Lucas Camilo

Lucas had his first day of middle school on Friday. Seattle public schools will be all virtual this fall so the start of day 1 consisted to logging on to Schoology (the online portal), checking into “homeroom”, and clicking on the link for a Microsoft Teams meeting. Everything was going well until the wireless appeared to stop working, which probably had to do with the fact that 60,000 kids were logging on through the SPS virtual private network (VPN) at the same time.  Eventually we decided to plug Lucas’s tablet directly into the modem via an ethernet cable (old school!) and that somehow worked. But since the cable was only 6 feet long he spent the first hour of his first day of school stuck in the closet.

Sure, there have lots of challenges with the roll-out of online school in Seattle (just as in many other cities) but we’re actually excited about his new middle school, Aki Kurose, even though it will be a while until he and other kids see the inside of the building. The teachers and principal have done a lot to include Lucas as part of the community and we really appreciate everyone who is part of Lucas’s team for making it a relatively smooth start for him. Here’s what Lucas had to say about it:

I like virtual school because…
I get more help when my computer has anything wrong.
I like technology and computers.
It’s harder, but not impossible to do schoolwork.
I get to hang out with my awesome parents more.
I still get lots of help from my nurses and Tania, my aid.

Kindergarten doesn’t start until next week but maybe Lucas will tell the story of Ida’s first day when the time comes…

On August 17th Lucas turned 11. We spent his actual birthday on Whidbey Island — there was record-breaking heat in Seattle that weekend so we were grateful to be on the island where temperatures tend to be 10-15 degrees cooler. Lucas enjoyed spending time with his Nonna and Papa over the long weekend and even got to take part in two activities that have been our go-to’s over the course of this coronavirus summer: wandering wheelchair accessible trails and flying kites. And we celebrated on the beach that night with a birthday cobbler made by Krista from wild blackberries that she and Ida had picked nearby.

Speaking of kites, Krista and Lucas came up with the idea of a socially distant birthday party involving 11 kites in honor of his 11th birthday. So this past Saturday we invited a few friends to Jefferson Park on Beacon Hill with the goal of getting 11 kites in the air. We originally were shooting for Saturday morning but there was very little wind at that time; so we texted friends to come out on Saturday afternoon instead hoping the wind would kick up by then. As Lucas said repeatedly, “there is no plan B!” We even had to borrow a couple kites and kite strings from our neighbors Kathy and Dave in order to get closer to making his vision a reality.

In the end the birthday party was amazingly successful. Gramma and Gary were up from Portland, a few of Lucas’s old friends from school came through with kites, and Ida’s buddy Julian (along with Dan and Jedi, their new dog) was also there. For a split second our crew had 8 kites in the sky, which along with the three flying on the other side of the park got us to our goal. It wasn’t easy (having that many kites up at the same time can lead to some complicated tangles) but as we rolled away Lucas said “That was the best birthday ever!”

Dear friends and family:

This summer I have been working with a Zoom online fundraising group called Penny Harvest. Penny Harvest is a class for kids that discusses
important issues in our community that we care about. The issues we decided on were animal welfare, climate change and hunger/homelessness.

We decided to raise funds for PAWS, Pasado’s Safe Haven,The Nature
Conservancy and Fare Start.

PAWS- www.paws.org
Pasado’s Safe Haven- http://pasadosafehaven.org
Nature Conservancy- www.natureconservancy.org
Farestart- https://www.farestart.org

Will you help me support these organizations by donating to them? We are trying to raise $850. Here is a link below.

Thank you for helping us.
Lucas Hanson

LINK HERE for folks to donate by credit card, paypal:
https://paypal.me/pools/c/8r2bAKR4Dm

It feels like a weird time to be on vacation… Coronavirus still ravaging the country, Black Lives Matter uprisings becoming more intense again after Federal agent arrived in Portland last week. But back in January — which now seems like years ago — we set aside the third week of July for our annual family road trip. Our plan was to rent the wheelchair accessible RV in Vancouver, check out the music festival there, and then go camp in the Canadian Rockies. Alas, that plan became unrealistic, but we stuck with the vacation week and instead decided to travel closer to home. In the end, we’ve spent about a week at Burke’s parents place on Whidbey Island along with a two-day foray to the Olympic Peninsula.

Lucas says he doesn’t like to blog anymore but he took a break from doing summer school reading, vocabulary study and video games on his tablet to write this:

6 things about our family vacation.

1. We went to a house in the woods called the Ravens Lodge (named after our cat, Raven).

2. At the Ravens Lodge there was a wheelchair accessible firepit. Each night for 2 nights we would sing songs around a campfire.

