COVID-19 Homeschool, Day 44

Day 2 of feral homeschool! Since day 1 was a reasonable success, we're continuing on. I'll spend the day frantically packing and organizing and cleaning and occasionally checking on the kids, while they basically do their own thing, hopefully mainly work from their classroom assignments. Kid 1 has online band rehearsal at 1:15pm and Kid 2 has a Google Classroom Meeting at 1pm, but other than that, they're allowed to make their schedule any way they see fit, provided that they work from 8:30-11:30am and 1-2pm.

I don't really know exactly what they're working on, so I'll tell you what I did:

7-8:45am: I got up, got dressed, brushed my hair and teeth (wait, I didn't actually brush my hair and I'm not entirely sure I brushed my teeth, but I definitely put on deodorant). I made scrambled eggs and grilled scali toast for myself and the kids (my husband generally prefers to fend for himself for breakfast), then cleaned up the kitchen.

8:45-9:45am: I vacuumed the last half of the basement (including the closet where we discovered yesterday that the hamster had been hiding for a week, which was full of seeds and crumbled bits of hamster treats), then finished using the carpet cleaner on that half. I went back over some of the more stubborn stains. Somewhere in the middle of this the tile guy came but he's the same guy who was here last week so I let him in and then pretty much just left him to do his own thing while I continued cleaning the carpet. Feral tiling!

9:45-10am: Now that the bedroom rugs were completely dry, I moved my son's furniture back into place. My daughter was just starting to watch Circle Time with Miss Tracey in her bedroom, so I figured I would wait until later to move her furniture. At some point I stepped on a small rusty pin that went pretty deeply into my foot. I stopped to put some antibiotic ointment and a bandaid on it, but my last tetanus booster was when my now 10-1/2 year old son was born, so I'm probably about to succumb to lockjaw. It's been nice knowing you.

10-10:45am: I figured out how to use the upholstery attachment on the carpet cleaner and scrubbed the living room sofa and armchair and their cushions.

10:45-11:30am: I figured I should probably check in with the kids a little bit to make sure that they were at least pretending to do some schoolwork. They were playing with the hamster, but they were able to give me at least a semi-believable list of assignments they'd worked on. I hung out in their bedrooms for a little while, making sure they were doing something useful (they were, with minimal protests), so I think we're good. I'm taking a break for a little bit. Using a carpet cleaner is tiring! I also took a look inside the POD to see what we still have room for. My husband did a lot of POD tetris last night so things are packed pretty rightly and there's not a lot of room left, other than tucking in random items to fill in small gaps. By God, we just might make it!

11:30am-1pm: The tile guy came back to finish the tiles in front of the kitchen sink, so I held off the kids from having lunch until he was done, so we didn't get in his way. This resulted in them being a few minutes late for their 1pm and 1:15pm online classes, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

1-2pm: My daughter had a class meeting, during which she got to show off her portrait of Queen Elizabeth, and my son had a band rehearsal. In the room next to his sister, so it's only a shame he didn't learn to play "God Save the Queen." While they were doing that, I was packing up my jewelry etagere (e.g., sticking all my pierced earrings through pinholes in a piece of cardboard and then taping them down with blue painters' tape). Once they were through, I finally finished putting my daughter's bedroom furniture back in place and went back up to the attic and pulled down anything that could fill in the remaining spaces in the POD. My husband gets to do the actual packing, but I wanted to give him a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and weights of items so he can tuck things in all over the place.

But I overdid it a little, so I am now stretched out on the sofa in the basement, listening to my kids playing video games. The good news is that we found out that the videography session won't be happening until next Wednesday, May 26th, so we have until then to completely ready the house for pictures. The bad news is that I have no idea how I can keep the house in the condition it's in (or at least the condition it will be in once the house cleaners come tomorrow) for an entire week without my kids completely destroying it. Let's all pray for good weather!

And with that, their day is done, my day is done, and this blog is DONE!