Hi. What day is it again?

Remember watching the morning news to see if school was canceled for the day? Of course you do. It’s all you’ve been thinking about since your kids’ first winter in school. We, as a horde of youths, would wake up with a level of hope usually reserved for Christmas morning, and we’d take more interest in the news than our parents did during reports of neighborhood home invasions. We would eat breakfast, certain of the fact that we’d remain in our pajamas for the foreseeable future, convinced our school’s name would show up in its assigned alphabetical filing. Having to get dressed for school after a morning like that was crushing, but the bliss of seeing your school’s name was unparalleled. Also similar to Christmas, the anticipation was as fun as the resulting outcome.

Kids don’t experience anything like it, other than Christmas, I suppose. I know this isn’t everywhere yet, but my kids’ school district has e-learning, so school assignments still need to be completed on a school-provided computer that kids get to take home. This is both awesome and terrible. They get to be excited about staying home, but they still need to produce some work to make the day count. It’s the remote work problem. You don’t get to fully relax, but you also have nothing getting you up and moving with any real sense of urgency. The day just drifts by. When we had snow days, back in millennial childhood era, we had no responsibilities for that day. We could play all day, or go out in the snow long enough to feel we could come back in for hot cocoa without our moms getting annoyed. Sure, the day had to be made up at the end of the year in June, but those weren’t real school days. They were tacked-on, in-school movie and end-of-the-year “assignment” days. Maybe that’s just an indicator of an Indiana public school education, but a day off in the winter was worth an added day in June.

I know I’m veering dangerously close to a “back in my day” kind of sentiment. As previously discussed, change is inevitable, and our kids’ education and childhood experiences are going to be different from our own. That’s part of progress. My main lament is that most of the differences between our childhoods and our kids’ childhoods is the amount of time we had to spend waiting that they just avoid entirely. They don’t wait for new episodes. They don’t have to wait long for things we order to show up at our house. They don’t have to wait for their school name to show up early in the morning before school. It’s the waiting, the anticipation, that really heightens the joy. I’m not going to artificially manufacture a waiting period. We get an automated phone call, text AND email letting us know when our kids have e-learning, plus the emails from the teachers themselves. (Bless teachers in all that they do – what amazing angels on earth.)

So really, it’s not just the kids. None of us have to wait. It still feels novel and like a change for us as parents, but our kids don’t know any different. Kids rolling their eyes at parents for reminiscing is a rite of passage, so we’ll let them have it, but they will always have immediate access to information. The world has decided that we all need information right away, so maybe it can be a family exercise to choose not to seek it. I mean, for things like school closings, I accept that immediacy is great. But maybe giving myself a designated time to read emails or check Instagram could show these boys they don’t always need to be connected to the world and its information. Choosing when to receive information seems like a good way to control the flow of a day, rather than showing my boys that I’m at the beck and call of my phone, which I absolutely am. Lamenting about the past and being nervous about change is sometimes about being worried that our kids won’t develop as we did. That’s probably part of what’s going on here, being sad that kids don’t know how to wait, but I think I’m also nervous that I don’t know how to wait anymore either.