July 26: Updated school plan and hopscotch

Unsurprisingly, school re-opening plans have changed once again. You may have heard Amy’s cry of anguish when she learned that her distance learning phase will last through the end of October, at the very least. She was also furious that uniforms will not be required even if/when she can attend in person. I learned this after ordering new sizes of things for each child. I’m still glad to provide uniforms though as a glimmer of hope and normalcy. Amy plans on wearing her uniform even for distance learning. I also ordered new backpacks, even though I know they may not actually need them. Often by the end of a school year, their backpacks are falling apart or the zippers don’t work, so they needed new ones just because it is good for a person to have a backpack. Sarah asked for a musical note backpack to match her musical note scarf and mask. Amazingly enough, I found one. Amy will be getting a horse-themed backpack, which hopefully will arrive in time for horse camp. Horse camp starts tomorrow, but it is sleep-away camp and I’ve been informed that they leave today. All of this is at our house with sitter A facilitating. Amy’s (swing) horse is Peppermint and Sarah’s is Chester. Sarah names everything Chester. 

Sarah loves walking to a restaurant near us and looking at their “Now Open” sign.  She also loves the corduroy pants I found for her. She has only been asking for corduroy pants for years. Now she refers to herself as a ridged mouse. Never mind that it might be 90 degrees, she will wear her corduroys and flip-flops!

Amy has been on a hopscotch kick recently. Her original version was that you toss a shared rock and hop down the board regardless of what number your rock hit. This makes it easier and is not competitive. I told her how I used to play when I was younger. It is a harder and more competitive version. We played yesterday and had a great time, with Amy emerging victorious after a close game. In my version each person has a stone marker to throw and has to get it to land on the numbers (1-10) in order. Then you hop all the way down the board, skipping any numbers with markers, and on the way back you pick up your rock and finish your hops. Then you toss again, but if you don’t get your next needed number then it moves to the next person’s turn. It is remarkably hard to get the rocks to land where you want them to land. 

There were a few days this week of playing preschool and I think some days of attending higher grades. Amy made lockers out of our folded gymnastics mats. Each child packed their backpack and put it in their locker. They took attendance and did puzzles. Amy assigned homework for the grown-ups.

One morning this week, the Mr. Greg Reads was not a book. It was kittens. Video footage of his adorable foster kittens. Amy was absolutely beside herself. I was rather beside myself too. They were sooooooo cute.

Much love to all of you. May your imagination be able to cover any experiences you don’t get to have for real.

July 19: Sad mice, field trips, ice lasers, and schools

What are you talking about?!

That is one of Sarah’s latest additions to her “huh?” play where she is pretending to be the squirrel in Mo Willems’ I Broke My Trunk. This is woven in with being (or asking me to be) a sad cat or saying “but, Gerald… No, do not speak… it is too late.” Since we watched “An American Tail” last weekend she also loves to be a sad Fievel. Fievel is sad because he can’t find his family and he sings “Somewhere out there.” Sarah sings a tiny bit of it. I picked the movie because I remembered it was about a mouse and I loved the main song. I forgot that Fievel is sad for large parts of the movie, thus perfect for a Sarah who loves to be a sad mouse. She likes to refer to herself as Baby Fievel and to call us Mommy and Daddy Fievel. 

Sarah and Amy had sleepovers in our basement guest room every night this past week. It felt very strange to have them so far away. While the pandemic has had many challenging components, I will admit to appreciating how much closer Amy and Sarah are to each other because of it. They always played together, but Amy had been getting more and more annoyed by Sarah just being Sarah. Amy had wanted to play more with her other friends, but now she is oh so glad to have a built-in friend at home all of the time. 

We have also been playing Catopoly, losing as usual to Amy. I’m not even trying to let her win! It just happens. Yesterday she and Carl and Sarah played Monopoly so Amy could understand more fully why Carl and I are always messing up with the money in Catopoly and why I’m always accidentally referring to litter boxes as houses or hotels. The colors are the same hue but the denominations have been switched around. I was just an observer to the Monopoly game yesterday but it looks like Sarah is on track to win with a strong presence in the light blues, which have always been my favorite. 

