We went on spring break for a week and came home to all coronavirus, all the time. I’ll post about spring break later this week — we did have a nice time, and in the grand scheme of things I think we’ll be glad to have had that week of fun and relaxation before the coming weeks (months?) of social distancing.
Social distancing! A term I had never heard before a week ago, and now we are all experts!
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So let’s see. What else…
On Thursday before spring break, Emma’s school had a 2nd grade musical. She’d been excitedly practicing the songs for weeks and it was a cute show. Turned out to be a send-off for a TBD period of time before school is back in session!
We went to the rodeo back on Saturday the 7th, the day before leaving for spring break. In previous years, we’ve gone to the livestock show and carnival but this year we took the girls to the actual RODEO part as well. I thought they’d enjoy it…but honestly, they were meh about it and kept wanting to go back outside to the carnival. They did like barrel racing and the calf scramble, but weren’t very interested in the rest. Oh well. We tried.
The rodeo shut down a few days later, almost two weeks earlier than planned. Hopefully our trip will also fall into the bucket of “glad we were able to do that before everything shut down” instead of “yikes, that’s probably where we caught the coronavirus.” Time will tell.
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I ran 3 times while we were in Florida, and again yesterday. I’ve been in a good rhythm for the last 6 weeks with my workouts and plan to keep it up as much as possible during these strange days. I suspect that my target 5K race on the 28th will be cancelled, but there will be other races.
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Emma’s school is closed this week. I’m anticipating the closure being extended, but so far they’ve just said this week. Charlotte’s daycare is still open, but we’re choosing to keep her home. My work has gone to “telework strongly encouraged” so I’ll be teleworking; I expect that work will end up going to “telework mandatory” at some point. Jose’s company is basically “work out what makes sense with your supervisor” at the moment, so he will hopefully be teleworking as much as possible as well.
I’ve seen a ton of great resources online for how to keep your kids on a schedule and maintain some educational activities…but they all seem to assume the parent suddenly has a bunch of free time?? I don’t understand it. Honestly, how am I supposed to enforce reading time and math time and arts and crafts while also attempting to work from home?? If Emma was my youngest, a lot of it might be doable, but with a 4-year-old…nope.
Jose and I should be able to each fit in several hours of work per day by trading off and allowing the girls to have copious amounts of screen time. But even still, fitting in a full workday is going to be next to impossible. I fully recognize that we are privileged to have work-from-home as a viable option. Still, I hope our employers are both understanding of the fact that productivity is going to suffer, and recognize that we’re doing our best.
“but they all seem to assume the parent suddenly has a bunch of free time??” —yep. Which is why I’m still hesitant to pull mine from daycare. He was out part of the week last week because my parents were here and due to spring break it was already quiet. And now it will be quiet again this week. Chris and I both work at the same place and our office is small and we have our own rooms to work in so I think I’m going to continue working at work until it just looks like that isn’t feasible. It will either end up being a lot of screentime at home for our son or he could still go to school where they are cleaning things constantly and still play with some friends. We’re playing it by ear for now.
No judgment here. I totally understand the dilemma. We are choosing to keep our kids home, but also anticipating that our daycare will close at some point this week anyway as part of a larger NASA JSC closure. There will be a lot of screentime for the kids, but I figure if I make sure they take a break and get outside for at least an hour or two that’s something. Strange times call for strange measures, and I remind myself that it won’t last forever.
All the day cares in DC are closed. With the double hit – they are still requiring full payment! So, the option to hire a nanny or temp child care worker to help out (lots of single parents too; or double career teleworking) becomes financially unfeasible. (Good news is a common government benefit up here is 5 days of emergency child care payments per year – with 3 kids and 2 government employees, you could cover 30 days of child care with that.)
I haven’t heard of a lot of daycare closures here yet. Our neighbor went to daycare today, and the JSC daycare is open until JSC goes to Level 3 which is essentially a center closure. Emma’s after school program is having another week of camp so she could have gone there. But we chose to keep them both home. Maybe I’ll regret that, but what good does it do to close schools and have workers telework if my kids are still going to daycare/camp and interacting with a ton of other kids who are potentially carrying the virus?
Sigh. Part of me feels crazy, but I also don’t want to pretend like nothing is happening. It will be a rough few weeks for sure, but we’ll get through it. And yeah, we are of course still paying for both daycare and after school, just as we did last week even though we were on vacation. (Requiring payment even when your kid is out for vacation, illness, etc is standard.) I’m actually not too upset about that part — at least I know that my kids’ caregivers won’t be financially ruined by losing their paychecks if/when the daycares shut down.
The child care thing is a very real issue. If people are having to go out and secure other kinds of child care, we are negating a lot of the benefit of having closed schools. But I get that not having childcare is not an option for many people. I don’t know what the answer is. I’m counting myself very fortunate to be in an organization that will be fairly understanding and flexible.
I would consider sending the kids outside and tell them to entertain themselves while it’s not too hot. They will figure it out. Not all day obviously, but for 2 or 3 hours at a time. Kids used to have to do that in the 50s. Our kids will (hopefully) adapt. Necessity breeds invention.
Yeah, we’ve had a bit of a free for all the last couple days, but I’m going to start a rough schedule. Nothing crazy, but something like “here’s when you can watch iPad” and “here’s when you need to play outside.” We don’t have as big of a yard as you but it’s certainly big enough.