Wednesday: still here

 Well, it has now been a week since Ben started his minor cold symptoms and we still don't know if it is COVID or not.  I understand that health care professionals and labs are doing their best to move all the cases through as quickly as possible.  But it's also a bit absurd.  Ben and I are lucky in that we can work from home (although apparently Ben is actually using his sick time, which he receives plenty of).   I won't start on a rant about people that can't afford to take off a week just to find out they have a cold.  I also won't start on a rant that if we knew it was going to take this long we might have not tried to quarantine Ben as much as possible in the house...because it is terrible.  I'll happily give up going to karate and going to church and going shopping if we don't have to do this again.

In other news, the rest of the day was fine.  The weather got cold again, which is really a bit sad.  Joshua had a hard night, and I'm not really sure why.  At one point he was crying (after 10 minutes of crying) because he couldn't decide whether to do his chores so he could get reading time with me before bed or not do his chores but then not get reading time.  I usually hold a hard line on this one, but usually it seems like Joshua is more in control of his emotions.  Today I told him he could just stay in his bed (with books) and he could still have reading time.  Oh, the relief was instantly obvious on his face.

Tuesday: the good and the bad

 Well, let's start with the bad.  Right?  Because that's were we should always start.

*Ben still doesn't have his test results back.

*My back hurts...a lot.  I think it's because I'm a stomach sleeper on an air mattress.  I'll be trying the couch tonight.  (I'm pretty sure it's just normal soreness and nothing more severe, but moving is hard right now.)

*Isaac took two hours to take his math test today.  I'm not really sure why...he knew the material.  It was supposed to be a half day, but was only a little shorter than normal because of this and he was very sad.

*I still had to teach via Zoom.

*The house is still a mess.

*My students in remote learning with Macs can't access the virtual machines that CIT and I set up.  I could access them a month ago when I saw this problem coming.  Now that the a lot of students are in remote learning something changed and it isn't working.

We'll move on to the good, because there was plenty of that too.

*It was a nice day out.  The doors were open most of the day again.

*I think Isaac is slowly realizing that he is working slowly and hopefully that will inspire him to work more quickly.

*Students seem very understanding of teaching via zoom and I have some great TAs.  It's annoying but working fine overall.  I realized if I was in their place it would be annoying but I'd rather have them take the precautions then come to school and that puts everything in perspective.

*The kids played so well today.  I was in a bad mood and they played and left me alone.

*Ben is still only feeling light cold symptoms.

*Joshua loaded the dishwasher for the first time tonight!  I gave him vague instructions to start with and when I came back to check on him all of the cups were right side up. :D

Monday: flag

 Isaac and Joshua made another fort today and then Isaac wanted a quest to go with it.  I told him to make a flag.  The first thing out of Joshua's mouth?  "Is it underwear?"

Sunday: church

During church.

 

After church.

 At packet pickup yesterday we got Joshua's hallway sign from wisdom.  It's always nice to see the reasoning behind why the child got the award.

Isaac received October's respect award.  This one makes a lot of sense to me.  Sometimes he's gotten awards and while I don't feel like they're wrong, I don't always see it as outstanding.  (I know.  Parent eyes are different than teacher eyes.)

It was a beautiful day today!  I had the windows open all day.  I finished winterizing the stuff, the kids played with bubbles, and I gave the last haircut of the warm weather.  (I try not to do it more than once during the winter because it makes a mess!)

Friday: virus

Yesterday I got out the crazy fort pieces to hold the camera for piano lessons.  Of course, they were new again and so the boys instantly started building with them.

That leads us to today, when all they did was play "virus."

The big one is the king virus.  I heard there was a prince virus and several other viruses too.  They attacked Ben a few times (from far away).  At one point I heard Isaac say, "oh, the virus changed.  We'll need new medicine now."  I feel like it's a great example of dealing with life through play.

I guess they did build a house first, after looking at my pictures.

The numbers of confirmed COVID cases are rising at a crazy rate.  I feel as though they'll have to level off sometimes soon because they won't be able to test any faster.  Hopefully someone smart is thinking about this in order to open up more testing/processing sites.  Then the numbers can just climb really quickly.  And we'll win!  We'll have the biggest numbers!

Thursday: quarantine

 Well, here we are.  In quarantine.  Of course, we don't actually know if we should be in quarantine.  

Ben came home yesterday with cold symptoms, and those symptoms overlap with COVID symptoms.  He made an appointment last night to get tested and the first available was Saturday.  SATURDAY!!  It takes 2.5 days to get tested...that's absurd.  It'll take another 3-4 days to get results.  Case numbers are sky-rocketing and there's no end in sight because people can't even get tested in a timely manner.  (I know there are a lot of people and they can only test so fast.  But it is still so annoying.)

So Ben is by himself a lot.  (Let's face it, I kind of wish I was by myself a lot.  I had to go on an Easter egg hunt today and then do silly things that were in the Easter eggs in order to get shiny rocks.)  I'm sleeping in Isaac's room.  Um...we canceled a few things on the calendar but we were already pulling back so those aren't too bad.

I taught from home today.  This went fine.  The class is set up well for remote learning anyway and I have some good TAs.  It's a little hard to not see the students to know if they need a bit more time to catch up with what I just did, but I think I did ok.  The second class asks a lot more questions than the first class and I could hear most of the questions too...so it didn't always have to go through the TA.  (Now that the second class isn't quite so slow I have been enjoying it a lot more.  They ask good questions, and questions make the whole class a bit more enjoyable.)

Isaac had his first piano lesson today.  It was going to be by zoom anyway, so nothing had to change there!

Pictures.  I should be taking more pictures because it makes the blog more interesting.  But let's be honest, I can't even keep the dishes from piling up or get the laundry put away right now.  I'm not sure why.  Yesterday I felt quite productive, but then I looked around and it was a mess.  I was probably productive on things you can't see.  Yeah.  That's it.