Sometimes the girls play MarioCart on Nintendo. They have created a song about ice lasers, firebombs, avalanches, and giant pendulums. They also like to create such obstacles in real life, pretending to go through a course while needing to avoid cushions that have gone rakishly askew.

Yesterday Carl and Amy went mountain biking. Amy created a scenario, as she often does, of a field trip taking place at the end of their year in seventh grade. What luck that Emma (Amy) and Jesse (Carl) were paired together! After a short ride, Amy had to come back to see the school nurse for a knee injury. That didn’t stop her from going back out on the trail, but it did slow her down for many other activities because it hurts when it touches her other leg. Sometimes it can break my heart that she needs to fill her days with pretend school field trips because there will be no real school field trips. But, I love how many scenarios Amy creates and I am reminding myself that she does that whether or not we are in a pandemic.  

The basic plan for Amy’s school reopening has been tentatively set. The first few weeks will be distance learning. Then there will be three cohorts of students that will rotate through in-person attendance for one week at a time and then they will be home for 2 weeks of distance learning. I know we will manage this easily in terms of logistics because my work is flexible and we can have some sitters, but I imagine this is rather a nightmare of planning for some parents and teachers. I haven’t heard anything from Sarah’s school aside from receiving the school supply list. Being me, I promptly got half of the items on the list, many of which she probably wouldn’t use even in a normal year. If her school does return in full I think I will just request that she stay in her resource room rather than joining any of the other classes. I will probably also drive her both ways, even though she loves riding the bus and I love not driving. 

Sometimes in the midst of living this altered reality, I pause, feeling stunned with a bit of dumbfounded grief that this is actually all happening. That we are in the middle of a pandemic and it’s not just going to end in a month. Somehow when things closed in March I think there was a lot of hope that by the start of school in the fall things would be back to normal. Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Now I wonder how many more years it will be before I can see my parents in person or hug them. I have to not think about that too much or it is just too sad. Thank goodness for Zoom and Facetime and even regular phones. 

July 12: Week 2 of Camp A amazingness

Sarah loves saying that she is a mouse in a house. 

The girls had a second week of Camp A and it was as amazing as the first week. They went to a creek on one of the super hot days (all of the days were super hot), went to A’s garden to water plants and learn about farming, made pasta from scratch for Fancy Dinner Day. The fancy dinner was served at the Plaid Cat Diner and there were brilliantly-colored tissue paper flowers in vases. Thursday was Doctor Day because the girls had eye doctor appointments. At home before the appointments they tried on many pairs of play glasses. Friday they all created amazing large puppets and paraded around the block. Sarah’s puppet was a house and Amy’s was a cat. Simply stunning. When I found A in the first place I thought they seemed fun and creative. I had no idea of the depth and scope of the fun creativity. The amount of joyful, playful attention given to both Sarah and Amy is phenomenal. What a gift of a person we have in our lives. 

Before the pandemic, Carl had been planning on doing a huge bike race in British Columbia. It was canceled but there was an opportunity to do a virtual race of sorts by doing long mountain biking rides daily for 7 days in a row. Carl did so this past week. I have rarely seen him so bruised and scraped, but he had a great time and is now glad to have some rest for his muscles. 

I had a follow-up sphenoid adjustment and was again shocked by how much it impacted me. I only received maybe 10 minutes of actual work. I was fine driving but was eager to be home. Then I felt totally wiped out for most of the day. Apparently there are still some spots that are rather stuck and the doctor thinks my headaches are related to my eyes since the eye muscles attach to the stuck spots. I will go back for another adjustment in a couple of weeks. Now I know to not expect anything of myself that day.

