It was exactly a week ago that we learned the boys would be out of school for the foreseeable future (likely the rest of the year, at this point). We put together a schedule and fumbled through our first week of togetherness, and here we are, one week done. Some thoughts, after our first week – I cannot get the bulleting/numbering to work in any kind of useful fashion, so you get it in un-useful fashion:
- The children love the schedule. They check it often. We don’t force ourselves to stick close to it, by any means, and I’ll be changing it this weekend to better reflect our natural rhythms (a few more frequent and shorter academic blocks – two hours is too long – and two PE/recess sessions a day at least), but I’m definitely updating it on the whiteboard because they seem soothed by having something to check.
- We also learned that the teachers tend to drop the day’s assignments between 8am and 9am, so we definitely can’t start the day at 8am – we need a little lead time ourselves to get a handle on what the boys each need to accomplish.
- Craig’s assignments are short, and cute, and I think we all have as big a crush on his teacher now as he does. She videos herself every day, chipper and happy to “see” them (it’s asynchronous, but they don’t really get that). He reads little books, plays in his math and reading apps, takes selfies, writes in his journal – all very cute.
- Liam’s assignments are a little longer, and he tends to blaze through them, so the Prof has taken to sitting next to him and trying to slow him down. Today he had a google meet up class with his homeroom, and it was pretty cute – he studiously raised his hand to take turns talking, and showed everyone his dog, and smiled a mile wide to see all his friends. These touching moments are when I’m most close to weeping – seeing how much we love the people in our lives, how pleased we are to see them. It’s only been a week of this, but we see our friends through a screen and wave and smile like maniacs.
- Jack’s work assignments are lengthy, complicated, and every one of them is graded – I’m “in charge” of Jack’s stuff and I am not really cut out for it, but we’re doing our best. He gets frustrated quickly and so do I – so we take a lot of breaks and occasionally make gentle fun of each other to break the mood.
- Exercise is key. KEY. And it’s easy for us right now since it’s so beautiful outside, weather-wise. I’ve been doing three mile runs every day, plus squats/lunges/lifting my weeny little five pound weights. (We’re going to order some heavier ones online soon). The other day I was running to the park and back, and ran past my church – all closed up. It was a little sad – a communal space closed off to the community.
- Today, instead of running I did Jack’s PE assignment. It was a ladder drill – 100 squats, 90 lunges, 80 mountain climbers, etc. Everyone was squirrelly so I took all three boys out back and I stood on the deck and led an “exercise class,” which the two little boys loved and the oldest boy tolerated. We played loud dance music on an outdoor speaker and ran through the drills. It was hard work! Also, Jack needs to work on his spelling.
We generally do our work all together at the dining table, although occasionally we go on the front porch or in the bedroom – the modem is in the bedroom and we can’t stray too far from it. We just purchased a wifi extender system that cost a mint, in the hopes it will allow us to spread out more. Jack would love to do his google meetup advisory classes in his own room, away from his brothers.
After lunch most days, I put them on towels in the backyard and we do a guided kid meditation – I found a great British company called New Horizon that has tons of them on youtube (here is the magic tree house one). Pinna.fm also has some, although they’re much shorter. Jack really seems to get relaxed. Liam will lay largely still but fidget. Craig simply CANNOT do it, but he insists upon joining us, so he wiggles around and annoys everyone. So goes the one room schoolhouse life – no group activity is perfectly tailored to anyone’s age. But, as my mantra these days goes, we do our best.
5. Nighttime activities have been pretty fun, actually, largely consisting of movie marathons. First we had a Percy Jackson movie marathon – two Percy Jackson movies, spread over three nights. Now we’re in the middle of a Harry Potter marathon – we are only watching the last two movies (Deathly Hallows one and two), and it’s still taking us four nights to get through. For Harry Potter, the boys all got their wands and I lit candles throughout the room. It doesn’t take much to charm them, and it makes it all feel really special.
6. I also continue to behave in a very unnecessary but fun fashion with respect to cooking. For example – today, I wanted to make bean burritos for lunch, but had no tortillas. Rather than run to the grocery store (which we are still perfectly capable of doing), I decided to make them from scratch and used this recipe. Many people have told me that making tortillas from scratch is extremely easy! So easy! Couldn’t be simpler! They taste so much better! And this is a LIE. Although I enjoyed them, and they weren’t the hardest thing in the world to make, there were definitely lots of steps and flour all over the kitchen when I was done. They looked awful and were a little crumbly but they tasted great – anything fried in oil tastes great – so I’m going to look for a slimmed down recipe and keep practicing.
Not exactly pretty 
Jack is saying “this is amazing”
So that’s life this week. Along with the rest of the country/world, I’m feeling a mix of anxiety (pretty low level actually), some bewilderment at how quickly everything turned surreal, a lot of gratitude to have this time right now with the boys, a lot of gratitude to just be alive and well. A friend died on March 16 – a stunning professional visual artist, she wanted to live, but ovarian cancer came, and so she has spent the last several months in hospice, illuminating a beautiful death journal manuscript that she shared with us on instagram. Her goal was to spread death positivity while also being real about her anger and fear and worry about the end – it was brutiful stuff, you should look at her saved Stories to see some of it. Her older sister is one of my besties from college, so Kaycee’s always been the kooky, spiritual kid sister to me, but she was 40 years old – a grown woman and still the little sister, forever. Her mother and sister were not able to attend the funeral, due to the pandemic, so her husband buried her with his family and sent pictures and videos and they wept via facetime. It’s all so deeply sad. My morning psalm on the day they buried her was particularly poignant.
Things are weird, and a little hard, and mostly just uncertain these days. But we’re all together, and healthy, and we have enough food and enough money and enough of everything. We ordered pizza from a local place tonight, and we’ll continue our Deathly Hallows journey after we’ve eaten, and tomorrow is Saturday and we’ll see what the weekend brings. Stay well, stay safe, and stay home everyone!
“These touching moments are when I’m most close to weeping.” Me, too. Oh, the look of pure joy on my child’s face when he watched the first little video that his preK teacher recorded for the class this week. Like Craig, I don’t think he understood it was asynchronous. He was so happy to shout out answers to the questions that she posed. And then he sort of shrunk when the video was over. I know that shrinking feeling. I feel it whenever I turn off Zoom or FaceTime or whatever. This life right now, where all of our human contact outside of immediate family and grocery clerks is mediated through a screen–it’s a diminished life. And I feel like such a jerk for complaining. We are still healthy, knock wood, we are still employed and likely to remain so, we have a safe and comfortable apartment (trying so hard not to focus on my massive house-and-yard envy right now), we have enough money and enough food and the weather is lovely.
I’m in the same zone. Huge old mood swings over here – and trying to diminish the guilt over these self-pitying feelings when I understand that we could be in such a worse position. I’m glad your boy got to see his buddies. It’s not the same but it helps.