Staying home, staying safe – week 15

This is a little diary of our fifteenth week in social isolation (well, ish by this point), encumbered by home learning, working from home, and himself in work from time to time. It seems a very long time since this all started now. Here are the highlights and lowlights.

See what happened in week 14.

What will week 16 bring?

Stay safe everyone, I hope you’re doing ok. How was your week? xxx

Highlights

Monday some stuff was going on at work and I knew about it! I know stuff! OK so I don’t have time to lead anything extra but at least I can help guide others.

Large boy and I finished The Secret Garden on Tuesday. I almost got emotional on the last chapter. It was so lovely reading together and discussing the book as we went. I was way stressed out in the morning (see below) but managed to be productive in the afternoon and felt better by bedtime.

I had some great meeting free stretches at work on Wednesday, not free of interruption of course but fairly productive which was good after recent days.

On Thursday I had a really good and productive training session with my boss – me training her. She listened, understood and then showed me back that she’d got it. Why can’t everyone listen and learn attentively like that?

I had a super speedy shopping experience on Friday, out and back in an hour so there was no rush to do school work before lunch or large boy trying to help small boy find his literacy work on YouTube. I’d had a 3.3km run before breakfast too. Small boy did some excellent reading and finally seemed click with the money maths he’d been find hard all week.

Despite the yucky weather I managed another decent run on Saturday morning, probably should have taken a day off really though. In the afternoon we took the boys to the local park for a scoot, having forgotten the play equipment was open again so it was rather busier than we expected. Back home, small boy and I set about creating his nature art – a snapperwack of course! After the kids were in bed himself and I had a mini date night – table cloth and steak knives out, lamb chops for main and raspberry cheesecake (bought) for pudding, then phones away and a movie instead of more binge watching series. Holding hands on the sofa felt rather romantic, a throw back to before we even lived together.

We decided to have a day out on Sunday, so we filled the truck with the boys’ bikes and a picnic and drove out to Delamere Forest. We had a walk upto the Gruffalo, then a picnic. After lunch the boys rode 5 km on their bikes, really building their confidence with hills and off roading a bit. It was a bright but very windy afternoon, just after returning to the car and finding an ice cream the heavens opened. We were so luck with the timing, we could easily have been soaked.

Lowlights

Monday the arsehole raised his head at work, not as forcefully as usual. He seems to have learned some diplomacy, but I know him well enough to be able to hear the seething undertones. And my work wife is off this week too so no one to vent to or ask for advice.

On Tuesday I was just feeling so overwhelmed, work is so busy, I have so much I need to do and all the non-writing things that need managing as well, plus home learning and everything else. I just want some peace and quiet to be able to get on with things. If I could just take one thing off my plate, I think I could cope. Right now, I’m really struggling.

After that one last late meeting on Wednesday I took the boys for a drizzly walk. While going through our local woods to visit our rock snake, large boy noticed something shiny in the muddy path. Shards of broken glass, again. We had picked some up one evening last week two, it seems to be spread out in clusters through out the 500 m length of the wooded path and looks like broken glasses. Last time we found really fine slivers but today the complete base of one and part of another pint glass were there. Seriously, who breaks and dumps glasses in a place used for walking dogs and by families with young children? It’s at the top of a hill, so its not been washed there by the rain. There used to be signs up in the woods suggesting glass was being buried there on purpose. Unbelievable.

Our attempted walk on Thursday was curtailed when the boys tried to race up the hill. Large boy went to squeeze past small boy and their feet tangled, small boy went flying. Massive lump right on his funny bone and scraped bloody knees and elbows. We got home and cleaned him up, frozen peas treatment and his cuddly blanket. He’s going to have some excellent bruises.

Friday was a horrid rainy day so we drove to pick up school work instead of walking. The boys were full of chat, loads of talking incessantly about pokemon and computer games and their new favourite TV show – Floor is Lava. My hormones were raging and I was feeling bloated and fat. We tried to feed the boys Indian take away – I think large boy has a sensitivity to an ingredient in the tikka mix because his lips got itchy again. We’re going to have to avoid curries for him in the future.

We caught up on loads of chores on Saturday, scrubbed the stove, vacuumed the whole house, steam cleaned the hard floors and sorted through all small boys clothes and the ones large boy had grown out of. It was a hand me down switch over, they always make me sad as I see small boy’s clothes put away forever and large boy’s things come back out, making me realise how fast they’re both growing. It was a really slow day on the blog, I hummed and heyed about writing something to generate some views but decided not to bother.

By Sunday afternoon, once we were home, I was feeling really sleepy. There’s a two week home stretch to the end of term and my energy reserves are running really low. Its exhausting juggling three million things and it’ll be a relief to be able to put some of them on one side. The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t as bright as we had hoped though – we want to go to Scotland for a week in August but we think that we wouldn’t be allowed to stay overnight with the in laws as things stand right now. We need to wait for the next announcement from the Scottish powers that be. Our post-lockdown road trip is becoming a possibility, maybe.

Things I wrote

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June 2020 Reading