Staying home, staying safe – week 11

This is a little diary of our eleventh week in social isolation, back to home learning after half term, me working from home, and himself in work a few days. Here are the highlights and low lights.

See what happened in week 10.

What will week 12 bring?

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

Highlights

I have to give huge credit to the boys. On Monday himself had to go into work to do some tests, so it was back to home learning with all the supervision falling to me. The boys didn’t interrupt me once, they did their work with a generally good attitude and kept themselves amused the rest of the time.

The LeanIn circle at my work got nominated for an award and it was made public on Tuesday. I’ve been involved from the beginning, chaired a session and reached out to new contributors. I’m so proud of the work we do and the real changes that are being made as a result.

Wednesday was simpler because himself wasn’t at work at work, just at work in the dining room again. Large boy pulled another tooth out. The best part though was the sparrows coming to collect seeds from the bird feeder stuck to the window in front of my desk. They kept me amused on and off all day.

Small boy decided on Thursday that he wanted to do loads of phonics, so he did all his videos and then an extra couple. I could hear him finding more even after the phonics time ended. On the flip side, large boy hated his literacy comprehension and cried cos it was too hard. He rarely finds school work challenging so he has strong reactions when he does, he was totally distraught. I tried to explain that if it’s hard he needs to ask for help, try to not panic, and that the best way to stop it feeling hard isn’t to refuse to do it but to practice. He didn’t listen at first but after I printed off some more exercises, one caught his attention and he went off and tried again even though I said to leave it until tomorrow instead. I was really proud of him confronting the thing he found hard and persevering.

On Friday I got some fantastic advice and recommendations from the boys’ teachers. Small boy needed some new reading material – Oxford Owl is amazing by the way, I can’t believe we hadn’t found it before. Large boy needed some support working through challenges he encountered on Thursday. I do love their school!

Despite the horrid weather on Saturday I went for my first run in weeks. It was refreshing and lovely to be out on my own, breathing heavily in the fresh air.

This week himself hadn’t been eating the bananas he usually has for breakfast, so on Sunday morning large boy and I made banana chocolate chip muffins and cocoa banana milkshakes. Great ways to use up mushy brown ones. After our daily walk, we used pens to design our rocks that we’d given a gloss base coat to on Saturday as school want to make a friendship snake.

Lowlights

I am baffled by Roblox. It’s so odd. Large boy spent 40 minutes building a hide out or something, left and went back and it was gone. I assume it’s to do with servers? I’m going to let himself investigate and take responsibility.

Himself was in work again on Tuesday, I had many more meetings than Monday so it was a stressful day all round. The boys were bored bored bored and large boy a bit emotional. I lost my rag a couple of times and then felt even worse because they got upset (which was fair enough).

Wednesday flew by in a blur, I don’t even know what happened.

On Thursday the arsehole made his presence felt at work. He had been meant to merge some work ages ago, except it had errors which we’d discussed. On Thursday he asked me to approve his merge, I don’t watch every little thing he does so I assumed he’d fixed the errors and agreed to process the merge. Yeah, he’d forgotten to fix them so I rejected the request and boom. At least he didn’t call or IM me to complain, instead he commented on the merge stream about the errors being incomprehensible (there’s a help page, but you know you have to actually read it) and the lack of professionalism in the system’s set up. I’m being teflon as advised by my work wife, not rising to the bait and leaving it over the weekend. He’s made his rude comments in a public forum so our boss saw the whole rant. Monday won’t be fun.

Himself hasn’t been feeling well, on Friday he seemed worse. He worried he’s developing IBS, at least it’s not the dreaded virus. I spent a small fortune on all sorts of remedies in the supermarket.

The weather on Saturday was properly stormy, windy and rainy. My garden took a battering and we decided it would be a home day, filled with cleaning bathrooms and scrubbing the kitchen stove top. I finally let my frustration at not running push me out of the door, bad move, very bad. Knee back to being painful.

The only low point on Sunday was my bloody knee, we went for a walk on our regular loop which ends with a downhill bit. Apparently this is very bad from my knee’s perspective. The only way to get down it was to keep my leg straight as I stepped down. Sorry to be a broken record but I’m so fed up now. Going to have to try to see a physio next week.

Things I wrote

Vincent Ehindero Bloggers Award

Missing things