Weekdays are more burdensome on the parents. I don't know how it is on the children, they're still going to school in a distanced learning kind of way from home. For the parents, it's suddenly trying to be a teacher's aid across an electronic divide. I think parents have been giving it their best go and most have been doing a pretty good job. Parents typically want to do their best for their offspring.
My husband and I are exceptionally fortunate. We have the time to dedicate to our two children while they're at home. We have teachers who not only working to help out our one child, they're helping out all the children and parents in their purview. It's got to be crazy hard. I ran into my daughter's kindergarten teacher a few days ago. She said it's been hard on her because she's a touchy-feely person and she needs that contact with her children. They're not reading and writing that much in kindergarten, but she said the hardest challenge is the students who don't speak English. She said it's so hard to communicate across a screen to the child and then to not be able to communicate with the parents because they don't speak English either. I can't imagine.
Guess what? I got off topic again. That might be my superpower, "Able to Distract Herself Within a Single Paragraph!" Where was I again? Ah, yes, being fortunate. We have the time. We have dedicated teachers. And for my daughter, we have the technology to get her materials she can consume with her fingers. As she told one dad when he had a tiny baby she wanted to feel, "I see with my fingers." My daughter can excel. She will be successful. I have no doubt about that. And we are helping her achieve independence and success with technology.
Remember that embosser we got? The embosser that I love and can't imagine life without now? That's the one. Here's a stack of all the work my daughter did this week. You can see the white pages from the embosser because they have little remnants from the continuous feed holes on the edges we tore off. Those white pages are work we wouldn't have been able to get to my daughter's fingers.
The manila pages are ones my daughter put in her braillewriter and typed. She wrote an informational book, did lots of math work, completed work about the life cycle of a butterfly and probably other things I'm not remembering because it was a long week.
There is more by way of things we're printing out for her. She's devouring stories written by her gandmothers and loving how they're writing just to her. And now that my daughter know she can ask for things she wants to read about, she'll just ask. I created an informational booklet about snails so she'd be informed on how to care for them. This morning she wanted to know if I could create another booklet about earthworms.
I can't explain how exciting this is to me. My daughter can't look at a screen, watch a movie, browse the internet. At this age she needs help getting information. Any sighted child is inundated with visual stimuli all day long. Ads, commercials, signs, things at the grocery store: all ways a sighted child might find out about something and become interested. So when my daughter finds out about something she's interested in—now I can get her information to learn on her own. I know I'm probablycoming off as over-zealous but it really is huge. [/soapbox off]
So our weeks here are school and my son and daughter both have the same ability to learn at home with the guidance of their children's teachers remotely. Friday has a different feeling for us, as parents, though. In the past we would want to have the weekends be meaningful activities as well as some down time. The children are working so hard during the week though (and so are we as their parents making sure to pack in a full week of school) that when the bell dings on Friday indicating school's out, I'm the one dancing and shouting, "yee haw!" as I throw my hat in the air.
Okay, I don't shout yee haw and I'm not wearing a hat, but that's what it feels like. The children get their own breakfast and let us sleep in on the weekends for at least one extra hour before there's a disagreement over something trivial that needs parent involvement. Right now, I think I'm more excited about it being Friday than my children are.
The Big Boy Update: My son came upstairs while I was writing this post and started asking me about the song I was listening to. I tried giving a carefully framed explanation about Dear Evan Hansen. He left with the LEGO's he had come to get. He was back about three songs later and asked what was going on in the play now. I tried to give fractional information to help move him along. He said, "so he was lying to everyone?" You know how this goes with children. It took two more trips into the room here for more LEGOs before I think I got him feeling that the people singing were good people. He disappeared downstairs with the drawer of green LEGOs and I didn't hear any more about it. I'm sure it'll come back around, knowing my son. The song, "Anybody Have a Map?" from Dear Evan Hansen is quite applicable, now that I think about it.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: I started writing this post five hours ago and I have no idea if I even finished any of my thoughts or even sentences above. My husband tells me dinner is ready so I'll end by saying I came home today from a fast drive-through trip to the pharmacy to see my daughter with her mini back-pack strapped to her body, her helmet on her head and her little feet pedaling down the street as I approached. She heard me coming and pulled into the driveway closest to where she was. I rolled down the window and said in a low, gruff voice, "little lady, you need to be careful!" She said, "aw, mama, I AM careful!" How does she always know?
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