3. I learned Yahtzee at the Ravens Lodge. A Yahtzee is 5 of a kind, so a Yahtzee is super rare

4. On Whidbey (beginning of trip) we flew all of our kites at once, a squid, a dragon, a poison dart frog and a turtle

5. We went on lots of hikes. We’re creating a website of wheelchair accessible hiking trails in Washington.

6. We flew kites everywhere. Squidy, Darty [the poison dart frog] and our newest, Kite-her

Indeed, exploring wheelchair accessible trails and flying kites have been two of the main themes of our time away from home. It was pretty cold for part of the week but Burke and Ida still managed to jump in the Puget Sound a lot. Another feature has been good times with  grandparents, including  Krista’s mom who also came to Whidbey for a few days with her boyfriend Gary. Overall its surprisingly relaxing for a family vacation, probably because we haven’t gone more than 50 miles from home. We’ll post more pictures and the new “Rolling Washington” website about wheelchair accessible trails soon.

What a moment to be alive.  In our house we are celebrating this national uprising, the national shift in consciousness around racial injustice and policing.  Our kids are making signs and asking deep questions, and Burke and I are feeling at times worried about the power of white supremacy to push back, and at times so hopeful about how big the changes might be that come of this moment of collective power pushing for racial justice.   May we all continue to/begin to follow the lead of the brilliant and powerful Black leaders who are pointing the way toward a society with more freedom and more justice.

Lucas’s PRESCHOOL graduation pic!

And… I come to our blog to tell you about our small celebrations. Ida is “graduating” from preschool next week, and Lucas is graduating from elementary school.  It is true.  Lucas has been in Seattle public schools for a whopping EIGHT years – two years of preschool at Lowell Elementary, and six years of elementary school at Orca.  Over the past few months I’ve seen more closely than ever all the physical challenges Lucas faces to access his curriculum.  Which makes it all the more incredible how well he is doing in school.  This kid who cannot engage the world the way other kids do –  cannot find things and pick them up and stack them, count them, study them, move them, taste them, throw them… he is nonetheless learning to multiply fractions and negative numbers, creating powerpoint presentations on the culture and traditions of Mexico, reading chapter books and working to understand the more subtle nuance, and now researching local wildlife rescue and rehabilitation centers.

And Ida.  Ida is amazing.  She is resisting us teaching her to read or write, yet sneakily figuring it out when we’re not looking.  “How did you know that said ‘Fox?'” I asked her, trying to prove that she can read.  “Oh, I just know,” she says.  She is a prolific artist.  She says on some days that when she grows up she will be a mom to thousands of children.  Other days she says she’ll have children but leave them to her husband to care for while she is the president and an artist.  This morning she told me that when she grows up she will be in her RV in the Redwoods when she meets her husband or wife, and they will then drive to Alaska (because she loves the cold and wants to see a blizzard) and they will have three or four children and her job will be painting RVs and camper vans pink and yellow.  It is incredible (and, to be quarantine honest, sometimes exhausting) to keep up with her endless imagination.

So, we wanted to invite you to celebrate our amazing kids with us!

Options:

1) Create a short video for Lucas – with a joke, a song, a short story, a greeting of congratulations.  Doesn’t have to be fancy.  Burke will put them together for him. Here’s a folder to drop videos into.  Ideal would be by this Friday, though we’ll probably also compile later videos into a Part 2 for him.

2) Send a card.  Now that we’re home all day, Ida is a big fan of noticing when the mail comes.  And she loves cards.   You could address it just to Ida, or Lucas and Ida.  (Lucas’s feelings won’t be hurt.)  If you need our address let me know and I’ll email/text.

3) Send a small donation.  Lucas is part of a group of kids raising money for local organizations working in issues of homelessness and wildlife rescue.  (They are still in the process of picking the organizations – we’re hoping they’ll be sure to have organizations working for racial justice on the list.)  They are collectively raising the money and then donating it.  So, if you like, you can paypal/venmo money to me, and send Lucas an email telling him you’ve donated as a graduation gift.  Lucas’s email is lucas AT estansbury dot com, and my paypal is www.paypal.me/kristaleehanson and venmo is @Krista-Hanson-6.  If you’re mailing a card, you could also put cash in the envelope and a note that it’s a donation for Lucas’s fundraising project.

Thanks for celebrating this moment – our kids, this moment in history – with us.  Here’s a picture from the one socially distanced protest we got the whole family out to last week.  (It was beautiful and powerful and led by high school students.  The audio track that goes with this involves a thousand high school students chanting, Ida trying to lead “Black Lives Matter” chants any time there was a break in the mass chanting, hundreds of cars and buses and trucks honking, and Lucas sticking with it until he couldn’t handle the noise any longer. )

Since March Krista has been X’ing off the days on our kitchen wall calendar, marking the time since school was closed and quarantine began. Late last week we officially passed 2 months that we’ve been hunkering down at home.

