My kids had teachers "preparing them" for a "virtual instruction day" today in light of a snow forecast... just the forecast... before any snow ever fell or roads were ever obstructed.

I work from home, my wife is a courier for a company that works with our local hospital network - her route was changed to on-call. It's not that we can't help the kids through their assignments today.

But - there is a principle to the element of having a SNOW DAY as a kid... and that's been gone for a while now. I'm sure COVID helped propel things in this direction... but I just think it's sad.

Instead of waking up to play in the snow, building snowmen and having epic snowball fights with the neighborhood kids... then coming in to hot chocolate for a snack to warm up, before going right back out to fortify your cover and build a fort or go sledding.... whatever you could accomplish before your parents shouted for you to come in to a hot bowl of soup at lunch. You'd drop out of every layer of clothing while soaked to the bone... change into PJs and wrap up in a blanket... and the soup just tasted better because of it... as it was when I was a kid... Maybe spend the afternoon in a new set of layers outside till the sun went down and it got too cold, or maybe you'd find the warmest place you could be (almost always a blanket fort) to watch a movie or play some video games... It was just the BEST.

NOW - Instead of all of that - my kids are waking up and stressing about making Zoom meetings on time or having issues finding assignments on Google Classroom. I highly doubt they even step foot outside. Once they're done they'll stay in front of a screen - probably pivot from school to YouTube or a videogame. They'll be stir-crazy and restless by dinner time, I'm sure of it.

It's just a sad observation I guess. I understand as an adult how it helps the teachers. It is safer to keep busses off the roads when weather is bad. It helps the kids stay out of the building over summer weeks and blah blah I get it... but I still can't help but feel like it's sort of diminishing one of the more magical parts of being a kid that I had growing up in the 80's and 90's.

EDIT/UPDATE:

I appreciate everyone for their insights, thoughts and suggestions in response to my venting this morning with this post. I wanted to sort of respond generally to a lot of what's been coming through because I can't respond to everyone individually:

1.We really can't blame the wifi or power going out as a solution to avoid the work that is being given to my kids in this way. I know many have suggested that before.

For one thing, we live in a small town and w/o many parents all saying the same thing they're going to know it's BS. There's accountability tied to this - because of the impact it could have to the kids' attendance. I used to be a supervisor at my place of business and I know that we let more people go for attendance issues than anything else - and it almost always came from playing around like this with attendance and then when the time was really needed for something important it wasn't there, and accountability happened.

1. I also don't personally think it's modeling great parental behavior to let them get out of a commitment by lying about something like that. They are thrown into this commitment, sure... and I don't like it any more than they do... but teaching them that lying is okay when it suits their needs isn't what I am trying to accomplish. Work sucks, school sucks, sometimes we have to go to work or school even when it doesn't seem fair and nobody sees the sense in it.

To me the flexibility is the big thing here. My kids actually were able to knock their stuff out before lunch today and they had the rest of the day to do whatever. The older one actually hasn't been feeling great lately, and he ended up sleeping some of that off (ear infection, we think)... the younger one helped her mom around the house and relaxed a little bit to a movie in the living room. I don't know WHAT parents who don't work from home were doing for their kids - probably saying their internet went out (HA) - but my heart goes out to those parents in these situations.

So I mean...no snow wars or anything at my house today but I think some of it for me and my kids is I need to come to grips that they're growing up and they're sort of out of their "snow suit" phase.