Western Pennsylvania has been getting progressively less snow through my lifetime. The great blizzard of 1993 is forever ingrained in my brain and an experience I doubt my own children will ever see here.

The few inches we sometimes get nowadays, though, is perfect for play for my little guys. We don’t have a good sledding hill in our own yard anymore, but we have a couple little slopes we can ride on, are not far from the park with excellent hills and can otherwise traipse around in the snow. There’s rarely such an obvious difference in who has kids in the house versus who doesn’t by looking at yards after a fresh snowfall.

Huge shoutout to the Zelienople Park for putting hay bales around tree trunks and sign posts aside the sledding hill so if kids go off course they hit a hay bale rather than a tree. I love small-town living.

What hasn’t been so fun about the snow, though, is the effect on school. Landon had a lengthy winter break, went back to school on a Thursday, had a snow day on Friday, a remote learning day the following Monday and a two-hour delay Tuesday. We are finally back to a normal schedule.

Here’s what I noticed about remote learning in kindergarten: it’s not all that different from professional life. We meet over Microsoft Teams, there are constant reminders of “you’re muted; you have to unmute yourself,” and there’s always at least one person who asks a question completely unrelated to the topic at hand.

Although my first inclination was to say that kindergarteners are just like professionals, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that professionals are just like kindergarteners.