I’ve been planning on a 2020 post but was thinking I missed the boat on that one, it being March now and all. Then I realized, today is the last day of school for my kids before Spring Break. At this point last year, it felt like the ground was shifting under my feet. The news was going wild and grocery store shelves were already empty.
I had recently quit my job to be at home again for my family and to make some progress on my book. (Still in chugging along, by the way.) I had one week when life was quiet and I got back to writing. Then the next week, the panic hit, and I spent the week hunting through stores for all sorts of things that seemed urgent. (Dried beans? When do I ever cook dried beans?)
And then it was Spring Break, and the kids were home. Like *really* home because everything was closed, and it scared us to go anywhere. So began our 2020 quarantine. Once the break was over, we began distance learning and honing our skills at driving each other crazy.
So, in a twist on a top ten list – I bring you a countdown of the ten most prominent things about our 2020 quarantine. The first five are negatives, the second five a little brighter.
Note: I’d love to give you more pictures from 2020, but it seems I kind of sucked at taking pictures last year. Oh well. I’ll take more this year!
10. “Unprecedented”
Everything was unprecedented. If I never hear that word again, it will be too soon. Unless it’s something like “Ms Groft’s book has achieved unprecedented success.” That might be okay.
9. Distance Learning
Homeschooling differs vastly from distance learning. I went into the Official Distance Learning prescribed by the school thinking, “I’ve homeschooled for years and years, this should be fine.” Now you hear Morgan Freeman narrating: It was not fine.
The teachers, God bless them, crammed the rest of the school year into online lessons. They did a miraculous job, but we found learning under the circumstances very difficult. The kids’ lives had been turned upside down. We didn’t have enough devices for everyone to use at the same time, or internet bandwidth to keep up with the multiple “synchronous” classes. Added to that, I had one, sometimes two, very loud and active four-year-olds tearing up the house. It was wall to wall insanity.
Five kids needed five separate spaces to work. My husband sometimes works nights and needs to sleep during the day. There are five spaces available in our house, one of them is the main living area, which gets all the house traffic. Yay open concept. (Not.) So we juggled.
Every teacher (God bless them!) communicated with the students and the parents in different ways, so each child came with multiple channels of information to monitor and respond to.
Their work had to be scanned and sent in daily. With all the scanning and printing, apps that malfunction, my kids often turned assignments in late, not because they didn’t complete them on time but because I turned them in late.
On the flip side, the assignments and activities kept my children from becoming completely feral. We also found and followed the adorable videos “PE with Joe”. He’s a fitness guy in the UK who made daily videos to keep kids moving during quarantine. These were part of our daily routine for a few weeks.
8. Going places
Go to church? To the store? Then my anxiety would skyrocket because of the people who refuse to take precautions. You people wearing the mask below your nose, I’m judging you. This is a visible IQ test.
Buying clothes and shoes for kids was tough. I had to guess at sizes and hope for the best.
7. Unpredictable supplies
Planning meals for 7-12 people is a difficult feat in the best of circumstances. So often I would plan meals only to find that the store is completely out of a primary item in each meal. I completely gave up on delivery or pickup of groceries. Because so many things were missing from the stores, it often left me with a couple hundred dollars of not quite enough stuff to make the meals. So we’d have to bite the bullet and go to the stores. At least then we could change plans on the fly.
6. Screen time
Sure, why not? We bought extra tablets, extra game consoles and games, extra controllers, extra charging cords. While this bought us some quiet, it always led to frazzled nerves from either fighting over who got what and when, who forgot to plug something in, or the exhausted (but so loud) tantrums from screen-tired brains. Managing the taking turns at screen time was a full-time job in itself.
Okay, now for the better stuff!
5. The great outdoors
While the Arizona heat made going outside tough, there were a few nice perks. We live right next to a two mile long green belt with beautiful views. It was so refreshing to go for a (very early) morning walk and get out of the house.
We don’t have a pool in this house. When we bought it, we figured the public pool half a mile away would be enough for summer entertainment. Except that it was closed all summer. So no swimming. But through a long and difficult search, we were able to pay an exorbitant amount of money for a 30” deep pool that kept the kids busy for a few weeks.
And then one day when it was empty for cleaning, a monsoon came and blew it away.
It was nice while it lasted.
4. Pets
Bored pets received all the love and attention they could possibly want. So much so, in fact, that we added a dog and two rats to the family.
3. Arts and Crafts
We have been a busily creative family during quarantine. Once the initial panic that sent me into a whirl making masks day and night passed, we did some funner stuff.
Coloring books and every kind of pencil, crayon, and marker littered our table almost every day. Together we watched and learned from Johanna Basford’s Inky Art School (flowers, ocean, Christmas), and many zendoodle videos. My favorite.
2. Family Movie “Marathons”
Usually my rule is that the kids have to read a book before watching the movie, but in light of the circumstances, I let them watch all the Lord of the Ring Movies.
I stuck to my guns on the Harry Potter books and movies, though, so Gus read through them all to earn the movies.
We found a list of the Marvel Movies in chronological order and watched those together. The trouble with this one was that Gwendolyn was utterly uninterested in them and would make sure everyone enjoyed them just as much as she did, which was not at all.
So we would set up a movie for her to watch in another room or wait until she was in bed to put our Marvel movie on. This decreased the interruptions to five to ten minutes apart.
Imagine my surprise when, after being sure for weeks that she had not paid attention to any part of what we were doing, this scenario occurred:
At 2:30 a.m. Gwenny stood by my bed, tapping on my shoulder. She wasn’t scared, but was insistently asking me something. In my grogginess, I couldn’t figure it out, so I convinced her to go back to bed with the promise to talk about it in the morning.
I didn’t think she would remember it at all, but over breakfast I asked her if she remembered what she wanted to ask me in the middle of the night. She brightened up instantly.
“Yes, I do! Does Thanos have a brother?”
The rest of us exchanged puzzled glances. “What?”
She was emphatic. “Does. Thanos. Have. A. Brother?”
When no one answered her, she explained. “Thanos stopped Thor’s hammer, and since only Thor can lift his hammer, Thanos must be his brother.”
And now we know what keeps my newly five-year-old up at night.
1. Hamilton!
Hamilton, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I had heard that people loved, raved about, were bonkers for Hamilton, but it didn’t sound interesting to me at all. A musical about Alexander Hamilton? (Boring.) With rap music? (Meh.)
But then we watched it when Disney released it for the 4th of July and it took over my life. My thoughts have been replaced by Hamilton Lyrics.
Not only are the lyrics mind-bendingly creative and beautiful, but the music was much more than the “rap” label I had heard.
In Hamilton, I also found inspiration to write. I am always running out of time, so I can’t quite write as much as he did, though.
I listened to the soundtrack over and over, particularly “My Shot” which I found out at the end of the year that I was in the top 1% of listeners to that song. Yay?
I could go on and on about Hamilton, but 2020 (and this post) have gone on long enough.
Here’s hoping that Spring Break doesn’t last six months this time.