11 year-olds were done with it. Tony Potato would have been ashamed.

But campers can be cleaned when there are memories to be made:

Then we came home and hosted an all-day baking competition. 

For most of the summer, Laney was obsessed with the musical "Hamilton." So I created three rounds of baking challenges based on the show. For example, there was a cookie round, where each girl had to present a trio of cookies that looked like the Schuyler sisters. These are the Schuyler sisters in their big number:

And THESE were two of the entries in that round of competition:

Y'all, I cackled. 

The girls came in the dining room and tried to pitch their cookies with a straight face, but couldn't. The cookies were little sugary train wrecks and I can't remember when I've laughed that hard. 

Laney's had the same best friends since she was two years old, and they're all insanely smart, fun, independent girls. I honestly think if you gave them $50 and told them they had three days to make it to the South Pole, they could do it.

...just don't ask them to bake the snacks for the trip. 

Love,

Mom

2020, A LOOK BACK: JULY

Hey, y'all - 

In the summer of 2019, my uncle Chris passed away.

I had loved him since the moment I met him.

Later in life, he met and married the love of his life, Danae, and I got a new aunt and two brand-new cousins and couldn't have been happier. 

His battle with lung cancer was nothing short of heroic, and the care and love that Danae showed to him in their final days together was a testament to what love means. Anyone lucky enough to meet him knew that he was a model for how to embrace life, but I was surprised and constantly inspired by the way he approached death: hopeful, loving, open, and still so much damn fun.  Instead of a wake after his passing, Chris wanted to throw one last party that he called "Last Call," so he'd still be around to enjoy it, too. He left this world before it could happen, so we all still owe him one. 

I was honored to write his obituary, which included the following:

Chris was adored by everyone who had the privilege to know him. With an unparalleled enthusiasm for life, he never did anything halfway: he had a heart big enough for an extended family and an army of friends, and a laugh big enough to rattle the windows. If you were lucky enough to call him a friend, you didn’t question his loyalty, and you didn’t root for Auburn in his house. 

He worked for the City of Montgomery for over 25 years, but his greatest role was as a loving husband and devoted father to his four children. He found his happily ever after with wife Danae, and they shared a love that would survive the two toughest struggles a couple can face: Cancer, and home remodeling. 

Chris’s death leaves a void in the hearts of all who knew him, but his life serves as an inspiration to live every moment to its fullest. His family finds comfort in knowing that Chris has found his way to his heavenly home, where he waits to be joined by his loving wife… and Keith Richards.

I tell you all of that to tell you this: Danae is my damn hero for living through it, and as much as the rest of the world jokes that 2020 is the worst year of all time, I know her 2019 was worse. 

I felt like Danae and her two kids Jacob and McKenna would enjoy a change of scenery this summer, so we had them out for an epic Montana vacation. 

We did it all: We rafted the Clark Fork River and sailed on Salmon Lake. We went camping at Flathead Lake and watched the sun rise over the water. We hiked the mountains and saw waterfalls. We paddle boarded through fields of lily pads. We enjoyed every minute; Chris would have wanted us to. 

Earlier in the summer, your idiot dog (Reminder: he's not mine) "learned" to swim when he fell off a downed tree in the middle of the lake and had to swim to shore. The problem after that was getting him to stop swimming. He was like Forrest Gump when the whole stadium crowd had to yell "STOP, FORREST."

I mean, sometimes he just gets a wild hair and forgets which way the shore is, and that dog is gone. 

You even have to hold on to him in the boat so he won't jump out. I'm telling you: moron. 

He has a lab's enthusiasm for swimming mixed with a husky's anxiety-riddled need to know where every member of his pack is, all the time. So when we're all on different paddle boards, he wears himself slap out swimming from one to the other to determine "Are you okay? You're okay? Great!" Then splash! back in the water to swim to the next person and almost knock them off their board in a never-ending status check. The drinks that dog has spilled, I tell you. 

Your dad bought Archer a life jacket and that extra buoyancy really helped the dog irritate more people in less time.

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We were sad to see Danae and MacKenna and Jacob go, but we're so glad they got a chance to escape to Montana for a while. It's always the sign of a successful Montana vacation if they look like this on the first day, like "Gee, I don't know - this river's kinda cold..."

...and they look like this on the last day, with their butt floating down the river not really caring where it takes them.

We hope we get to do it all over again soon.

Love,

Mom