Easter Egg Coloring

Zac helped the kids dye eggs today. Simon loves to eat boiled eggs, except the yolk.

The Fairy House

Sometimes we wake up in the morning and come downstairs and the neighbors are already there and they've all blown up balloons already.

Our neighbor, Kim, helped all the kids make fairy houses.

Simon and Ellie still spend as much time together as humanly possible, especially on the weekends.

Meanwhile, I had spent the past week (my school's spring break) catching up on grading that I hadn't been able to do since a bunch of things were turned in right before we switched to the shelter-in-place orders and I had to relearn how to teach everything online. Tomorrow I "go back" to work.

Backyard Fun

We've been really appreciative of our backyard and the neighbor kids!

Here they are practicing for their future circus careers.

And then there were three...

That's right. We now have THREE fish tanks in our dining room.

It's stocked with some minnows, crawdads, a nymph and a tadpole that Simon and Ellie found in the pond.

Homeschooling: Week 3

Week 3 of homeschooling saw no improvements. Simon still resisted doing any work.

Alice still spent an inordinate amount of time doing the simplest of assignments.

They both primarily prefer to goof off and play.

I mean, you can't blame them. They're kids. It makes sense that it's hard to try and get them do school from home-- a place they associate with weekends and breaks.

At least our backyard playground is getting lots of use.

Alice can always stay focused when doing her art though.

Signs of Covid-19 (wishing this were all an elaborate April Fools joke)

Almost every day I take an afternoon walk on the greenway. It's my break from the kids and work, both of which seem all-consuming right now. The greenway has been a lot busier lately--as everyone is forced to work from home and everything is closed, walking and biking are are some of the few things left to do. Plus the spring weather has been mostly warm and sunny.  Even although my walk is my escape, reminders of these strange times are everywhere along the path. 

  

 

From sidewalk chalkings to math problems tacked to trees to the now omnipresent Zoom meetings, I love that we're still finding ways to come together during this time when we're told to stay apart and everything feels like it's falling apart. Because honestly, it's really scary what's happening right now.

Pond Life

Whenever the weather is warm enough, Simon and Ellie spend a lot of time down at the creek part of the pond, catching critters like tadpoles, minnows and crawdads.

Alice, Vivian and Ed (neighbor kids) will also play at the creek too, but not with the same dedication as Ellie and Simon.

New Pump

On Friday afternoon, at the end of stay-at-home week #2, Zac finished installing a pump for the kids to pump water up from the pond to water their gardens.

Homeschooling: Week 2

Week two of our new stay-at-home life was much like the first but with a few developments. Zac was working completely from home by now. Alice and Izzy starting doing FaceTime Playdoh Playdates, which were a great way for our extrovert to have some extra social stimulation.  And we also got the chromebook, which worked great for Alice to access her school online learning websites.

The routine was still that in the morning I would supervise their schoolwork, Zac would work from his office set up in the basement, and then after lunch we'd switch roles. Usually the kids would be done with their schoolwork and could play outside and with the neighbors all afternoon. Simon and Ellie were having a blast together every day.

Gifts

The kids sometimes like to have "present mornings" where we have to open a bunch of packages of paper balled up around some rock or shell. They love it.

Zac took the kids fishing at the pond, while I spent the afternoon getting ready for classes the next day.

Ever since we've moved here, I've been very appreciative of how lucky we were to get such a great location. It's really paying off now that we're not allowed supposed to go anywhere. We have a big fun backyard with a pond and creek. We have neighbors the kids can play with and a cul-de-sac they can ride their bikes in. It's truly a gift.

Umstead Creek

On Friday afternoon, as our reward for surviving week one, we took the kids on a hike to the creek at Umstead. We figured it would be less crowded there on Friday than on Saturday. Since almost everything else was closed by now, nature was the only thing left open. And with the lovely warm spring weather, we figured the park would be inundated with people this weekend.

The kids had fun frolicking in the water and searching for creatures. Alice made a friend and rolled around in a deep part of the water for a while (practically swimming in March!). It was good to get out after being home all week.

We had a fire that night, the weather was so warm and beautiful. About 80 degrees.

Homeschooling: Week 1

The first week of homeschooling the kids and converting my classes to online digital learning was intense.  Here's a brief summary of how it went down.

For me, I had a teacher workday on Monday, where I went into the building in the afternoon once Zac came home from work to watch the kids. I put all my digital files from the school network onto my google drive. I packed up my binders for each of the remaining units and made sure to bring my books home too. I gathered up all of my grading (tons of it) and cleaned out all the desk so there wouldn't be a rotten banana peal or something awful to discover later. I met briefly with a teacher I collaborate with all the time (Lisa Springle) and we made a plan for how to kick off our Romeo and Juliet unit.  It his hard to explain how hard it was to rethink everything and figure out how to do everything online. The irony was I had planned out the rest of the year down to the day, and it was supposed to be smooth sailing from here on out, because we show them so many movie clips from Romeo and Juliet that you get a chance to catch your breath in this unit. All that was gone in one fell swoop and we were back to square one.  But we came up with a plan and got our first lesson ready to be posted, so it was productive. It's so nice to not have to go through this transition alone.

On the homefront, for Simon, his teacher had had the foresight to send him home with a bunch of worksheets on Friday. So I just picked 3 each day--one math, one reading, and one spelling, for him to do each day.  He resisted, but I wouldn't let him play until he got it done. The irony is that he's a stellar student at school, but a limp noodle at home.

For Alice, I could let her be more creative. Her teacher hadn't sent anything home, so I let her come up with her own learning ideas each day, and she could use some apps on the iPad for math. Her teacher was emailing and telling us to get on all these school learning sites, but they were hard to access from the iPad. Zac had mentioned a long time ago possibly getting Alice a Chromebook, and it seemed like now we definitely needed one. I suggested he order it right away before everybody else trying to homeschool their kids realized they also needed one and the prices went up or they sold out.

We got through the week, just barely, with me watching the kids in the morning and overseeing their school work, while simultaneously being inundated with emails all morning.  After lunch, Zac would take over and I would take a walk then go up to the office to work all afternoon, evening, and night to get the next day's lessons ready. It was intense, and I would start to spiral if I imagined doing this for the rest of the year. It just didn't seem sustainable.

Alice's Irish jig

Alice was determined to celebrate St. Patrick's day.

Social Distancing

Simon and Ellie are not good at practicing social distancing. But they're so cute.

For some day far in the future where we may not remember what this means, social distancing is the phrase that is all the rage right now. It means staying home as much as possible and staying 6 feet away from people in public.

Art & Gardens

On the morning of Saturday, March 14th, Alice painted some really cool (and ominous) pictures. On the afternoon of March 14th, Zac built the kids some raised garden beds in the back yard. And by the evening of March 14th, we got the news that all Wake County schools would be closed starting Monday due to the Covid-19 outbreak.  Suddenly, the idea of teaching my classes online just got a lot harder. But we enjoyed the day, now maybe with more urgency as the future started to seem very uncertain.