Yeet

Yeet is my children’s new favorite word. The word annoys me in the way that only words said 7,526,437 times a day EVERY DAY can. If you throw something, you “yeeted it!” If someone pushed you, they “yeeted” you. When you’re so filled with joy you just can’t deal – “Yeet!” When something is ironic or of interest, “Yeet” apparently also works there. Craiggy has especially glommed onto the term and only a mother’s love keeps me from yeeting him out the window every time he says it.

Anyhow, they are next to me playing a video game in my parents’ bonus room shouting “Yeet!” with more than usual frequency, while I update my Quicken and slowly sip and microwave and sip and microwave and sip a cup of coffee I’ve been working my way through since 7:30 a.m. We will be heading out to a lake walking track pretty soon to do a few miles around a flat, paved trail. I fully expect them to complain during most of this walk (no bikes allowed, sadly), but we need outta the house for a bit, and the weather here in Nashville is a delight right now. It’s obvious, but I’m reminded that quarantine is not such a burden when going outside is an actual option. New Orleans is still at least 10-15 degrees hotter every day, and particularly annoying is that the temp does not go down a bit when the sun sets. Here we have chilly mornings and evenings (chilly = 62), and moderate warm days (85). Way better than the 90-97 range in NOLA these days. September in NOLA is the WORST.

Speaking of September – my birthday has come and gone. We had a little party here with some party decorations and an ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins. My mother’s birthday is just a couple of days before mine, so we shared the cake and decorations and took turns opening our presents while the boys watched and cheered. Kids make everything a little more fun. Usually. (“YEET!” Aaaaaaaaaugh)

It’s been a huge help to be here. Huge. It still takes all three of us sometimes to figure out Craig’s virtual learning, which is so poorly organized I can’t tell you. This is a conglomeration of comments I posted on facebook thread where parents around the country were venting to each other about how terrible this system is:

“My morning with the first grader: do your grammar worksheets, pages 16-25. They are all on google classroom in pdf, so you need to download them, print them, complete them with a pencil, scan them in, and upload them. Sounds easy – except the teacher uploaded them in utterly random, non page number batches – think 17, 23, 21, 18 in one batch, the rest in another. This wasn’t explained or labeled. And the pages are connected – 16 and 17 have to go together, ditto 18 and 19. It took us forever to figure out that all the pages were there, just in the wrong order and in different places. Once we find everything, we figure out that the system blocks downloading or printing the worksheets – we get an error message. Instead I try to do a print screen and then use that, but that doesn’t work because it’s too pixelated. We give up and decide he can just handwrite the worksheet, which takes three times as long but whatever, we’re already a half hour into this thing. We have him do that, sometimes copying over all of the text and sometimes not, trying to make it clear what page he’s trying to replicate so she can easily grade it. Once he’s done (with all 10 pages), we have to take a photo of each page and upload that to google classroom. Except his permissions are all thoroughly locked down so I can’t take a picture with my phone and email it to him, and for some reason if I take one with the computer it won’t let me choose the photo I took to upload onto google classroom – that’s not an option. So I have to take a picture with my phone and email it to my personal gmail, then I to log out of google as him, log into google as me, save the emailed picture on my desktop, log out of google as me, log back into google as him, and then find Google classroom, click on the class, click over to classwork, scroll down and find the assignment, click the assignment, click into the box to insert the assignment, upload the photo, and click “Turn In.” (With this particular assignment I was thoroughly annoyed so I stuck it all in an envelope and we mailed it to her instead).

Oh and his zoom mic stopped working because somehow permissions were blocked. And then his teacher’s internet connection failed mid-meeting, and he was stressed about getting back on. Little things like that just suck your day and energy away. Everything is this torturous and hard. And I had to lead a webinar for 200 people and do a court appearance today in the middle of this. And somebody at work said “I checked your hours last month and I see you need more work so here’s more cases” and I cried. This is just brutality. If he could do an hour of lexia, hour of spelling city, and hour of xtra math and then go about his day, I think he’d learn far more and our lives would be simpler! But if I pull them out and homeschool them for a year then they lose their coveted spot in the public school and we go back in the lottery. Argh.”

This is unsustainable – and yet here we are sustaining it. We are “lucky” that Jack is back in person, and his classes are so small that his risk is really quite low. We are “lucky” that our school system gave us a chromebook for the year so we didn’t have to juggle letting the kids use our work computers. We are “lucky” that I can continue to work remotely, and that while the Prof is now teaching on campus, he’s been able to avoid the virus so far even though transmission among the undergrads is starting to pick up steam. But man, this COULD BE BETTER DESIGNED is all I’m sayin’.

Phew, now I’m gonna go take a walk outside by a lake. No sense being annoyed on a holiday weekend. I hope everyone is hanging in. We can do hard things! Probably! Yeet!