I do know that week two of preschool-from-home began on Monday. The letter of the week is Q. The circle time stories are (yet to be determined because we started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender this morning and mommy and Chaya are both into marathoning it). The artivity of the week involves dragons...
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| Chaya kind of went her own way with the facial features, but it's her dragon anyways |
And massive amounts of washable paint and glue. Plus toilet paper rolls! See, I told you that's why there was a run on TP! Crafts! All the crafts!
Preschool makes it quite easy to make carbon copies of the teacher's assignment (with supplies all pre-selected and shapes cut out just right), but they also emphasize letting kids do their own thing. Needless to say, I let Chaya do her own thing. Except when her own thing was "turn around and brush massive paintbrush globs on mommy's sweater and maybe the table" and the like.
But preschool wasn't our only structured learning time. Last week I signed Chaya up for two sessions of "Circus Time With a Stuffie" through SANCA (Seattle Abracadabra Nose Chaya Alligator? No something to do with Circuses - School of Acrobatics and New Circus Arts, actually). She found the first class simultaneously engaging - when the teacher talked directly to her - and confounding - when the teacher started doing said circus tricks with said stuffie. This last class, she was... a little more unified in her response.
Here, Chaya watches from her comfy chair while the teacher does a series of fancy tricks that the other children at least attempt to imitate - balancing their stuffed animals on their heads, standing on one leg, throwing their bunnies and catching them, etc. She eventually lost her patience for even that and shuffled off to a corner to draw. I attempted to exit the class a few times to her great protest, so... that was our last Circus With a Stuffie class, but I won't say it wasn't appreciated in some way or other.
As for Chaya's music class live stream, it was somehow *not* "songs" (Chaya's general word for any kind of screen times that she views desirable, due to this having been animated children's songs on youtube in her formative language learning days) last week. Sometimes "songs" includes podcasts. Sometimes "songs" includes infographics about seasonal affective disorder made for adults. Sometimes it includes videos of various fast forward cupcake decorating set to rad techno music (my favorite). Sometimes the scholastic online books are "songs." Sometimes games are songs. Most often songs are videos of things she finds interesting, but it's never 100% certain.
But music class? She seems to enjoy it when she watches it, but perhaps because I am too enthusiastic about suggesting it, she now will yell "NO I WANNA WATCH SONGS FIRST" and then we miss it entirely. Today we caught it. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I'd given up on it. Maybe because she doesn't know that there are several more discs of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
There are little learn-at-home digital bundles that Scholastic offers. We worked through their free month of pre-k lessons and are now going through their 1st grade lessons because why not? They include a video, an e-book, a couple of little quizzes about the video and book, a drawing or physical activity, and links to more sites with similar information on a given educational theme.
It's enjoyable. And she likes it if we call it "songs." If I refer to it as "Scholastic" she'll scream and wail and resist. Lessons, learned, slowly.
As mentioned, Scholastic has lots of quizzes that Chaya typically wants to watch me take while she watches
There's a word match and a true/false after every couple of stories.
I can't do true/false, so, it gets interesting.
Me: Trombones are sad. fact or fiction
Chaya: push the button that's right.
Me: No, you. Just chose one.
Chaya: What is it?
Me: Well, it's not a fair question. Sad trombones? I mean are they sad all the time? Can they be jaunty or cheeky? Of course. But does this mean they are never sad? I beg to differ. Trombones have a range. This is neither true nor false. I have no way of proceeding, so, what do you want.
Chaya: PUSH THE BUTTONNNNNN THAT MAKES IT GREEN!
Me: Fine. False, but that's stupid.
Chaya: (seeing the green victory signal) Yay!
Me: Ok next question. Oboes can cry. Oh c'mon!
Chaya: Push the right button!
Me: Can oboes cry? Um, absolutely. Maybe not with literal tears, that would be awkward and I know they are going to say no, but they're so wrong...
... And so on.
In our migrations, we have stumbled on some surprisingly educational favorites, including a science story time... that involves cut outs and a special Mad Scientist badge that Chaya has been wearing nonstop with her chosen outfit of the week (still a bunny, but an increasingly bedraggled one).
It's encouraged her to continue her nonstop rampage of "WHY?" which is just now kicking in on full gear. I like the creativity she puts into asking why. Sometimes it's a bit pro forma - Andrew says something complicated about his work and she just says why? But usually she at least grabs a word or two to supplement the why form, especially cute because she likely will mispronounce it in some way or other so you have to guess what she's querying. "Why neoparantiestablishmentasupercalifragilisticalmechanixamonium???" Good good question, kiddo. Once she kicks the habit of screaming loudly at random, spitting on her interlocutors, and bursting into unexpected tears "because I wanted to say something to mommy but daddy was already talking" I think she's on the path to being an excellent conversationalist.
