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:

__________________

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