Staying home, staying safe – week 7

This is a little diary of our seventh week in social isolation, home learning, and with both himself and me working from home. I’m going to just talk about the highlights and low lights. A full diary takes a lot of writing and I can’t imagine anyone’s really interested in all the detail.

Here’s what happened in week 6.

Stay safe everyone, I hope you’re doing ok. xxx

What will week 8 bring?

Highlights

The weather’s been better, more outside time and long walks. Fresh air makes so much difference.

Small boy is coming out with some gems lately: “mimicking is speaking with someone else’s voice”.

Large boy wrote a letter to my grandma on Monday, he waffled on about boredom but also said how much he loves her and misses her.

On Tuesday small boy read a whole four word sentence without sounding any words out!

Wednesday was my Friday this week, the only highlight of the day. Apart from himself making dinner.

The boys did a great job of working their way through lots of work on Thursday. It was lovely being off work and able to properly support them, although small boy is needing less help. I worked through a long to do list which was quite satisfying.

Our cunning plan to get a bank holiday lie in paid off. The boys thought it was a school day so didn’t get up until 9am. When real school goes back, the 7 o’clock get ups are going to be a shock.

We went on a really long walk out to the next village and down the back lanes, 4 miles. Its normally a route that I run, so was a good test for my knee. Small boy managed the whole distance with no moaning, but large boy claimed his legs were going to fall off when we got home.

On Sunday large boy made breakfast for him and small boy, supervised but successfully. He tidied up afterwards too. Total winner!

Lowlights

Monday, number of interruptions to meeting I was running and mic open: 3. Number of interruptions total: countless. If the door is shut, don’t come in, it’s easy boys!

My knee was feeling better. Then I sat still a lot on Tuesday and it wasn’t feeling better any more.

Large boy did a great job of not interrupting a meeting on Tuesday. Only he had a question and I opened my door after to find him in tears as he’d been waiting 20 minutes to ask what to do next (nothing, he’d finished and I told him that before my meeting but he was so absorbed in fractions he forgot).

Wednesday was a bleugh day. Nothing special and nothing dreadful.

My attempt to do gardening was partly thwarted on Thursday when I ran out of compost. I did drive bys on B&M and Tesco but there was none to be found. At least the garden centres are doing delivery.

Our en suite ceiling paint has cracked and bubbled. We need to buy proper bathroom paint, sand, dry and repaint. Boo.

Saturday’s plan for an idyllic bike ride with the kids learning to ride on a closed road was semi-disasterous. Small boy stung himself on a huge nettle in the first 500 yards and shrieked at an impressive volume. It didn’t improve from there except I had to run the last 200 yards so they weren’t out of sight and my knee coped.

The boys’ perspective

The best for large boy was building games on Scratch. For small boy it was homemade frozen apple squash lollies in the garden.

The worst for small boy was the nettles and for large boy it was his tired legs after their 4 mile walk.