Week 9 of Pandemic
Welcome to Pandemic Summer (almost)
Day 56, Sunday, May 10, 2020
Happy Mother’s Day! I talked to my mom yesterday, and she and my dad will be having dinner with my siblings. Most everyone is working from home, so the thought is that it should be safe enough. She has been trying to stay busy and has been working in the yard and planting flowers.
My plans for today are to continue with laundry and to vacuum. For dinner I’m grilling corn on the cob and ribeyes and we might have salad as well. It’s a good thing that Leah doesn’t care for steak and is happy with a hamburger because the store only had three ribeyes, and I bought all three. Leah said she was going to bake a surprise for me, so that should be interesting.
In yesterday’s mail, Leah got the supplies to make another stuffed frog from my mom, and I got an unexpected book from my dear friend Vanessa.
In the next week, we should hear some information about summer camp, and maybe some idea of what school will look like in August. I know we’d all like to make plans…
Day 57, Monday, May 11, 2020
I had a lovely Mother’s Day. I took the girls to JoAnn’s to buy fabric for masks. I let them each pick out two fabrics and I bought ¼ yard of each. JoAnn is pretty strict on limiting the number of people in the store. I was a little surprised to find out that it was only 25 people at a time, and I felt a little guilty for having three people. An interesting note: EVERYONE at JoAnn was wearing a mask. During my trip to Wal-mart Saturday, I noticed that while only 30% of the people in the store were wearing masks, 90% of people in the produce section were mask wearers.
After JoAnn, we went to the Harper’s to drop off a few things, and we hung out in the backyard for about an hour. Leah, Penny, and Jacinda were happy to get some play time. The twins who are about 20 months old just stared at us like they’d never seen non-Harper people before. I’m sure they don’t remember non-Harper people since they haven’t left the house in two months.
On the way home, we stopped at Sonic for drinks, and they were super busy. When we got home, I looked for a mask pattern that had all of the requirements I was looking for. I wanted a pattern that was cup shaped, contoured, and tied with one long tie. I decided to make a test mask with some scrap material I already had. I was impressed with how nice it turned out. I did end up needing to make the tie longer than it suggested, by 50%. I think it’s honestly the best bit of sewing I’ve ever done. I went ahead and washed, dried, and ironed the fabric that I had bought so I can cut out masks today.
For dinner I grilled corn on the cob and ribeye steaks, and a hamburger for Leah. The steaks were AMAZING, and the corn was great as well. For some reason, I haven’t gotten corn on the cob for the past few years, but I will have to start getting it more often. It is delicious.
Hannah made me an adorable card with TurtleDucks on it because that’s what she does.
Today, I have to get started on my progress monitoring for my students. My goal is to do ten students a day for seven days. If I tried to do all 70 any faster, well, it wouldn’t be pretty. I will likely prepare for a conference that is at 9am tomorrow as well. I still need to vacuum, but that cat hair isn’t going anywhere.
Day 58 – Tuesday, May 12, 2020
I did a 30 minutes Sh’bam workout yesterday instead of a 45 minute one, and I’m less sore and my heartrate recovered much faster. I’m going to try to do that three times a week until I get my heart back in shape, and then go back to the 45-minute ones.
Last night for dinner, I made salmon patties in the air fryer. They were okay. One recipe said to spray with PAM, another said not to. I didn’t and wish I had.
Elijah kept coming and talking to me last night, which is cool, so I did nothing else.
This morning, I got up at 6am and got up a ready right away because I wanted to get my work done as early as possible. I did “paper” work for two hours, then I had an IEP WebEx that was 90+ minutes long. By the time I was done with that, it was time for lunch.
Leah joined me for lunch in the dining room, which rarely happens. She was excited for the delivery of a phone case she had purchased…. And she ordered the wrong size. So, now we know that Amazon returns are easier than ever. You can drop them off unboxed, and they scan a QR code on your phone. I believe she has found one that will actually fit that she wants to order.
Elijah is currently writing practice DBQs (document-based questions) in preparation for his AP US History test on Friday. He did one on Monday and plans to do two more before his teacher’s deadline tomorrow afternoon. He may be a procrastinator, but his last push is generally successful.
Day 59 – Wednesday, May 13, 2020
I’m back to not knowing what day it is…. Which honestly, is an issue I struggle with even when I go to work. In some ways, I know it’s Wednesday, but I also occasionally think it might be Tuesday. I just marked a few days off of the calendar hanging on the fridge, and I went back to see if I had marked Tuesday off. Nope.
Last night we got some exciting/stressful/kind-of-sad news about work that I can’t share until tomorrow. In the email I read right before that one was from one of the teachers I work with who was letting me know that I wrote the wrong kid’s name in his progress monitoring statement. OMG! Two blonde boys in two classes who remind me of each other…. I got his name right the first time, but not the second. Thankfully, I was able to go in and delete it, and put in a correct one. Thank goodness for copy & paste. That’s one reason that I’m only doing 10 per day. I can’t imagine the mistakes if I tried to do more. My typical mistake is to forget to enter the date which means when you hit “save” it doesn’t, but it doesn’t notify you. I have been EXTRA careful to put the date in first thing. Now, I need to proof read the 20 I finished.
Last week, Elijah had been explaining a reveal from the anime, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, that he’s been watching. My response was, “Have you SEEN Fight Club?”. Of course, he had not, so I told him we should watch it sometime. That turned out to be last night. Even though I’d kind of given away the twist, he only started to see it coming a little earlier than it is revealed in the movie. He had a lot of questions after. That was the second time I’ve seen it, and I didn’t remember many details. The last time I saw it, was 2000 and we rented it on VHS from Hasting’s in Stillwater.
