I’m resisting making a Coronavirus tag. Ugh.
So, Week Two is down and the Administration has extended the social distancing recommendations through the month of April. We did anticipate this, I believe the local school system already announced closure through at least April.
There are good days and bad days. The weekends are actually harder for me. On the weekdays I have to juggle Minnow and work (now on overtime) and life stuff, and that keeps me busy. The weekends are “open” except, of course, they’re not at all open, we’re very limited in where we can go or what we can do and it starts to get at me a bit. The city has closed playgrounds and there have been issues with crowding at some of our parks now that the weather is improving.
The good news is the weather IS improving! We’re not to kayaking weather yet but it’s on the horizon. We’re having nice sunny days and unfortunately, a crap-ton of pollen. My allergies have improved over time but Minnow is quite susceptible and I feel bad for them, so we’re keeping them stocked with Child Zyrtek and trying to be smart about their exposure.
We’ve been working on things around the house. Going to the grocery once a week, instead of whenever we need something, has changed our perspective on the pantry and we’ve been able to clean out or finish off a lot of dry goods that were languishing. We’ve always been good about eating leftovers and not wasting food, but we’ve gotten more creative about odds and ends that accumulate and I have a few personal missions (finish off a bag of coconut flour, for instance).
We’re still working out issues with homeschool, it’s an evolving process, but I like to think by the start of Week Three we have a pretty solid routine and we’re just refining it as we go. Every few days for “craft time” we bake a dessert, usually a half-batch of low sugar-cupcakes or something like that. I added chores to the list for this week, we’re going to start having a kid-related chore (e.g. clean Minnow’s bathroom sink, wash bed sheets) each day. Craft time has been really miss or miss, it’s actually a good bit of work for me to find crafts for them to make and most of the time they’re not very engaged, but I think having a creative/maker block is important. I’ll figure something out.