Our experience has been a weird mix of resignation at settling into a not-so-bad routine, contrasted with recurring anxiety and longing for more spaciousness. Its hard to grapple with the horrifying way that the way the crisis has played out politically, and recognizing the short-term and longer-term economic impacts for many people in this country is devastating. The possibility of political change come November, and the opening for a major societal transformation moving forward, means we can maintain some hope. But hey, this is Lucas’s blog and he would say this line of politics talk is… “booorrrring!”

So how are things for the kids? As Lucas’s online school gets a little better — especially the accessibility which certain teachers, therapists and district tech experts have been supporting us on — we can’t help but think at times that homeschooling is well suited for him. Lucas’s certainly believes that to be the case. Sure, there have been glitches, and he still doesn’t love being on Zoom or Microsoft Teams with big groups of kids, but given that he’s already set up to use a computer for all of his schoolwork, there’s actually a lot of potential for remote learning to continue to improve. For example, his twice a week after school Spanish class shifted to online back in March — and with only a couple other kids on there its become a favorite for Lucas, and he’s learning a lot more than when it was in person. Plus, now that all kids access homework online, the systems have gotten a lot better.

Meanwhile, we’ve developed some of our own teaching techniques, including having Lucas pull a list of 10 words a day from the books he reads. Then he looks up the definitions himself online and adds them to a testing program called “Quizlet” that allows him to practice defining the words until he’s mastered them. By now he’s learned hundreds of new words since coronavirus hit. The only problem is that he’s always looking for new words… he’ll lie in bed listening to his audiobook at 6 am (while Krista and I try to get a few more minutes of sleep) and every 3 minutes yell out “Daddy, I’ve got another one!”

Another good development is that Lucas’s love of music continues to expand. His latest interest is jazz, and we now get to listen to a different jazz album every morning while he gets ready for the day (instead of heavy metal, as was the case a few months back, and the switch is making some people around the house very happy.) He also made a special Mother’s day jazz playlist for Krista, Nonna, and Gramma.

Ida is taking things pretty well too, for a five year old. She gets restless and frustrated at times, especially when Krista and I are tag teaming Zoom meetings and can’t give her our undivided attention. But she’s also got quite an imagination and can spend hours by herself making up fantastical stories with the help of stuffies and/or the hundreds of plastic figurines scattered around our house (thanks Aunt Ashley for the hand-me-downs :) She’s learning to ride a bike, gets deeply absorbed when being read chapter books, and loves creating — art projects, made-up cookie recipes, wild outfits, and more.

Finally, we sometimes escape and find moments and places of refuge outside… a visit to the beach on Whidbey Island where my parents live, or a trip to Jefferson Park on a windy day to fly THREE kites simultaneously (see video below).

We are sending you all – family and friends, near and far (including those of you we only know through this blog, who we mean to respond to but somehow always get called to help a kid before we do!) – our love and solidarity and hopes that you are surviving and thriving through this plague.

Things are getting weird around here… We’ll post more of an update soon but for now here’s Lucas’s writeup about today:

The adventures of Ken

Now, you’re probably wondering who is this Ken guy?

Ken is the doll from Toy Story 3. We went out on a walk and took pictures of Ken around the neighborhood

We put Ken as a guard at the little free library, up in a tree, on a basketball hoop, on a staircase, in a waste bin, in the bushes and lots of other places.

We go on a morning and an afternoon walk every day to keep busy during this time.

Ida and Krista made a sign that says “We can do this. We are brave” modeled after the ones in Italy.

It’s been 17 days since school was cancelled in Seattle, 5 days since Governor Inslee issued his stay-at-home order. The latter is supposed to last until April 8 but already Inslee has said it will be extended. So, we’re getting used to our routine, doing our part to flatten the curve by staying inside… and in the meantime doing lots of Zoom meetings, figuring out projects around the house, and occasionally escaping for occasional walks or a trip to the grocery store. We’re grateful to be healthy and safe, but also worried and distraught about all the suffering in the world as the coronavirus pandemic runs its course.

It’s been tough to get Lucas to blog regularly (despite extra time around the house) but he wrote this the other day:

My life during Coronavirus has been fun. Each morning we have circle time. We take turns leading it. First, we sing Alive Awake Alert Enthusiastic. Then we do a check-in to see how everyone’s feeling (Ida always feels a little of everything). Then the leader does a “performance” or talks about something. We close by saying one thing that we want to do to have fun, help around the house and one thing we want to learn that day.

After circle time, we go on a walk.

Even though we are fine, I care about other people who are struggling right now.

On Thursday night we join many people in our neighborhood and throughout Seattle who stood on porches or outside houses at 8 pm, playing instruments and shouting encouragement to the medical professionals on the frontlines of the fight against the coronavirus. Making “joyful noise” was good for the soul, and Lucas seemed to feel the emotion as he surprised us by getting teared up.