Today was not a hop out of bed when the alarm goes off kind of day. I’m going to get some work done, and then get ready for the day…. Some Pandemic days are like that.
Day 60 – Thursday, May 14, 2020
Hannah and I watched the movie “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” last night. We listened to the audiobook on the drive to Oklahoma last summer, and we really enjoyed it. In fact, it was a major reason why I planned our now cancelled trip to Seattle. In the middle of the movie, the characters are eating dinner in the Space Needle restaurant. Elijah happened to be in the room at the time, and comments, “I really want to go there.” I nearly burst into tears. We were supposed to leave in about two weeks.
Yesterday, when I checked the ten progress monitoring reports I had done on Tuesday, I found SIX significant errors. So much for getting up early and getting right to work. I’m going to assume that my brain was not yet fully functioning. I didn’t find any mistakes from Monday…. Yesterday, I double checked after the fact and found one less significant mistake.
Today, we are going to picnic with Leah’s BFF Libby. I’m not sure if my other two are coming along or not. It probably depends on if I’m offering to buy fast food. I haven’t decided yet.
Today is my last IEP conference for which I am a teacher of service (they have speech therapy, but that’s not their primary disability). I still have one speech-only IEP to conference, but I’ve had to re-schedule it twice. I’m ready to be DONE with those for the school year.
At the beginning of the school year, Elijah was convinced that a low(er) tech device called AlphaSmart was going to BEST thing for his class note taking. He’s one of those boys who HATES the physical act of writing, but has been able to type fluently on a keyboard since 1st grade. He has a laptop, but it has issues since it got dropped off of his loft bed at one point. The AlphaSmart is basically a keyboard that is able to store text documents. It has a tiny LCD screen where you can see two lines of text at a time. It’s slightly more advanced than the word processor my college roommate had in 1993 (a typewriter that could store text documents). The AlphaSmart can plug into a computer or printer to output documents. Elijah recently decided that the AlphaSmart was NOT the end all be all of note taking, so I’m looking into getting him a nicer Chromebook. He has a SWEET desktop computer for gaming… but it doesn’t transport well to school, lol.
I did another 30 minute Sh’bam workout yesterday, and I only have one more pound of Pandemic weight to lose… then on to the rest. I’ve been very good/strict with my food intake until dinner, then I eat a normal dinner. No sweets…. I’m happy with my progress so far.
Day 61, Friday, May 15, 2020
Today will be quite a day. At 12:30 my two high schoolers will log into their College Board accounts and wait for their AP US History test to begin at 1:00. All of our anxiety is a bit high.
This morning, our PTA is putting on a wave parade for students. Teachers will stand in front of the school as parents and student drive past. It’s also predicted to rain, but it might hold off until the parade is over.
On Monday I will pick up Leah’s belongings from her school and drop off her Chromebook, then head to my school and help with that process. The whole thing is very upsetting. I think we had hopes that at some magical time in July teachers and students could gather to do this in person…
Yesterday I took Leah to an outdoor picnic with her BFF Libby in the parking lot of a nearby park. It was nice, and I’m clearly dying for conversation with other adults because I don’t think I stopped talking to Libby’s mom for the entire hour. I’m sure I let her get a few words in, lol. It was warm, a little humid, and WINDY. The girls were out in the sun, and got hot, but moms are smart and we stayed in the shade.
Hannah and her boyfriend, Dylan went to Starbucks for the first time in forever. They even borrowed masks to do so.
We had Taco Thursday. Then Elijah bought a new Switch game called Overcooked 2 that he thought would make a good group game, and he convinced all of the youngsters to play with him. They all four played for over two hours, on a collaborative game, without fighting. Amazing.
Day 62 – Saturday, May 16, 2020
We are wrapping up week 9 of Pandemic. Yesterday was an anxious/good day (which must be like chaotic-good as opposed to chaotic-evil) with a school Wave Parade for teachers at my elementary school quickly followed by at-home AP US History testing for my two high schoolers. Everything went well.
I headed to school an hour earlier than I had initially planned because I was too anxious to sit around at home. At school, I proceeded to chat with my teacher friends the entire time I was in the building. Apparently, I miss interacting with people I’m not related to. It was a rainy morning, typical of Evansville, any time of the year, and I realized as I was driving in the rain, that I had not driven in the rain since March 12th (that was a flash flood). That is a LONG time to have not driven in the rain in Evansville…. Twelve days without rain once made the news…. So, for the wave parade, the teachers stood in front of the school, socially distanced, in masks while parents drove their kids past, waved, honked, and some threw candy. It was very sweet!
The APUSH test went off without a hitch. Both kids were able to log in at 12:30 (30 minutes before the test started). Hannah was in my bedroom at a card table with my laptop so she could have an ethernet connection. Elijah was in his bedroom with his sweet computer set-up. Both doors were shut. They ended up with different test prompts (expected), though after the fact, both found people who had the same as them among their friends. Both wrote for 45 minutes, uploaded, and walked out of their respective rooms within 30 seconds of each other. Elijah’s prompt covered the time period he was most familiar with, and Hannah thought her’s was pretty easy as well. In July we’ll find out their scores.
The rest of the afternoon was spent decompressing, and we followed It up with take-out from Lin’s Asian Express. I made Dylan and Hannah pick it up. It was fantastic, as always.
The kids tried to re-create the video game extravaganza from the previous night, but people were not in the best moods. They are going to try again on another night.
This morning, I’m going to head to Aldi around the time it opens. I haven’t been there in quite a while. I’m hopeful that they will have a couple of things that Walmart doesn’t ever seem to have. Also, it’s laundry day, which is always fun. If the grass ever dries out, I need to mow, but I think it’s just going to rain again…
0 comments:
Post a Comment