Friday night Amy had a stomach bug. She seemed totally fine yesterday, until the evening when her tummy was again not happy at all. Again she seems well now. Fingers crossed that that is true. I am tired because Friday night I was so worried about her possibly being really sick, and this spelling doom for all of us, that I could barely sleep. Last night I slept next to Amy and thus was able to be calm and sleep. But all of yesterday and still now I feel anxious and don’t have a calm belly because of it. I know it is nerves because everything calms when I am sufficiently distracted/focused on something else. It feels very challenging to navigate decision-making. Clearly I won’t be very calm if we do get covid-19. Yet, even knowing that, I’m not sure that it makes sense to go back to full lock-down mode. There is so much uncertainty about how and if schools will reopen for in-school sessions. I am dragging my mental and emotional feet about the start of school approaching. 

I measured the girls and over the past three months each has grown at least an inch! 

July 5: Sphenoid bone adjustment... huh?

Hello people in houses!

Whenever we go anywhere, Sarah likes to say, “Hello other-peoples’-houses-with-windows!” She also dreams of having a house that is painted in orange and yellow stripes.

The evolution of our snuggle time is now…huh? When Mr. Greg read Mo Willems’ I Broke My Trunk he commented that the squirrel who observes Piggie with her broken snout seems to be saying, “huh?” So now Sarah wants to say “huh?” back and forth to each other. She also sometimes has a broken snout or asks me what happened to my snout. If you know the book, you know that the answer is a long and crazy story. Our Huh times can be long and crazy too, weaving in old elements of saying “Hello Kiddo,” and “Prance with the horses, skitter with the mice,” and being nice mice rolling dice in a trice, and saying, “but Gerald!… No, do not speak… it is too late” and blowing my nose on Sarah’s clothing, including her socks. It is like following an improvised piece of music and Sarah is the conductor. I can only wonder where this will go next after “huh?"

Monday was a big day in our household. It was Carl’s birthday, the girls had their first official swim lesson since the Covid-19 quarantine, and it was day 1 of getting my sphenoid bone adjusted. It took two attempts to make a carrot cake that held together, but it was delicious. Swim lessons felt appropriately safe. It felt a bit like being in a ghost town to enter the empty gym. Sarah has yet another new teacher, but I’m pleased with the energy level and Sarah-appreciation present. Now about the sphenoid bone…

Very roughly speaking, imagine a drawing of a large butterfly inserted behind your nose with wingtips up under your eyes and just above the roof of your mouth. That is the sphenoid bone. Having it adjusted also meant getting the rest of my cranial bones slightly more mobile. I had thought it would be a gentle procedure because the assessment to see if the work might be helpful was gentle. I was wrong. My hope is that this adjustment may help me come off of the meds for my cluster headaches. It was a 3 day process where the doctor would press on my skull and inside my mouth in various places. It was intense and sometimes quite painful. Each session of work was about 5 minutes long and then I would have 20 minutes to wait before the next one. I was there for 2 hours per day. They had recommended that I not drive myself because I might be really tired after the adjustments. On day 1 I felt great and wasn’t tired at all. Day 2, I was fine until I got home and had lunch. Then I felt so tired I just needed to close my eyes. I didn’t sleep, but for a few hours I just wanted to be still. I didn’t even really want to think. Day 3 I felt that level of tiredness after the first adjustment and it continued off and on through the day. The next couple of days I also had more fatigue but now I feel like myself with my normal level of energy. Thursday night and Friday morning I had a significant headache whisper, the first in ages. So that was supremely disappointing. I’m trying to hope that that was a last headache hurrah. If the adjustment doesn’t impact my headaches that is ok, but I will be chagrined. It just made so much sense that if my sphenoid wasn’t sitting quite right then it was putting pressure on my head and eye in the places where I feel headache pain. Anyway, fingers crossed. I have a short follow-up treatment on Thursday and then at least 2 more short sessions in future weeks. 

Tomorrow the girls attend their second week of Camp A. They are very excited. Sarah wants A to wear a Gymkhana t-shirt, corduroy shorts, and to say “huh?"