Saturday, April 18, 2020

Week 5 Quarantine

4/14-
Well, here we are on day #2 of the school week of which we were originally told would be when the kids would be returning to school.  Obviously that didn't happen.  When we found out on Friday THE 13TH (of course! ha) that the kids would be out of school and not returning until April 13th it was SO hard to wrap our heads around.  The reality of it was just something that was hard to imagine.  I chalked it up to being a bit like summer break when I'm home with the kids....though, even with that we have camps and busy schedules and are always out and about.  So, here we are heading into Week 5 of pretty much being-at-home full time.

4/18-
Week 5 completed.  By far the TOUGHEST week of the 5 weeks of quarantine thus far.  Up until this past week I haven't completely minded the stay-at-home part of this entire thing.  We have been caught up in a non-stop tornado of "busy-ness" for so long now that it took forcing us to stop the madness to actually stop the madness.  Finally, a weekend without 4-8 kids' sports games, running around from here to there, birthday parties, playdates, dinners out, never really relaxing or having down-time.  It has been nice. It has been NEEDED.
This week, however..."distance learning" commenced for our school district.  I was originally looking forward to this.  I had enjoyed "home-schooling" the kids the first couple weeks but thought it would be beneficial to have actual assignments from their teachers to hold the kids accountable.  What I didn't predict was how incredibly difficult having 4 kids each having so much to complete at home would be.  I felt like a pinball in a pinball machine all week trying to rush from one child to the next, all who seemed to need help and assistance with almost every assignment.  Chloë is pretty independent, thankfully, but the other 3 seemed to need me with almost everything. To top it off, ALL assignments and papers are to be completed in Spanish as all 4 are in a Spanish immersion program.  I know some Spanish but I'm far from fluent.  This definitely adds a challenge to the situation.  I stress that they are losing so much by not being at school in their full-Spanish curriculum.


To make a long story short, there were a lot of tears this past week, a lot of stress, anxiety, a lot of wondering how we are going to make it through 10 more weeks of this...and this was all from me.  I don't want to harp on it. I would like to move past this previous week and just move forward.  I realize the first week was a learning curve for all involved.  I can only HOPE and pray that next week can run a little smoother.


Photos from the past 5 weeks:



We did a puzzle

Visiting my brother from 10-15 feet away 


Grocery Store Trip
(last time we went was 17 days ago-now doing delivery)


Drive way happy hour

Eli letting his hair grow
(though Myke actually cut it last night)

Ella on a Zoom call with her first-grade class