Distanced learning has taught my son lots of things. I don’t believe my son would have an email address or know how to send things to the printer were it not for distanced learning. Only a few weeks ago in December my son was struggling on how to get to email and what to do to find and open messages. Tonight before bed, I asked him if he’d gotten Mrs. Grace’s email about the materials he’d need to brung to his art class tomorrow. He nonchalantly said, “yeah, of course.”
Just last week my son was also completely distraught about printing something he’d gotten in an email. He was getting agitated and upset. I told him it wasn’t hard at all and that he could print from the computer at the table where he said. I showed him how and then told him he could go get the printed page from the printer in the basement. Today, I saw him come to the basement during school and asked him if he needed help. As he took sheets off the printer he said with casual confidence, “no, I was just printing something.”
My daughter got a Kitchen Explosions kit for Christmas. That may not be the exact name, but it has all sorts of fun things to do in the kitchen as cooking experiments. Today, she and Blake worked on coloring some eggs. They hardboiled the eggs and then cracked the shells all around without removing them. Then they put the eggs in bowls with the food coloring. The coloring seeped through the cracks and made a different fractured pattern of lines matching the cracks all over the egg itself.
After an hour they removed the shells to find the colored eggs. They made purple and orange eggs. My daughter and Blake came to find and show me what they’d made. My daughter asked me which one I wanted and after I picked a purple one, she brought me some salt and pepper to eat it with.
My daughter had a lot of fun doing this food experiment, dying the eggs to have a pattern show on them. And she couldn’t see any of it. She has a level of flexibility and tolerance I don’t always appreciate.
Tonight, we had a package arrive from our friend in Norway. It was a collection of country-specific candy for the whole family. My daughter was frustrated as she touched the various packages and said, “it's that everyone knows what the things are because they can see the table and I always have to ask what the things are.”
I told her that in this case, we didn’t know what things were either because we couldn’t speak Norwegian. We spelled some of the very long words and tried to guess what things were.
The Big Boy Update: My son got in trouble just before bed and stormed to his room. My husband got in trouble (with me) because I told him after taking care of things this afternoon with the children while I had a nap I would get the two rowdy children to bed but he appeared upstairs only a few minutes later. My son, still angry that his cries of, “my sister hit me” weren’t received well after he tackled her, wrote on a piece of paper “Visits Welcomed, GB” and threw it downstairs over the bridge meeting the requirements loosely of, “only paper airplanes and laundry can go over the bridge.” When I came down after getting him calm and settled my husband showed me his message and said, “can I go up now?”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter and I have worked hard on the Peggy O’Niel song and after singing it for Mimi this holiday I told her tonight we needed to record it to show Aunt Rebecca. She has been working on playing the song on the keyboard and told me from her bed as I tucked her in and after singing the two-part song as a good night that she would show me in the morning.
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