This Is Not a Drill.

What happened when my kids' school went into lockdown.

It’s been a week, folks — in addition to coping with our dog Henry’s death, we had a real lockdown at my kids’ school on Monday (everyone is physically okay). Also, last night, my 8-year-old, the one who juuuuuust recovered from mono, came down with a nasty bug. She woke me up at 5:30am this morning with a fever of 104 feeling terrible. But hey, the early wake-up has given me time to write this newsletter, which is already a day late, so silver lining and all that, I guess.

Today, I want to tell you about our lockdown. I recently wrote a deep-dive on the science on lockdown drills, so I’m not going to delve into that right now, but I will go over key take-home points about lockdown drills at the end of this post. First, I want to walk you through what happened during our actual lockdown and how my kids and I handled it.

On Monday at 12:35pm, I received a text from my kids’ school.