So needless to say, the schooling portion at-home-pre-k is going great!
We also continue our creative kitchen work. Spoiler alert, it's icing still. But it's blue icing this time.
And tons of egg dying, because Chaya found the egg decorating package I'd misplaced for actual Easter.
Turns out the dye water makes for GREAT painting.
On virtually any surface.
Eventually including some egg crates, all the paper towels, and the floor of course.
So, cooking and art... covered.
And of course, Andrew pitches in to run off some Chaya-energy. I remember my old roommate would take his dog for walks on his bike. They'd go to a field and circle round and round and round because she was an endless font of energy so that evened out the proportionate exertion.
It's not quite like that. But bikes are involved.
The ratio of parental energy into child energy burned is always unfavorable to the parent without some kind of equalizer. In this case, they mostly both get on their respective bikes and he practices his "hardly moving at all" balancing on his fancy schmancy specially tuned race horse of a bike to go with Chaya's stryder. It seems to work for them once we manage to coax her away from the thrilling prospects of staying in the apartment all day demanding "songs" and/or painting the carpet with glue and egg dye!! They also go exploring on some trails and she will force him into all kinds of gymnastics and acrobatics that she refused to even contemplate during Circus With a Stuffie. He survives. somehow.
Andrew went in to work for some period three times last week, so... probably we're all one or two weeks away from becoming rona-zombies. If we didn't already pick it up from some package that was not sufficiently doused in bleach after its 5 week quarantine spell. Andrew and I are both a relatively similar level of diligent, so I trust him to be cautious, but you leave the house and who knows what happens.
Then again, after all my effort to switch my pharmacy to an online delivery pharmacy in order to avoid going to Fred Meyer's Pharmacy again, I managed to open the door on my delivery person and take my box well within the 6 foot theoretical safety zone. I think we were both confused when we saw each other, so he reached out the package like in the beforetimes and then ran. But he'd had a hard time finding our apartment, couldn't drive in our gate, and eventually just walked through the complex to find us. So, it was a confusing evening. So... ah well. At least I don't have to go to Fred Meyer's too.
People are starting to get tired of the lock down and I both fear and understand this. I personally wouldn't be out there if all the orders were lifted, but we have a pretty good set up and the extra inconveniences are legitimately inconveniences. Not that it isn't difficult. I miss people a lot. I miss my down time. I miss date nights. I miss PT and massages and non-emergency medical care. My mental health feels those tolls for sure. And when Chaya asks about when it will all be over... it still breaks my heart, what she's missing. I saw a Kinder Care playground full of children the other day and I felt a little twinge - knowing how much Chaya lights up with her friends, with her playgrounds, with learning. Remembering how much I used to enjoy sneaking to school a little early to watch her while she was on the playground. These things, I feel.
That definitely is still in the world of inconvenience though.
It's more than "wanting to go wherever whenever" or things like that. There are significant costs. Not just the financial ones, which I suspect would also be heavy in a non-lockdown-free-viral-spread situation. But DV victims stuck with their spouses, all kinds of mental illness without the same social net, suicide will go up, drinking, all the addictions, people not seeking medical attention for serious conditions that don't look like covid-19. Illnesses that aren't going to get diagnosed early enough because elective surgeries (like endoscopies and other diagnostic procedures) aren't being done. And painful things that are not going to be treated. These are real things with heavy costs. It's not just inconvenience. The lockdown will be the proximate cause of deaths. It will. Not more deaths than letting the virus run through the population (probably not by a long shot, but it's hard to compare models). And some of the things that are being denied to people now by choice would be denied by necessity if things did become overrun. But to say it's just an inconvenience... it's like saying covid-19 is just the flu or a head cold. You can't go anywhere from there.
And I think minimizing that, which I see a lot, ignores that we're always in some form of trolley problem. We're trying to maximize the best outcome for everyone. Some people's lives at the cost of others. Nobody likes to frame it that way, but yes as a society we do accept a certain amount of death. And a certain amount of limitations on our freedom. It's always a balance. And it's always done in a world of imperfect information and second-third-fourth order consequences. And different people win and lose depending on the choices that are made.
That said, we're hunkering down for the long haul here. Skeptical that much will change for another minor eternity. Figuring out how on earth we are going to arrange for work to be done on our new house and to move in the proper time frames. We'll be in this apartment for a good long while. No idea what comes on the other side of that move or how that happens, but it's gonna happen!
Stay saneish. Stay healthyish. Go to the ER if you're having a heart attack... Otherwise video chat. Anytime!
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