Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (21)
October 20, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,816.35; Rural libraries, $346.69.
Week 31 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Week 31, Day 213: We had a talk with JB’s tutor about the two priorities we’re balancing: academics vs structure. Structure is the part that they have always had with daycare scheduling to prepare them for the way a traditional classroom is run, vs the learning itself (academics).
Kindergarten completely lacks consistency and structure. We never know what they’re going to be doing at any given time of the class session, or even what time the class will end. Daycare was incredibly structured down to the five minute mark and we always knew what they were expected to be doing at any point in the day. Our tutor expressed concern that if JB were to continue on a trajectory where they are academically a grade level or two above their current grade but continue to lack that ability to handle the structure, skipping a grade would be a real problem. We appreciated that insight but we realize that JB’s social development isn’t progressing at a pace that I would think skipping grades could work well for them in the next year or two. That could change, but at the moment, with the few opportunities they have to socialize, I have my doubts it’ll shift much over the next year.
We decided that within the tutoring session, focusing on the academics will be our higher priority. PiC and I will continue to work on balancing flexibility and structure across the whole day so that they aren’t completely feral by the time first grade starts.
Today I introduced a short post-kindergarten class exercise session. We took the dogs outside for a very short walk to a safe part of the street where I could send JB to do wind sprints. I posed this as their “real dog owner training”. They need to build up strength and stamina if they’re going to have a hope of keeping up with running Sera one of these days. Then they get to do a quiet activity of their choice for up to 40 minutes, followed up by an assigned chore. We’ll go into lunch and rest time before their afternoon educational session from there.
Week 31, Day 214: I AM rather annoyed at Target for, essentially, false advertising. They had four promotions on a single item: buy $30 and get $10 back, and 10%, 5% and 5% off for various reasons. But they decided to deduct the $10 from the purchase price for the purpose of calculating the percent off discounts. Rude. I’m paying the full purchase price and if I returned anything, that gift card would be prorated so that’s covered. Why are they cheating me out of the full discount? It’s a small amount in this case but it still annoys me.
My pain just keeps ramping up, to the point where I couldn’t make any good decisions, including good self care decisions. I even turned down the last minute appointment with my massage therapist that opened up, which would help!, because I was hurting too much to figure out how to make it work with our schedules. I was going to wait a full week or more for pain relief because the logistics were too complicated for pain-brain.
All I could think was about how much I wanted to have a weekend getaway. In that imagined getaway, there was no pregnant body to contend with, no logistics, no COVID to worry about. It’s not the baby I have an issue with, it’s all the stuff happening to my body that I’m so tired of.
Basically I wanted an alternate reality. So of course we’ll continue staying home because no hotel exists where I can escape our pandemic and my pregnant body.
Week 31, Day 215: This was a frustratingly jam packed day: PiC had to take meetings all morning and into the afternoon, JB had an afternoon lesson, and I had my “emergency” massage appointment.
I have barely been able to walk all week. My sciatic nerve is screwed up and literally every step I’ve taken for the past several days has jarred the nerve and been excruciatingly painful.
Even though it was a major disruption of my work day, thank goodness for my massage therapist. She managed to work that pain out and gave me stretching time and stretching advice to keep supporting it until it feels better. It hasn’t stopped hurting entirely but that made such a huge difference that I was able to stand up and cook, after. I haven’t been able to stand up for more than a few minutes at a time before the screaming pain was too much.
I took the dinner shift and turned out a big pasta dinner for tonight and put together a pasta bake for the two of them to eat later. I get gluten free corn pasta which isn’t very low carb but it’s currently tolerated, perhaps because of the pregnancy, so I am enjoying the alternative pasta GREATLY. The texture is perfect and satisfying. I’ll be sad if I have to go back to very low carb after the baby but we’ll see when that day comes. For now, I enjoy what I can.
Week 31, Day 216: There’s a thing that the Kinder teacher does every single class. She always finds at least one thing, usually two, to bemoan the difficulty of. Mondays. Mondays are SOOO HARD. Mornings. Mornings are sooooo HAAAAARD and we’re all so tireeddddd. Remote learning is nothing like the classroom. I can’t WAIT to be back in our classroom, I hope it’s soon, I can’t wait until blah blah blah. Technical difficulty is SOOOOO challenging… Etc etc etc.
It’s 3-10 minutes every single day. The “this sucks” litany is more consistent than literally anything else in the class and it makes me mad every time I hear her start up. Do you not realize you’re talking to a large group of five year olds and they’re absorbent little parrots who are going to pick this attitude up??? JB certainly has. They have been having remote lessons for five months. Not once have they had an issue with it being remote. They have only ever experienced kindergarten online, so they have nothing in person to compare it to. But lo and behold, after several weeks of the teacher constantly reiterating how hard things are online, I start hearing JB (who has been excited for kindergarten for 18 months and actually enjoys the easy joyride that is a kindergarten curriculum) say: kindergarten is boring.
Why?
Because we’re not in the classroom.
Yeah. Gee. I wonder where that came from. We’re not Pollyanna around here but we find ways to see the value in what we have to do and we don’t overly dwell on the stuff we don’t have.
We explained the restrictions due to COVID months ago and we’ve talked through why we’re making the decisions we’ve made. They may not like it, none of us do, but they’re aligned with us in finding what we can enjoy, being honest about our disappointments about what we can’t have right now, and looking forward to enjoying stuff we can’t do safely right now, someday.
We’re reaching responsibility, being in touch with our emotions, that we can do hard things, and making sensible choices for our family and understanding that every family has to do the same for theirs. We want them to know that even under duress, we can make choices and we can think of others and we can bounce back.
This teacher is doing nothing to promote the notions of resilience and flexibility. Ugh.
Week 31, Day 217: I played catch up all day and still didn’t make it over the line by the end of the day. I had to call work quits at 7 pm and was sad at what I’d left for Monday.
But good news! I finally picked out a good backpack to replace my 15 year old backpack that’s breaking in some key places. Took three tries to get the right one and that’s pretty exciting.
