We can do hard things.
Happy Tuesday!
“Summer vacation” has never felt so strange!
Yesterday was the first day of Summer Break. I’ll admit it. We were pretty lost and confused. Full credit to my kids, they rocked the pandemic homeschooling schedule we had set up in March. In one of his best ideas ever, my husband set up twice-daily Facebook Messenger video sessions between my 9 year old and my mother-in-law, set her up with access to his assignments and they successfully navigated pandemic-3rd grade. My son is my rules guy, so when 10am and 2pm rolled around, he stopped what he was doing, headed straight to his room and got to work. He worked in exchange for his daily dose of Roblox video game, and a standing appointment he had to play virtually with a childhood friend who lives a few hours away.
As for my 6 year old, she’s our “dreamer,” not really needing others for entertainment. She developed an alter ego, “Cat Girl” complete with costume cape and cat ears headband (I’m sworn to secrecy so don’t tell!), found some comfort in making a zillion hideouts out of Amazon boxes for her army of stuffed animals & even started to take some pride in organizing her room. She and I came to an understanding about what is her “creation” and what is her “mess.” All and all, I call it a success.
With my husband working West Coast hours, dinner has definitely gotten later and begrudgingly, I’ve accepted going to bed before my kids so I could get up early and work while they were asleep in the morning.
Summer break should mean just that…taking a break.
Normally, I back my schedule off for the summer, the kids come with me to the gym to hang out with the other kids, we navigate swim practices/meets and weekend trips visiting family and friends. We do a little tutoring but it’s enough to prevent the summer slide-back. We take it a little easier on bedtime, letting the schedule relax. The pace is slower for sure.
And then came yesterday.
With the future of back-to-school in jeopardy, I was clueless how to prepare for the long haul, give some well deserved time off to all of us & figure out what to do with a mother-in-law who feels out of a “job?” What about workouts and just plain work? Will there be another surge and change in the COVID phases? What kind of schedule accommodates for all that?
The answer is: I have no idea.
If there’s anything that I’ve learned from the past 90+ days, we’ll figure it out and it probably won’t be anything like I planned. Having kids and tackling postpartum was kind of like that, too. You think you have it all figured out and you realize on day one that you were all wrong and you need to rethink everything.
I do want to acknowledge, had you told me in February that I’d have to quarantine with my family for 90+ days in a global pandemic, my first thought would have been that we weren’t going to survive (Before this, if the kids had another half-day for some random reason, I felt like they never went to school! Joke’s on me!). Just goes to show what I tell my daughter when she’s tackling a math problem…my darling, we can do hard things.
You can do the hard things too.
If you have any great ideas about tacking summer, let me know! I’ll share the top tips!
Happy Summer!
-Carrie
