COVID-19 Homeschool, Day 45

Today's Challenge of the Day: Our wonderful housecleaners, who have been not been able to come clean for us for several months, have agreed to come and do a deep-clean of the house prior to putting it on the market. So today, we'll be working around them. I think we can manage hanging out in the basement while they clean the rest of the house, and then when they're ready to work down here, we can either move outside (it's an absolutely glorious day at the moment) or the kids can go up to their bedrooms.

As for me, I'm not sure what I'm going to work on today. Most of the tasks remaining on my to-do list will be difficult or impossible to do without getting in the way of the cleaners, so I'll put them on hold. I'm having a huge attack of allergies - I woke up my poor husband in the middle of the night with a combination of repeated throat-clearing, approximately 23 sneezes in a row, and blowing my nose what felt like a hundred times - so I have a feeling I'm going to be somewhat useless today anyway, so I may treat it as a rest and recovery day and give myself permission to be useless.

The kids, however, are slowly learning to manage their time and get some assignments done. Here's the schedule we ended up with today.

7-8:30am: Get up, have a quick breakfast. I gave them a 5-minute warning before I cleared all the bread and the microwave from the counter but no-one took advantage of it so breakfast turned out to be a premade frozen breakfast sandwich for one child and chicken nuggets for the other. Who says you have to have breakfast food for breakfast? Judging by the state of their hair, no-one made it to the "brush hair and teeth" stage, but they're both dressed, so not the hill I'm dying on this morning.

8:30-9am: My daughter read me some of her journal up to this point (it's mostly descriptions of her friends and classmates), then went on to write more in it. I encouraged her to write more about what it's like doing homeschool, including what she likes and dislikes about it. My son is doing a project on ReadWorks. I am drinking coffee and blowing my nose. I suspect I'll be doing this a lot today.

9-9;30am: My daughter has moved on to read a book on Epic. This one happens to be on harp seals and has a lot of photographs, so there is much squealing. She continued on with one about pandas and there was even more squealing. She'd love to read a real paper book, but unfortunately most of those are packed at this point. I do appreciate that as much as both children enjoy reading, they generally prefer a physical book to an e-book when they read to themselves. especially my daughter. I love my Kindle books, but there's nothing like physically turning the pages of a paper book. I may have thrown away a lot of CDs and DVDs in favor of "cloud" media, but like Captains Kirk and Picard, I will never lose my love for actual books.

My son is now reading a book on Epic as well, this one being assigned by one of his teachers.

9:30-10am: My daughter hemmed and hawed for a while trying to decide what she wanted to work on next. She decided to work on Typing Club, which I am learning is one of her favorite assignments. My son is doing his daily 20 minutes of Zearn. He is also sitting in a rolling desk chair, which he is rolling around the room while he works so...P.E. credits, too?

10-10:45am: Both kids are watching their Facebook Live programs; my daughter with Miss Tracey's Circle Time, and my son with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy. Since my daughter borrows my laptop to watch, I'm going outside to soak up some sunshine and look for hummingbirds. I hear that vitamin D is good for COVID-19 prevention.

10:45-11:30am: My son worked on some more math and a few other assignments. My daughter goofed around for a while and eventually worked on some assignment. I don't know. I was catching up on to-do lists and trying to stay out of the cleaners' way.

11:30am-1pm: Lunch break and free time. My husband had to bring the carpet cleaner back to Home Depot (and return a set of attic stairs that were the wrong size), so he stopped by D'Angelo's and brought us all subs for lunch. I had no idea how much I was craving their Thanksgiving sub until I was licking gravy off my chin.

1-2pm: I fell asleep in my daughter's room. I have no idea what they did. Possibly schoolwork.

My husband and I spent the rest of the evening and well into the night doing a virtual staging walkthrough with our realty team and packing up the POD for pickup tomorrow.

We ended the day with much-deserved champagne.

So how was YOUR day today??