We started on the flight unit this week. My work schedule right now isn’t very good time-wise for in-person teaching, so I assigned Steven some independent work this week.
I started the week with a Bill Nye video and a worksheet to complete while watching it. Fun fact: Flight is Season 1, Episode 1 of “Bill Nye: The Science Guy”. Another fact: I can’t read “Bill Nye: The Science Guy” in any voice other than the one in the intro to the show.
Continue reading “Flight”
In my eagerness to start writing a novel last weekend, I kind of completely forgot to post on the blog! But honestly, I didn’t have much to say. We finished our NaNo prep and we’re on to writing!
Steven ended up setting the bar high. The “default” NaNoWriMo goal is 50000 words, and Steven’s goal is 67860 words. And here I was thinking it would be easier to write to his goal this year! We’re both a little behind, but we’re planning on catching up this weekend.
Continue reading “NaNoWriMo and U.S. Election”Today, we all woke up and decided we didn’t want to do anything. Sure, it’s Friday, sure we could decide to do nothing tomorrow instead, but instead we told ourselves we’ll do today tomorrow, though I’m sure we all realize we probably won’t, and I think sometimes that’s ok.
So here are some things I found on social media this week.
Steven’s teacher is starting distance learning next week. We’ll see how that goes. It looks like she plans on posting a few assignments for them to work through each week as they have time. We’ll probably be able to work them into what we’ve already been doing for homeschooling.
Stay Safe!
~Lauren
Honestly, other than the constant feeling of impending doom, isolation isn’t really abnormal for us. It’s been nice to be home, not going to work and spending time with my family, and I don’t really miss going out because we honestly don’t really go out. We have missed dinners with family and our monthly DnD game, and Steven asked today when he would be able to have his cousin over for a playdate, but those are all things we’re working on being able to do while social distancing.
Errands have been a little more complicated, but we’re lucky to have family members (in this case Liam’s awesome sister) to help us out with our weekly grocery trip.
We normally do a big grocery trip a couple of times a month and I’ll often grab a few other things on my way to/from work. But we’ve been trying to only send someone for groceries once a week and get everything we will need for a week or more. It means fewer points of contact for us, as well as for the people helping us and for the people who still need to work so we can get food.
We’ve got a system for unpacking groceries now too. Basically, Steven keeps his hands clean and runs around opening doors for us and helping remove things from boxes that we’ve opened to avoid contamination… and then we still disinfect everything we can and wash our hands even more than we already were for the first couple days after those groceries come into the house.
I’ve really been trying to focus on the here and now because if I start trying to think even about the next few weeks I kind of drown in the uncertainty. I’ve never dealt well with uncertainty, and there’s a lot of it going around these days. I called my work a few days ago to arrange an unpaid leave of absence since I used up all my vacation days last week and I was planning on staying home for at least another week. It turns out they are working on having people work from home, which I had been told before I left was highly unlikely. So I applied to work from home and am waiting to hear back.
I’m so grateful that I will (hopefully) be able to work from home, but now I’m in this weird limbo that’s giving me some (additional) anxiety. I was expecting to be off for at least 2 weeks, we planned for it financially, and I was honestly looking forward to a second week off. But now I don’t know when I’m going back to work. I don’t know when I’m going to hear back, or how long from then it will take to get set up at home, or when I’ll actually be expected to start again. And, as it often does, it took me most of a day to process those emotions and that anxiety and form it into words, and in that time I was maybe a little grumpy and less fun to be around.
I’m pretty sure my family is used to me having days like that by now, but I always feel bad when it happens. Especially when it’s a day that I’m home. It feels like wasted time, wasted potential. I can’t help thinking of all the things I could have been doing if I hadn’t been in a funk. And it’s not like I didn’t accomplish a lot on Friday, it’s just that I wasn’t as present as I wanted to be, I didn’t connect with the people around me as much as I wanted to.
So I tried to push that out of my mind and enjoy this weekend. Steven and I coloured some pokemon pictures I had printed. He says we should do that more often because “it’s a good bonding activity”… he doesn’t yet understand why I’m laughing at that, but he’s not wrong. I feel like we might be doing more of this in the future.
Steven and I also spent quite a few hours cleaning his room. It’s his Saturday chore, but his room was such a mess that he didn’t know where to start cleaning on his own. Hopefully, now that it’s clean again he’ll be able to maintain it himself for a while.
Oh, and Steven cooked toad in the hole for brunch today. Actually, yesterday he also helped make the English muffin loaf he wanted to use for eggs today. He’s decided he’s going to cook something every Sunday. I think his plan is to get back to the basics because he’s a little out of practice. We just haven’t had time to cook together as we used to the past year or so, but we will have time for the foreseeable future.
Hope you had a great weekend and are staying safe!
~Lauren
Covid-19 related news got a little weird today. Weird like “wtf?”, not like funny weird. Canada made it illegal not to isolate if you’re coming home from outside the country. It’s about time, really. I don’t know how people didn’t understand that isolating meant not going to get groceries before going home. But the weird part is people faking covid-19. I’ve seen an article about someone giving a fake doctors note saying they had covid-19 in order to get away with staying home from their job at McDonalds, forcing all the people who worked with them to isolate and the business to close and deep clean everything. I saw another article about a “prank” in which someone went into a grocery store and coughed and spit all over everything and loudly claimed they had covid-19, causing that business to close for cleaning and discard tens of thousands of dollars worth of product. If I remember correctly, that person got charged. But seriously… what is wrong with people?
Meanwhile, Trump is saying everything will be back to normal in the U.S. by Easter. That’s like 2 weeks away. And last I checked, they had the most covid-19 cases of anywhere in the world. If they keep putting the economy ahead of the people, there will be no economy because there will be no people. Oh, and they’re trying to put more troops on the border… like any Canadian wants to sneak into the States right now…
I do love all the memes, though…
Anyways… homeschooling… we made Fridays pretty laid back on purpose. We did our daily yoga and French and then had a discussion for Health about what might motivate someone to work out, or what might make them not want to work out. In preparation for this, I googled some stuff and jotted down like 5 things I wanted to make sure to mention. But mostly we put some ideas out there and let Steven carry most of the discussion. This might not work with some kids, but once you get Steven talking it’s hard to get him to stop!
Then we started our Art project, which is building the bird for the bird project we started in Language Arts on Monday.
We started with Crayola Model Magic (thank you, Staples, for offering free shipping during this time), using some copper wire for support. I had never used it before. It’s weirdly foamy and squishy, kind of like kinetic sand, and you can store it in an airtight container to keep playing with it, but it supposedly dries hard in 3 days. I’m interested to see how easy it is to paint and to glue things to.
Then Steven spent the rest of the day working on his Dungeons and Dragons campaign and finishing the writing part of the bird assignment. That reminds me, I should add “make a DnD character” to my weekend to do list, since we’re playing Monday! Steven’s one-shots are always fun.
Have a great weekend, and stay safe!
~Lauren