The at-home adventure continues.
One of the things that’s been a little out-of-whack at our house, besides, you know, everything, is that right now the girls have completely open schedules, and meanwhile Cute W and I have been busier than ever. Cute W works with city and village officials, and as you can imagine, everyone is pretty freaked out. Elections have been rescheduled, local states-of-emergency are being declared (or not), and normal laws (like that everyone has to be invited to your meetings) have become tough to follow. He’s getting a crazy number of calls and emails, and they’ll finally write some guidelines, and then all the rules get re-adjusted again. He’s been spending some time at home and some time at the office.
Meanwhile, I’m working from home like I always do, but we’ve been busy trying to help people adjust away from helping families get “out and about” to events and instead helping people stay busy and occupied. Here are a bunch of resources from KOAA:
250+ Creative Ways to Keep Your Family Sane During the COVID-19 Crisis
Surprise! You’re Homeschooling. Here are some tips.
Virtual Experiences Available 24/7
It is funny seeing people’s pictures and reports of their homeschooling set-ups. . . rearranged furniture for desk space and posted schedules and all of this diligence. At our house, the girls mostly have been left to their own devices. Besides forwarding the emails that I get from teachers, I’ve contributed very little.
Yesterday, we did have a cooking lesson of a family favorite meal. When I suggested this activity, I let the girls choose the meal, and those of you who’ve heard of my adventures trying to come up with more vegetarian options will be surprised (appalled?) that they went with veal scallopini. It really is very delicious. But then at the beginning, when I tried to get M to work on the first step, which is pounding the cutlets, she started talking about how the poor calves were made to stay in their teeny-tiny pens, and Cute W yelled from his now-home-office corner, “Stop talking about that! I want to enjoy this meal!” Then, halfway through cooking, I mentioned that now the girls would know how to make this for themselves in the future and J said, “Soon no one will eat cows at all.” Yes. Okay. But did I mention that it was delicious? And we had fun cooking, and the girls were helpful. That is usually a special occasion meal, so it felt like a small celebration in the middle of all of this. Not to mention that we washed it down with prosecco after I decided that we’d better stock up on wine in case the liquor stores get shut down. Did I wipe down the bottles with Clorox wipes as they entered the house? Yes I did.
The girls have been doing some homework, organizing their rooms, talking to friends, reading, working out, and watching tv. M’s been doing some coloring, and J made this rainbow for the #518RainbowHunt.
 Besides working and the usual household chores, I’ve shifted from my usual JCC routine to working out in the basement playroom and taking long walks. I had to laugh when I was hunting for new works in my Workout Trainer app and there was one called “Yoga for Anxiety.” How appropriate is that?! I have decided that, among other things, I can use this time to try to improve my currently-pretty-tragic forward fold and downward dog moves. And I am very happy that starting on Monday, the JCC will be livestreaming workouts at 9 am, which is my usual class time. There are already a couple of workouts that they’ve released, and even though it was a little too explain-y so that they could adapt to a wide range of people, it was weirdly comforting to do familiar exercises while seeing my usual workout room.
Umm, what else? I feel like I’ve had a killer headache for a week. I think maybe it’s stress induced? I feel like I’ve been mostly pretty mellow, under the circumstances, and reducing my news intake has helped quite a bit, but Yoga for Anxiety can only go so far.
I hope you and yours are well!
