If I had to choose a photo to describe the mood for the day, this would be it:

It’s not all rainbows and butterflies over here and our first day of school went much worse than I could have imagined. It put us all in a mood. Every. One. Of. Us.

Technology for 4 students (three of which are elementary age) is always going to have it’s challenges. Hallie’s schedule although corrected days ago still left some issues when she was trying to log into classes that teacher’s didn’t have her down for. Cannon’s laptop provided by the school is too old to manage a live streaming video so after an hour of trying to get him connected – we finally sent him to a friend’s house who was in the same class. (funny enough his teacher didn’t realize this and although he kept raising his hand to participate the teacher wouldn’t call on him. Finally towards the end of the day the teacher asked his friend if her brother wanted to say something. They both giggled and the mom popped on to clarify that Cannon was not her brother and indeed in the class and of course she felt bad for ignoring him half the day!)

Neither Bennett’s or Hunter’s laptops were able to work with the live stream so after missing the first half of the video Bennett moved to my desktop and Hunter on a work laptop. Of course Briggs was trying to hop in every video which wasn’t so cute to his siblings and he kept asking when he gets to go to school. I ran around from one kid to the other fixing problems. “My video just quit. The link isn’t working. She said to click here and there’s nothing there. How do I fill this out? It just keeps saying loading.

Hunter was bummed that they didn’t do anything. Only half of Hallie’s teachers even provided instruction. And Cannon’s class only seemed to talk about feelings (which I see from the schedule is the topic for the whole week – clearly a theme they felt they needed to address strongly this year.)

They were only “in” school half the day and it felt like an eternity. It left us all in a somber mood the rest of the afternoon. We’ll call it a funk.

I am bound and determined tomorrow will be better. I had concerns before starting this process and today did not put those concerns at ease. Praying technology is on our side and we can work through this very kinky process. It was very apparent today that this cannot be a long term solution for our family, I’m just hoping it gets better when they actually start to learn things.

The redeeming moment for the day – first day of school pictures with some cousins – definitely the highlight. A sense of normalcy on an abnormal day.