Life without school (week 6)...

On Sunday before the next school week started:

Kiddos have been cleaning the bathroom for half an hour already. Its getting nice and sparkly. The teamwork chatter is fantastic: “you have to use elbow grease, daddy says!” “Oh, it does come off” “I get to clean the mirror” “I can reach behind the toilet”... such positivity!
Our home economics classes are really a game changer! Think everyone will be graduating from the course with flying colors. (I wonder if the fact there was video game privileges being awarded influenced their happiness in cleaning? Naw- had to be the pride in knowing they were doing a good job, right?)

Week 6 I was at work again for a few hours in the middle of the day M-F to hand out lunches to families in need of food. We've been pretty lucky in the weather on our weeks to hand out food, and I'm super thankful to still have a job. I'm also super thankful that I'm one week on and one week off so that we can also manage the stress of distance learning, though we have all started to get used to this new normal. It's going pretty well.

Every morning the kiddos get up and read or do something quietly. They eat breakfast and get ready for their day. I'm up and showered by roughly 8- 8:30 am. We look at emails and schedules to see what they need to do. Lucius' day is fairly easy and he is able to get most of his work done by 11am. He's been doing online chess club two mornings a week and even with the hour and a half he spends on chess he's still done with his schoolwork around noon.

O has what seems like a new schedule every day. O's teacher is so disorganized and spacey that it's no wonder O was having such a hard time this year. The teacher says one things and does something else completely. It's SO frustrating for all of us here at home trying to make sure O is doing schoolwork. O has a bunch of positivity through this- although O SUPER hates not being around people!!

Most mornings we let the cats up from downstairs to play and wonder around. They love being able to explore upstairs and see out the windows. But we don't let them stay upstairs because they start to claw all the furniture and get ramped up to the point of running around like crazy. That drives me a little nuts.

It's been getting a lot nicer out weather wise and we've been spending more and more time outside. Lucius and Daddy like to hit tennis balls in the driveway.

This week I started moving more of the retaining wall and digging up the river rocks. We're getting ready to plant grass here, because of the way we play with the neighbors the wall was a bit of a tripping hazard. I moved the basketball hoop down a little and transplanted the peonie farther up the driveway. It's a long job but slow and steady it's getting there.

I am also working on a cross stitch. It's also a big project but slowly it's coming along.

Week six ended with a physically distance "bring your own umbrella" party. The kids all sat under there shade tents and chatted. Eventually they got out a board game and played that distantly as well. They're making due, even though they dislike it. Thank goodness we have amazing neighbors or things would be a LOT harder for our young extroverts.

Life without School (Week 5)...

Wow we made it through 5 weeks without school. This was week three distance learning for Lucius and the second week for O. Thankfully I was "on call" at work this week, which meant I had to check my email twice a day but otherwise stay home unless needed. I was actually quite thrilled not to be needed for once at my day job so that I could help the kiddos make this a smooth week. Jerimy continues to work from home but it was stressful last week when I needed to leave in the middle of the day, which meant the kids didn't do their work for the few hours I was gone and we weren't "done" with school till 5 or 6pm some evenings.

This week however was much easier! I ever took a few more photos this week because stress levels were lower for everyone. Sunday we celebrated Easter! The bunny hid easter eggs around the house. Apparently the Easter Bunny hid them pretty well because the kiddos were searching for their eggs from about 7:30ish (when they both got up) till a little after 9am when Marmee helped look for the last two eggs.

Then in the evening we sat down to a yummy turkey dinner. It also snowed on Easter so it felt like we were living through all the big holidays all at once. We had turkey & mashed potatoes for lunch with pumpkin cookies for dessert (aka. thanksgiving), there’s well over two inches of snow fallen already & we received gifts (Christmas), we hunted for easter eggs (Easter), our cousins dressed up in costumes to deliver us some candy (Halloween)... all we need now are some fireworks and we’ll have most of the holidays done in one day!

On Monday school schedule was going a LOT smoother. We got my really old laptop out of storage and set it up for the kiddos to check their google classrooms, email and even learn how to type. The kids were SO excited about a typing website that lets you race, the speed and accuracy with which you type sets the speed for how fast your race car finishes the race. I think O spent almost two hours on the typing websites learning how to improve typing skills.
 

On Tuesday Lucius and I ran to get lunches from school. It was a short drive to pick them up but nice excuse to leave the house for a short period of time. We also got lunches on Wednesday and Thursday too.

On Thursday Lucius' big Overwatch lego set arrived in the mail. He spent his savings and Easter money on it from Target's website and it was delivered to the doorstep- no leaving the house to shop. He spent the next few hours putting it together.

O and I also did a little online shopping on Etsy and Michael's earlier in the week. We got a few cross stitch patterns from Etsy and bought the supplies from Michael's. We had to do curb side pick up at two different Michael stores to find everything we needed to get started but we did it! I got both O and I's cross stitches all set up on Thursday evening for us to start. O was doing a GREAT job listening to advice (we usually end up in a misunderstanding when I try to teach O something).

Thursday afternoon the kiddos and I went for a little walk around the neighborhood. We kept seeing signs the city posted about social distancing on our walk. I took pictures for posterity's sake.

Friday O had finished all the school work the teacher had assigned for the week. L didn't have a lot felt to finish so we decided we'd work on bigger projects today. Called it "Big Project Friday"! I read a book about the American Revolution (because O is helping a school friend with a research project) while O worked on their cat cross stitch. Lucius finished up his schoolwork and listened to the American Revolution book as well. When he was finished he started a small cross stitch too. I think we read close to two hours of the book aloud and O got a good start on the cat cross stitch project!

