Week Four

I’ve been writing things down since here and there since the coronavirus really started to impact our lives. I’ve shared some of this as snippets on Instagram but if you’re interested in reading more, feel free to read through these lightly-edited words. As this essay says, I’m craving to see what people are thinking/doing/feeling through all of this. Maybe it’s helpful to use my own still, small voice to give some words to what we’re all going through at this moment in time. You can find Week One here , Week Two here, and Week Three here. Related: did we really just finish week FOUR of this??

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Monday, April 6th
I’m so entrenched in this now it seems like this is how life always has been, is now, and shall be forever. 

Probably not though, right?

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Our daily schedule looks something like this:

Breakfast and free play before 8:00 am. 8:00-9:00 gives them an hour to get dressed, brush their teeth, pick up their bedrooms, and do Cosmic Kids Yoga. 9:00-11:00ish look like reading and math, a snack ay some point, and their “specials”: art, music, science, etc. Add in a few breaks as needed. Especially for Nolan. Though he’s essentially become another Kindergartener. Caden and Brooklyn’s teacher has been sending out these fantastic Number Corner videos each day and you should hear Nolan shouting the answers at the screen. Their teacher sent me an email last week saying, “I should just add Nolan as another student. Poor kid! I hear him in the background on all their videos!”

11:00-Noonish you’ll find the kids on their tablets. Caden and Brooklyn connect with their teacher through the Seesaw app and it’s Caden’s GREATEST JOY in life right now to send her videos detailing his latest LEGO creation or our backyard or random things in our neighborhood. I let them play games while I make lunch. (Huge shoutout to Khan Academy!)

Noon-1:30 equals lunch and quiet time. Caden and Brooklyn seem to have forgotten how to do quiet time. Mostly Caden. Particularly the whole “quiet” part. It’s getting better. Though it’s frustrating because it took Nolan the better part of the past six months to do quiet time successfully, and JUST when he was really getting into the rhythm of it, Caden and Brooklyn were back home and it completely threw everything off.

1:30-2/2:30 is screen time, a show or two.

After that it’s snack and outside time. Fridays they get a movie. If it’s gross out they can either play or we bake something or paint or whatever but that (thankfully) hasn’t happened much yet.

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Really, our afternoon schedule looks how it always has, and I think that familiarity is comforting to us all right now. 

I do pretty well in the mornings. The routine is comforting. I hit a wall by lunchtime. I want time to myself and that’s hard to come by (see: homeschooling, they’ve forgotten how quiet time works). And I have my own list of to-dos that range from writing deadlines to ordering household items from the store to replying to emails to WHATEVER that seem virtually impossible to accomplish right now. Tyson’s been getting done with work between 3:00-4 00 and that helps.

I suppose it’s similar to how it felt at the beginning of the school year, where it seemed so hard to find a new rhythm but then I did. (Related: I’ve been a mom for six years and had JUST sent two off to school and Nolan to preschool for 8 hours a week for all of SIX FREAKING MONTHS and then this happened. It’s just cruel is what it is.) This is new to all of us and nobody has found a rhythm yet, at least not consistently.

Also, have the official screentime recommendations been lowered to “whatever the hell you need to survive” yet? Because while the 2-hour maximum was incredibly easy to meet before—Nolan usually had less than an hour a day and Caden and Brooklyn had nothing beyond anything they did at school—we’re now on overload over here. Between yoga and schoolwork and the screentime-just-for-fun they’ve always had in the afternoon, we’re easily hitting 3 hours a day over here, if not more. And we’ve been saying “yes” a lot more. You want to play on your tablet for 20 minutes until bedtime? Sure. We’re saying “no” to virtually everything else right now.

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Wednesday, April 8th
When I wrote last fall about being sad that Caden and Brooklyn went off to school and that everyone was right when they said “it all goes by so fast” I DIDN’T MEAN I ACTUALLY WANTED THEM ALL BACK HOME. COME ON, UNIVERSE.

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I’m sitting at my desk, in the semi-darkness, and I heard a car drive by with the music blarimg. It reminded me of being 16 and getting my license. This time of year always does.

I actually got my license in February. It must have been warm that year because the snow was already melting— I think it was right after Valentine’s Day. And I remember, not long after, in March and April, the melting snow, rolling down the windows just because it was sunny and 55 degrees, blaring my own music because I could. It felt like freedom.

I think of that every year at this time, when it’s sunny and just barely warm enough to roll down the windows. I’d turn up my music, but these days it’s more often NPR or a podcast and that’s not quite the same. Also, this year, it doesn’t really feel like freedom.

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Thursday, April 9th
I saw a school bus drive by today and it was the strangest thing. Usually my life is full of school buses. Even before Caden and Brooklyn went off to school; we can basically see the high school from our backyard. We can hear the football games clearly in the fall. And less than mile down the busy road behind our house is a middle school and an elementary school. Buses drive back and forth all day, usually, during the school year.

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When Nolan was a baby, he would wake up from his afternoon nap just about the time the buses were all lining up to pick up the high schoolers. We’d sit in the glider in his room together or look out the large windows downstairs as he would chant, “Bus! Bus! Bus!”

Anyway, I saw a bus yesterday. I have no idea where it came from or where it was going. And it was as strange as seeing one in the middle of July.

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Friday, April 10th
The other day I drew an activity on the sidewalk in front of our house. It began with hopscotch and then into frog jumps, transitioned into running and hopping on one foot and skipping around in a circle to turn around and do it all again.

I can see it from where I type here, up in our bedroom. There’s a girl outside now, maybe 11 or 12 years old. She’s been going back and forth on our sidewalk for the past seven minutes or so and it makes me so happy.

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It makes a lot of sense to me that Easter is the first holiday we’ll celebrate in this strange new world. Easter to me is a story of contrasts: grief and joy, dark and light, literally a story of death and life.

It feels like we’re holding a lot of those contrasts right now. We hold those swinging, opposing emotions: our own grief and joy, dark and light, and even death and life. 

Today is a dark day. As Glennon Doyle says, “First the pain. Then the waiting. Then the rising.” We’re in the middle of this right now; just at the very beginning of so much waiting. Though, sometimes, we’re still in pain. Maybe, just like the stages of grief, the pain and the waiting aren’t so linear as we’d like to think. 

Still, this year, we wait for our very own rising.

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Joining in today with Laura Tremain’s 10 things on the 10th prompt. Today’s is 10 things you miss.

  1. Seeing friends and family. The kids want nothing more than to be able to play with their neighborhood friends. 

  2. Hair cuts. There are some split ends up in here. 

  3. The kids going to school. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

  4. Certainty. Everything is so up in the air right now. We don’t know how long this will last or what our new normal will look like when this is all over. I’m assuming that summer is cancelled and the kids will go back to school in the fall but...will they? Tyson and I will be celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary in October and were trying to decide whether to live it up in New York City or take a tropical vacay. It seems unlikely either will happen now. 

  5. Pedicures. But for real.

  6. Being able to run to the store for random things. Like, I accidentally bought sugar free coffee syrup yesterday and almost GAGGED into my coffee this morning but I can’t (or at least won’t) just run to pick up another one.

  7. Going outside without it being weird if there’s another person in my general vicinity.

  8. Eating at restaurants. Drinking at breweries. Getting takeout without wiping the bags and containers down.

  9. Options. Like, before I might have CHOSEN to stay home instead of go to that party/event/night out but at least I had the CHOICE.

  10. Thinking. As in, about anything other than COVID-19. Also please see #3: the children are home and it is LOUD and I just want a MOMENT to complete an entire sentence in my own head.