This week I also made a LOT of bread. I think it was three loafs of White amish bread on three different days. The kids ate it all up before dinner the days I made it. Yum!

Here' hoping for another good week of distance learning this coming week!

Life without School (Week 4)...

This week was Lucius' second week distance learning and O's first week. Lucius' teacher changed things up a bit with her schedule, so although we had a nice rhythm with Lucius last week we had a few extra tears at the changes this week. It was hard giving Lucius enough one on one attention to help him get his work assignments finished while also trying to keep O on top of everything too.

But through the tears and all the frustration we managed to make it to Friday. Since Jerimy, Lucius and I had the day off from work and school, we decided to give O a day off too! Thankfully the schools and teachers have all understood how tough this is for everyone involved in distance learning.

I had to work everyday in the middle of the day to hand out food for families who needed it. So I left the house around 10am each day and came home around 1pm. It was a nice short break but it would be easier to just stay home so we can keep everyone calm. Jerimy's been trying to work from home, which is nice to have him here when I can't be but at the same time it's hard to have us both trying to manage the kids. It gets confusing not only for us but for the kids. Thankfully we're slowing trying to figure out how this should all work. Here's hoping next week is even better. It's sounded more and more like kids will not be going back to school before the end of the school year, which is rather sad for them to deal with.

I did end up making masks on Saturday because I knew I needed to wear one for food distribution. I ended up making two for myself so I could wash them overnight after using it. I also made one for each of my kids and Jerimy too.

I didn't actually take that many photos this week because of how tired and exhausted we all were to figure this all out. On Thursday afternoon, even though the weather was pretty cold and nasty, we gathered up all our sidewalk chalk and headed to the school I work at. A co-worker had a great idea of writing encouraging notes on the front wall of the school to let the kids know we missed them.  O was SO excited about this idea because they've been talking a LOT lately about wanting to become a street artist when they grow up. Lucius came along too and colored in a few letters with us, but soon found a nice spot to sit and watch us while listening to an audio book.

The kiddos have been reading a TON of books while we're home and listening to a LOT of audio books too. I love that they love reading so much.

Quotable: this week during pandemic...

Trying to teach my kid how to play trumpet went like this week:

Me: “just do it like this, watch my cheeks, see my lips... just do this”
L: “but what? How? Like this?”
Me: “no like this, just feel it, just.... augh I don’t know... figure it out somehow“
L: “okay”

Later...
me: “sorry kiddo, I’m not a teacher. I never was a teacher, I am not patient or able to explain things”
L: “but you’re a great mom!”
I wish everyone had a kid like L!! Kid has the biggest heart on the planet.

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Tonight at dinner, eating chicken tacos, L says:
“The reason I put a lot of cheese on it is to get rid of the chicken flavor”

Life without school (week three)...

Technically O had no school this week, O’s school would officially be on spring break. Major disappointment happened for O when O realized the would be no adventures or outings on spring break. The best we could offer was virtual field trips online, extra tablet or tv time, and a few extra sweet treats. O got free time on the daily schedule in place of academic time, which really wasn’t super pleasing to a 12 year old. O was able to read quite a few books over spring break, including Star Girl, Book one of The Hunger Games and two of the Divergent series books.

End of week three of the kiddos being home. Completed Week ONE of distance learning with Lucius. Can I just say TEACHERS ARE AMAZING!!

A few take aways:

1) first day of distance learning my fourth grader figured out how to do the bare minimum on all the choice boards that were available so that he was “finished” with all his required tasks in like half an hour. Yup.

This is an assignment for Social/ Emotional lesson:  "Write an encouraging note to a friend"

This is Lucius attending his first class zoom meeting. We had to facetime with his teacher before this meeting because he was so anxious and nervous to join this way- as he is about anything brand new. But once he's got it "over with" it was smooth sailing after that.

2) having to organize everything that was sent home from school for my smaller humans and remember what was what, was exhausting. Who had what zoom meeting and when. Which device were they going to use and so on... super overwhelming. Wanna see how we made it work? Check out our living room wall covered in all the choice boards and schedules pictured below:

3) I quickly realized that if we were gonna make this work we were going to have to let some things from the daily choice boards go. We read a choose your own adventure book and now he is writing a book of his own. He’s spent hours on it so far and is thoroughly enjoying that writing project. We watched lego master builder, guess who’s playing with legos again?! (We’re counting that as a STEM project). We watched the kindness diaries documentary... my kids are learning about cultures, countries, and the human spirit like they’ve never seen or heard about before. Sometimes less really is more...

4) who ever decided to make chores a part of the students daily tasks is brilliant! We have finally got dishes into the dishwasher. People are sweeping, folding their own laundry and happily cleaning their own messes! Amazing.

So, to any fellow pandemic schooling parents, let the plans go if you need to, let the kids enjoy learning and take all the guilt out of the equation. Stress will still happen but seriously... it is what it is. If you can’t give it your best (I totally couldn’t this week), I like to think its all going to be okay. Somehow we survived... and that was with only one doing school this week. We’ll see how next week goes with two!

This is the neighbors and our kids social distance playing. They all did a great job, even though staying away from each other is so hard for them. They'd much rather be playing tag than staying 6 feet apart or more.

I promised Lucius a bike ride one afternoon after he was finished with his work. So we went around the lake and back home again. It was a nice trip.

 The kiddos watching a video lesson from the art teacher.

Another weekly extended family facetime: